Nuclear Explosion Effects

[Raellus]

I know we have several related threads, but I thought it might be useful to have one thread dedicated to the various effects of nuclear explosions. I also have a couple of specific questions re said that I'm hoping someone has the expertise to answer for me.

Which would be more effective against an oil refinery, a ground strike or airburst?
(Guessing air burst)

Which would be more effective against oil wells, a ground strike or airburst? (Guessing ground strike)

It's been shared before, in several threads, I believe, but I think it's worth sharing the famous nukemap simulator again.

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

Also, here's a really interesting piece about recovery time after a nuclear disaster. The parts on the rebuilding of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I think, are particularly useful to the T2k ref:

https://davidson.weizmann.ac.il/en/o...clear-disaster

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[chico20854]

And here are some more sources:

The granddaddy of them all, that has all the gnarly scientific details and formulas that the nukemapper site uses is The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 640 pages...

Some other ones are:

The Effects of Nuclear War, which was used by GDW when drafting Howling Wilderness

The Medical Implications of Nuclear War, another brick at 638 pages...

Survival of the Relocated Population of the US After a Nuclear Attack

an answer to your specific question, Raellus: Minimizing Damage to Refineries from Nuclear Attack

The Effects of a Nuclear Attack on Rail Activity Centers

And how to plan a nuclear war (!!!):

The US Nuclear War Plan: A Time for Change, which goes into details about things like the "hardness" of various targets and what it means to say "Well, X Target got nuked".

and (this is a repost from the original site, which gave me a security error), Stuart Slade's Nuclear Warfare 101

and

The US Army's FM 101-31-1, Nuclear Weapons Employment Doctrine and Procedures, which gets into the nitty-gritties of how to determine which weapon to use to achieve the objective.


Longer term I've been toying with the idea of a piece on the nuclear phase of the war... but the above documents combine to equal some seriously depressing reading.

[rcaf_777]

The Early-Time (E1) High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) and
Its Impact on the U.S. Power Grid, Prepared for Oak Ridge National Laboratory
2010

Appendix
E1 HEMP Myths

"Cars dying: Some say that all vehicles travelling will come to a halt, with all modern vehicles damaged because of their use of modern electronics (and one movie even had a bulk, non-electronic part dying). Most likely there will be some vehicles affected, but probably just a small fraction of them (although this could create traffic jams in large cities). A car does not have very long cabling to act as antennas, and there is some protection from metallic construction."

[Raellus]

Thanks, Chico. I read the Minimizing Damage to Refineries from Nuclear Attack but didn't see a specific reference to the different effects of air burst and/or ground strikes against oil wells and/or refineries.

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[Southernap]

So what you are thinking of is the Weaponeering. There are a number of books about it which deal with the conventional weapons and I am sure there are books about this for nuclear weapons.

Just remember there are at least 5 types of bursts. High altitude air, air burst, surface burst, sub-surface burst, deep underwater burst.

To me it would work best to have the low altitude air burst against both refineries and oil wells, since the burst wave would do the most damage to all the facilities that would be touched by the pressure wave from an air burst.

[Legbreaker]

Keep in mind that T2k is not the real world and physics are slightly different (take a look at radiation half life IRL and in the game for an example.
There's no reason to think EMP isn't also a little different in the game universe and somewhat nastier than in our own reality.

[castlebravo92]

Originally Posted by Southernap

So what you are thinking of is the Weaponeering. There are a number of books about it which deal with the conventional weapons and I am sure there are books about this for nuclear weapons.

Just remember there are at least 5 types of bursts. High altitude air, air burst, surface burst, sub-surface burst, deep underwater burst.

To me it would work best to have the low altitude air burst against both refineries and oil wells, since the burst wave would do the most damage to all the facilities that would be touched by the pressure wave from an air burst.

IRL no one would waste a nuke on an oil field. Pump jacks are not soft targets, there are a ton of them servicing a major field spread out over thousands of square kilometers. Juice isn't worth the squeeze even with 1984 stockpiles. Refineries, though, absolutely. Oil storage, yes, Ports capable of loading or offloading, yes,

You would probably want an airburst to optimize the 12+ psi range, although anything over 5 psi would probably be a hard kill, and anything over 2 psi would be a soft kill for a refinery. 12 psi would mostly guarantee that pretty much everything but some vertical pipe columns would be flattened.