CHAPTER FOUR
ATTACKING RUSSIA’S NUCLEAR FORCES
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n this chapter, we put the analytical tools of our model to work describing a major U.S. attack on Russia’s nuclear forces. The attack scenarios use land-based and seabased strategic missiles to deliver between 1,124 and 1,289 warheads with an explosive yield of between 294.9 and 320.6 megatons. The ranges represent low and high levels of targeting against Russian strategic naval and aviation sites. This is a type of attack that has traditionally been an option in the U.S. SIOP. At times it was designated MAO-1, for Major Attack Option-1. This chapter presents NRDC’s approximation of that kind of attack, which we will call Major Attack Option-Nuclear Forces (MAO-NF). In our analysis, we cover the eight categories that currently make up the infrastructure of Russia’s nuclear forces—the likely targets in an attack of this kind. These categories include: silo-based, road-based, and rail-based ICBMs, SSBN and longrange bomber bases, nuclear warhead storage sites, the nuclear weapons design and production complex, and command, control, and communication facilities. This kind of attack is termed a “counterforce” attack because the targets are military rather than civilian and because heavily populated areas are excluded. In this case, the military targets are all nuclear related. Russian/Soviet forces in the recent past were many times their current size. If existing trends continue, they probably will be much smaller in the future. Nevertheless, a detailed examination of a U.S. counterforce attack today can be a benchmark case study to help analyze future arsenals and different-sized attacks. We divide our discussion of each of the eight Russian target categories into three subsections. The first subsection describes the kinds of targets in each category. The second subsection explains our reasons for selecting the attacking warhead aimpoints, the height of bursts, and the number of warheads per target. We base these selections on detailed analysis of the vulnerability of the targets to nuclear explosions. The third subsection describes the scale of casualties that result from the attack. As we shall see, the numbers of casualties depend upon several parameters that are included in our model. The monthly variation in wind speed and direction, for example, affects fallout patterns. We treat two other important parameters—the degree of population sheltering from fallout and the fission fraction of the total yield of a thermonuclear warhead—as uncertainties in our calculations. At the end of the chapter, we summarize our results by totaling and assessing what happens in each of the eight categories to both people and targets. Depending
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