[Webstral]

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.