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My attempt at a list...YMMV
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While the ANZUS treaty has been mentioned, Australia was also part of the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) until it's end in 1977. SEATO was a directly anti-communist pact developed from the Truman Doctrine. We are still part of the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA), a series of defence relationships established by a series of bilateral agreements between the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore. Australia, by virtue of British colonization, is intimately tied in with the UK and the US. While not part of NATO, we are definitely part of the allied nations for the UK and the US. While that may or may not rate an immediate nuking, it certainly means we were kept under observation by the Soviets especially after being actively involved in attempting to stem Communist influence in Korea, Malaya and Vietnam. |
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The combined population of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra, Newcastle, Geelong and the other targets is about 13 million people even in the 1990's. It includes most of Australia's manufacturing capacity, oil refineries, major sea ports, strategic intelligence and communications facilities, airports and air and naval bases. What survives of note? Major cities over 100,000: Gold Coast (QLD) (probabaly damaged from strike on Brisbane), Wollongong (NSW), Sunshine Coast (QLD), Hobart (TAS), Townsville (QLD), Cairns (QLD), Toowoomba (QLD), Albury (NSW/SA), Launceston (TAS) and Ballarat (VIC). Basically NSW, Victoria, South Australia, southern Queensland and Perth gets hammered. Tasmania, northern Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory outside of Perth and Darwin are the best places to be. Oil Refineries: The Exxon-Mobil refinery at Alton (Vic) 75,000 bbl/d and the BP refinery at Bulwer Island (QLD) 90,000 bbl/d. But both probably damaged from nuclear strikes on Melbourne and Brisbane. RAAF Bases: RAAF Curtin (WA), RAAF East Sale (VIC), RAAF Pearce (WA) (probably damaged from strike on Perth), RAAF Scherger (QLD), RAAF Tindal (NT), RAAF Townsville (QLD), RAAF Wagga Wagga (NSW) RAAF Williams (VIC) (probably damaged from strike on Melbourne) and Woomera (SA) Naval Bases: HMAS Cairnes, HMAS Stirling (probably some damage from the strike on Perth). |
Wollongong is high priority on my list of targets due to it's coal mining and heavy industry. It may survive if the warhead hits a couple of miles off course inland (the escarpment might partially protect it), but I doubt it.
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True, but without the oil from the now dead refineries, the coal mining and manufacturing is coming to a screeching halt. It was an argument Chico and I had, do you take out the tank plant, or the oil refinery providing fuel for the tanks and power for the plant?
I remembered that in 1944-45, as the Allied bombing campaign switched to hitting Germany's synthetic oil refineries, you had Germany making more fighters and tanks than ever...that just sat where they were, with no gas to power them.... Sure, there's two refineries left, but they are low output, probably damaged by the blasts from other attacks and there's a lot of competing priorities now for whatever gasoline is left. |
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Just... why? Why would you pour a combined 4.8mt of nuclear destruction onto an area less than 10km across which is completely flat and not hardened against that sort of attack? One warhead would do all the damage needed, but why not say two for good measure. And lobbing three 800mt warheads all at Perth Airport? Is there a vast hidden subterranean military-industrial facility buried under there? And why would you throw three warheads at one airport but not throw even one at the biggest RAAF fighter base on this part of the continent, RAAF Pearce, which is just north of Perth? |
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I double teamed a lot of targets on the assumption one or more warheads might fail to fuze. It was a Soviet preoccupation. Not to mention their warheads tended to be higher yield to make up for their higher CEP. As for Perth Airport, I wasn't sure if RAAF Pearce had such a role. I can switch that. I hit the airport as the Soviets would see it and say "Ah, B-52s could land there comrade". To do an airfield, you want to parcel out three per runway. One warhead at either end and a third right on the middle. Finally, in terms of overkill...it's the Soviets? When have they not been into overkill? |
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Whilst speculating about potential Austalian nuclear targets, it's probably worth bearing in mind that the BYB would suggest that Australia was definitely hit, but not to the point of saturation.
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"Largely untouched" is obviously open to interpretation, but suggests to me at least, a relatively limited number of targets (I note SSC mentioned at least five potential targets in one post, which would seem to me to be consistent with the country being relatively untouched). |
One compromise might be to have a first round of strikes carried out by a single long-range ICBM with a large number of warheads, as Jason suggests. The first round has a couple of hits, a couple of near-misses, and a couple of flat-out misses. Throw a malfunction or two in there to round out the picture.
Then weird things start to happen. The follow-on strike gets delayed for some reason, and then the missile allocated for the job has a malfunction. In the original thread, I advocated a strike from a boomer. Maybe the Soviets get unlucky, and they lose three boomers trying to get into a good firing position around Australia. Finally, another missile is sent in and also has spotty results. By this time, the Soviets are losing interest in further punishing Australia. Perhaps the US counts re-entry vehicles and hits Vietnam with a string of much more successful nuclear strikes. The surviving Soviet leadership decides that Australia has had enough for the purpose of denying the West an intact industrial base in that part of the world and pencils in "Mission Accomplished" after Australia takes a half-dozen good hits. |
I would think that the panic alone might be what damaged Australia to the extent it was - you have a lot of people living in the cities and if you get widespread panic that they are about to get hit that would cause a lot of damage - i.e. widespread looting, cops and firemen leaving their positions and fleeing or being overwhelmed, fires out of control -
for instance think about the large scale wild fires that Australia has had - now imagine you get large scale fires breaking out from panic and looting in the cities and no firemen to fight them - you could end up with huge areas of the cities burned out or heavily damaged without a single nuclear bomb hitting them Now add in a single nuclear strike that takes out Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane to start that panic - and viola you have that combined with the resulting panic causing the damage to Australia that causes the government to collapse and the military to take over |
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Very nice site on Australian Forces that gives some good information of the setup of their armed forces
http://www.awm.gov.au/atwar/structure/one_army.asp I.e. The Infantry Battalion 1993 Rifle Section: 9 Other Ranks 2 x Minimi light support weapon 1 x M79 grenade launcher 2 x 66mm rocket launcher Rifle Platoon: Platoon Headquarters (1 Officer, 2 Other Ranks) 3 x Section Rifle Company: Company Headquarters (2 Officers, 4 Other Ranks) 3 x Rifle Platoon Battalion: 39 Officers, 662 Other Ranks Battalion Headquarters Administration Company Transport Platoon Quartermasters Platoon Catering Platoon Technical Support Platoon Medical Platoon Support Company Signals Platoon Mortar Platoon Assault Pioneer Platoon DFSW (Direct fire support weapon) Platoon Reconnaissance and Surveillance Platoon 4x Rifle Company 1993 Armoured Personnel Carrier (Cavalry) Squadron ** Section: 6 Other Ranks 3 armoured personnel carriers Troop: Troop Headquarters (1 Officer, 5 Other Ranks, 3 armoured personnel carriers) 3 x Section Squadron: 9 Officers, 132 Other Ranks Squadron Headquarters (9 armoured personnel carriers) Support Troop (17 armoured personnel carriers, 3 tracked load carriers) Administration Troop (4 armoured personnel carriers, 12 tracked load carriers) Tech Support Troop (6 armoured personnel carriers, 1 cargo carrier, 1 armoured recovery vehicle) 4 x Armoured Personnel Carrier Troop I am assuming the 9 officers and 132 other ranks are what is in addition to the 4 x APC troops it mentions |
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Mention was made of RAAF Base Curtin in an earlier post. I'd like to offer some clarification of Curtin's status. It is not an active duty base and no squadrons are meant to be based there during peacetime.
It is one of three 'bare bases' that the RAAF maintain as forward deployment bases. The three bases and their locations are now available on on the net so there's no security breach in posting them here. They are: - RAAF Scherger near Weipa, Queensland RAAF Curtin near Derby, Western Australia RAAF Learmonth near Exmouth, Western Australia More information can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAAF_Bare_Bases |
Official warning
Ladies and gentlemen. Anyone who is considering visiting Australia in the near future, please be advised drop bear mating season has just commenced. It's an especially dangerous time to be walking in forested areas.
Attachment 1849 |
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Interesting pic there
To get back to the thread topic the East Africa/Kenya sourcebook I am working on, as part of its description of forces, has a small section detaliing how the Australians were not able to send any forces to aid the US and Brits in Kenya until 1999 due to both the war they had with Indonesia and because of the damage they took from taking three nukes from the Soviets on three of their biggest refineries, one of which took out most of Rockingham and HMAS Stirling along with it, with the strike being carried out by a single ICBM in December of 1997 with three warheads, and causing 500,000 casualties in the process. In other words big enough to really hurt (thats 1 out of every 60 Aussies killed along with a big naval base along with a lot of industry) but not catastrophic to where the country falls apart. |
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In some respects, Drop Bears are our best solution to illegal immigrants, ever since the government stopped the navy putting .50 cal "warning holes" in their boats anyway. :( |
21 million. Wow. About the population of Texas, give or take. And that makes Australia a larger-than-average nation. Sometimes I think every American ought to live in a very small, poor nation (not Australia, lest my Australian cousins interpret the physical proximity of their nation's name with the adjectives "very small" and "poor" as meaning those adjectives apply to the jewel of the Southern Hemisphere) for at least a year to get a better perspective on things.
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And that's up from the 6 million we had during WWII.
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