Nuclear target state maps (FEMA, 1990)
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    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      towns over a certain size will get nuked

      I mean yeah, that’s the point of nuclear warfare. Kill everyone so your enemy can never justify saying “Well it’s not going to be that bad”.

    • InevitableSwing [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      It seems to be exactly that. I don’t know what Santa Fe’s population was in 1990 but my hunch is was just over 50,000. When I checked the New Mexico map - sure enough Santa Fe is a target.

      Santa Fe was (and still is) a tourist town. As far as I know - it has zero military or strategic value. The only thing that existed (and exists) here in vast amounts is very bad western art.

      • Teapot [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Probably a bunch of military people working at Los Alamos who live in Santa Fe. Pretty sure Los Alamos will be cratered

        • InevitableSwing [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          I only glanced at the NM map for a couple seconds. I don’t know if Los Alamos was a target. If targets are crudely based (on population, nukes, military bases, etc) - the answer is probably “no”. Los Alamos has a very small population.

    • RoabeArt [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Military bases, missile silos (which is why there are a shit ton of dots in states like Missouri and the Dakotas), airports, steel mills, chemical plants and it looks like even vehicle assembly plants.

      I’m in Ohio and I can tell that one of those dots is directly on top of the huge General Motors assembly facility in Lordstown (which recently closed). I guess anything that could be repurposed to build and support war machines was considered as a potential target.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I’m surprised at Colorado’s: https://i.imgur.com/kntCw6i.jpeg

    The area getting carpet nuked is Pawnee National Grasslands and the surrounding cattle ranches. That area borders Wyoming (https://i.imgur.com/fKtHTTF.jpeg) and Nebraska (https://i.imgur.com/5MoU8AQ.jpeg). Wyoming I get, Cheyenne is a major nuclear missile base to the point that they have three fucking ICBMs outside the gate of Warren AFB. There’s fuck-all in that area of Colorado and Nebraska though as far as bases go. It has to be a bunch of dispersed missile silos on farms.

      • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        I know a lot of contemporary silos in the region are like that, nondescript fenced-in sites with one or two Air Force security guards randomly stashed in the mountains. 1990 would have still been at Cold War operating levels so they’re probably all throughout the area.

        • invo_rt [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          Yeah that’s my assumption as well. The saturation of that area was surprising. I looked at my state out of curiosity and it was what you’d expect, population centers and military bases, but nothing to that degree.

    • Commander_Data [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Isn’t there a big data center or something there? I remember driving through that area in 2020 and seeing a crazy looking sprawling complex that wasn’t expressly a military installation, but had far too much security and menacing architecture to be civilian.

      • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        I’ve only driven past Pawnee once and it was during a blizzard so I didn’t see anything. It’s the one part of Colorado I have no reason to ever visit.

  • Aliveelectricwire [it/its]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I quit drinking and smoking cigs recently. I, as a joke, kept a single cig and a bottle of tequila for nuclear war. Now I open my freezer and just feel :posadist-nuke: vibes. I’m located in a “once the nukes fly you can’t and won’t get out” city

  • spring_rabbit [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Wish I could see the reasoning behind some of these targets. My state is looking kinda wacky and I’m seeing dots in places I can’t imagine there is anything worth bombing.

    Got some tourist towns, and someone really really hates the river.

      • WIIHAPPYFEW [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Found a comment from the guy who made it under an upload he made of it to reddit:

        We are currently running the consequence of execution analysis on a pure-counterforce and a mixed-counterforce/countervalue attack. Actually, I believe that we’d lose 90% of the US population within a year. No power, heat, fuel. No logistics. Greatly reduced supplies of food and medicine. We’re just not set up to deal with this kind of event given how our current logistics train.

        :this-is-fine:

        • Grebgreb [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          Darpa did a similar study that came to a similar conclusion but it was only about the US’s shitty power grid failing. If just a few power plants go down the entire country will be powerless for about a year during which darpa thinks most of the population will die.

          There was also at least one unexplained attack on a power plant involving a drone dropping tin foil.

        • BigLadKarlLiebknecht [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          Oooh I didn’t know he posted to Reddit. I used to follow him on Twitter, but he quit or got banned. His account is a goldmine for War Nerds…

          From 6 months ago:

          I am more worried now about the potential for nuclear war than perhaps ever.

          :yea:

          I think that a first strike might be possible on the US but not on Russia. Let’s assume an intelligence failure and that some Russian forces are able to generate to alert status in a covert manner. I think that it’s possible to initially do a limited first strike on both the East and West coast using stealth Kh-102 nuclear cruise missiles. These will not be detected until there is a NUDET. You could take out all the SSPARS (early warning radars), the White House, the Pentagon, Site R, and the SSBN bases at Kings Bay and Bangor immediately prior to a massive ICBM/SLBM strike. So now, the President and top military leadership in DC are dead. At this point, we’ll still have DSP/SBIRs/etc. picking up the missile plumes and USSTRATCOM will be trying to reach out to surviving leadership. Soon, the weapons begin to detonate on all NAOCs and TACAMOs on the ground and to take out the ground entry points for these systems. Yes, we still have the alert- and mod-alert SSBNs on patrol, but this scenario might be doable. Or might not. Hard to say.

          What scares me the most is a preemptive attack from Russian stealth Kh-102 ALCMs. I do not think that we would ever see that coming, and yes, there are ways to fool us that the ALCM carriers are spoofing ADS-B as airliners/etc.

          :putin-wink:

          I’m former intelligence community (Department of Energy and Defense Intelligence Agency). I have high confidence in the weapon systems reliability of Russian nuclear weapons and missiles. What is happening in Ukraine is not transferrable to the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces/etc.

          Almost refreshing to see someone with professional knowledge of these things refute the idiocy of “but lol the nukes won’t work”. Obviously it’s not refreshing as it means that 90-95% of the US population would be dead in 18 months, but still. There’s at least some people who take this seriously, somewhere in the empire.

        • InevitableSwing [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          Also - Americans won’t even wear masks anymore during a peacetime pandemic. Imagine the chaos, fear, and anger if there was a nuclear war. If the radiation doesn’t kill you - other Americans will.

  • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    My only hope for nuclear war is that I’m in the range where I go “Huh what’s that bright light?” immediately before becoming a shadow on the floor rather than the range where I die after a few weeks of agony

    • Biggay [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      That is perhaps the biggest relief of bothering to learn about the reality of nuclear warfare, at first the stages of grief just spiraled nearly out of control for me. I really did not want to believe that such things were not only possible but also have been pretty close to happening at any given moment the 70 years where theyve been allowed to proliferate. Coming from “How would I and so many other people even attempt to survive this?” to “Why on Earth would I want to see the destruction of everything I know and love as planet Earth and survive?” was a real relief. If the nukes drop I’m finding a way to die in the initial blasts.

      • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Exactly. Even if I could survive the first few weeks and initial high danger of blasts and radiation, why the fuck would I want to? I don’t want to live in the world that comes after, it sounds like a hell I can’t comprehend.