Mexican Army Equipment 1995

[Olefin]

Just as an exercise I plotted out the attack on LA using the excellent resource http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ - and I wonder why the game designers had the Soviets attack as they did - for one the amount of destruction is way past the point of a "limited attack on oil facilities only" - for another its definitely overkill

The Nuke attacks are as follows:

Torrance, CA: Oil refining and storage facilities (.5 Mt).
Wilmington, CA: Oil refining and storage facilities (1.25 Mt).
El Segundo, CA: Oil refining and storage facilities (1.75 Mt).
Carson, CA: Oil refining and storage facilities (.75 Kt).

Plus the attack on March Air Force Base

Ok first question - if you are going after refineries why are they using 1.75 megatons? Thats a city buster not a refinery buster.

Second - look at a map of LA and the whole attack makes no sense to use that many nukes. The Torrance and Carson strikes are basically overlapping - either the Torrance or Carson strike, all by itself would have taken out both facilities quite handily, as the air blast radius overlaps each other - and you don't need the fireball to take out an oil storage facility. In other words the Soviets weren't taking out oil facilities - they were specifically taking out the city of Los Angeles

When you add it all up it takes out basically the area from the 10 to the 5 to the 605 and hits LA with 4.25 Megatons - again a hell of a lot more than just "the oil facilities were hit"

Given that level of attack I definitely now agree with those talking about the firestorm destroying LA - Glendale, Burbank, the Valley, Pasadena and Orange County would survive but in the basin itself anything south of the Hollywood Hills and west of the San Gabriel River would have been one huge firestorm and nothing but ruins - i.e. what you see in the Terminator movies

One interesting thing - even with that devastating a pattern, due to its location there is every chance the Inglewood Oil Field would have survived both the attack and the resulting fires

[mpipes]

Originally Posted by Olefin

Ok first question - if you are going after refineries why are they using 1.75 megatons?

Simple answer....deliverable warheads. In the 1990s, most Soviet ICBM and SLBM warheads were at least 500kt yield, even on their MIRVs. Here are some stats for 1990s:

SS-17 4X400kt MIRV 1X3.4mt
SS-18 1X18-25mt 1X20mt 8-10X.5-1.5mt MIRV 10X.75-1.0mt MIRV
SS-19 6X400kt MIRV 1X5mt
SS-24 10X550kt MIRV (36 of 92 missile located in Ukraine before breakup)
SS-25 1X800kt
SS-27 1X800kt
SS-N-8 1X1.5mt
SS-N-18 3X500kt MIRV 7X100kt MIRV 1X450kt
SS-N-20 10X100-200kt MIRV
SS-N-23 4X100kt MIRV

Note that the SS-18 (Mod 6) carrying a single 20mt warhead was intended for high altitude detonation to generate EMP.

Moreover, no one is really sure how well their ICBMs or SLBMs will actually perform, so in real life multiple missiles would likely target some targets. For example, 3 or 4 MIRV missiles (maybe as many as 16 warheads or more) would likely be allocated to the DC area to make absolutely sure of the destruction of the White House and Pentagon bunkers, Washington Naval Yard, CIA, NSA, State Dept, Congress, and Andrews AFB. I would not be surprised at all at the number of missiles targeting the LA area, especially since the B-2 production line was in the vicinity as well as high tech defense companies and manufacturing. If memory serves me right, the main Raytheon ECM and radar production facilities were in LA as one example.

[Olefin]

Oh I am not doubting that they couldnt lay on that attack - but thats a lot of overkill to use that many warheads when two of the attack pts are overlapping - in fact if they came in close to each other in time the detonation of one warhead might have taken out the other one before it detonated.

Using the two 1 MT plus warheads as they did though - that's a city killer mission, not the "we are trying to avoid an all-out exchange" mission

Its one thing to use the big ones on ICBM fields or isolated targets - its another to have it basically go off right in the center of a major population area.

Remember the whole purpose was to avoid escalation to an all out exchange by not busting cities (with DC and Moscow being the big exceptions) - that kind of nuke used on LA would have been about the dumbest move possible in that situation.