Nuke Accuracy
 

So reading the script for Jacksonville, where I currently live, it got me to wonder about the accuracy and I guess reliability of the nuclear weapons used.

What are the chances that of ALL the weapons that hit the US only one missed its target?

Virtually non-existent.

If one enjoys story-telling, it's possible to look at some of the numbers associated with the nuke strikes and tell some tales. I have postulated that the strike against the refineries in the San Francisco Bay had four warheads originally. Three .5Mt warheads found their targets in Benicia, Martinez, and Avon. Another strike directed against Richmond was a 1.5Mt. While many explanations could be offered, I have hypothesized that the re-entry vehicle that was aimed at Richmond experienced a problem of some sort and either did not reach the target or did not detonate. Soviet battle damage assessment (BDA) determined that the Benicia, Martinez, and Avon strikes had gone off as planned but that Richmond would need a follow-on attack. Accordingly, an older land-based ICBM tasked for the job was used. The ICBM had a larger warhead than was strictly necessary due to the low accuracy of the missile. The comparatively large yield of the warhead proved necessary. “The warhead came in nearly three miles north of its intended target and detonated nearly 500 meters lower than expected.”

One could imagine many explanations for the fact that three of the refinery strikes in San Francisco Bay used .5Mt warheads, while the Richmond attack used a 1.5Mt warhead. I went with delivery system problems as a means of explaining why Richmond stood out and why San Francisco wasn’t very badly damaged by the Richmond strike.

Many here also have supposed that the strike against the Atlantic Fleet HQ missed and that this is the explanation for the apparent functioning state of Norfolk. The nuke fell into the water somewhat short of the target and swamped the naval facilities with a radioactive tidal wave. For whatever reason, the Soviets seemed to content to leave it at that.


Webstral

Thats a great point Web, especially bout the Norfolk situation. Always made me wonder why they would still use the blown out shell as a Milgov HQ. :)

I think I brought this up before, but how many nukes struck odd places, like maybe a coal mine in West Virginia or dropped into an isolated desert town in Arizona because their warheads just missed their targets entirely? Or how many "dirty bombs" hit in various places in the world because the warheads failed to detonate?

Nice storyline seed there...a marauder group finds an unexploded warhead and tries to use it to blackmail the local MILGOV forces...

Side note: Could a nuclear warhead be used like that? I am guessing thats the start of a dirty bomb post war.

You disable either the sphere of explosives surrounding the subcritical core, or damage the explosive charge triggering the gun mechanism, and you have a nice dirty bomb explosion without an actual nuclear explosion. You'd have to damage them in such a way as to allow for a conventional explosion to still take place -- specialized skill, but one could probably have found out how in the average college library before or even after the war. I would guess you'd take a good dose of rads in the process of your work, however.

I'm sure I'm oversimplifying it.

What I don't think would happen, however, is the survival of a nuclear missile warhead intact as it hits the ground, even if it is a dud. You'd have the equivalent of a dirty bomb hit right there. An aircraft-delivered bomb might be another story, however, as would a case where the aircraft crashes with intact nuclear weapons on board (there was a scenario in Challenge magazine to that effect -- a B-1 crashes near the Crazy Horse monument).

EDIT: I do remember reading in the late 1970s about warheads that were designed to survive a ground penetration and explode underground -- they were meant to take out missile silos through seismic shock.

Pershing-II, IIRC, was supposed to have had such a penetrator warhead for taking out hardened targets like command bunkers; which explains the low yield for the penetrator: 15 KT.

Warhead inaccuracy would explain how certain targets that should've been hit were not: several SAC bases are missing from the target list in canon. Such as: Beale, Mather, Castle, Whiteman, Plattsburgh, and McConnell. Then the sub bases at Bangor and King's Bay, the Alternate National Military Command Center at Raven Rock (Site R), Mount Weather, and so on. Whiteman in particular as not only is it a Minuteman-II base, but is also the home for the 509th BW and their B-2s.

There's also other factors to consider, such as the inherent accuracy of the weapon system. In regards to ballistic missiles this accuracy seems to be most commonly recorded as the circular error probable or CEP
Soviet missiles had worse CEPs than NATO missiles and apparently the Soviets compensated for this by using either multiple warheads on one target or using larger warheads to ensure a near miss still had enough damage potential.

Here's an interesting idea (I got it from War Games): some targets did not get hit because individual missile crews or submarine crews, realizing the enormity of what they were about to do, simply decided not to fire their missiles. A little touch of humanity for World War 3.