Assuming a land-based system in which satellites can identify the plume of a nuclear missile launch how long does a US president have to decide whether to launch a retaliatory strike? I’ll provide the answer once the poll closes by responding to this post.
@CanisPundit Assuming only land-based missiles are launched and ignoring bombers and subs, it'll be about 20-30 minutes before the first warheads land, depending on the launch site and target. Deciding whether to launch a retaliatory strike depends on the nature of the attack (single missile, limited, or all-out), various strategic and geopolitical considerations and the president's moral compass (extinct mankind or nah?). In all, he'll have about 15 minutes, tops, to decide, likely much less.
@CanisPundit I seem to recall the answer relating to ICBMs (not long, but longer than people think), but other land-based missiles might be different and SLBMs and Cuba are game changers.
@Coctaanatis @POOetryma I’m not responding as I don’t want to influence the poll.
@Coctaanatis @CanisPundit There are no nukes in Cuba today, thanks to Kennedy & Khrushchev agreeing to sanity instead of annihilation, so the nukes we're concerned about in the above scenario are those from Russia & China, either truck mounted or in silos. All other nuclear armed countries are at least nominally friendly towards the U.S. If I remember right, a Russian ICBM will take roughly 20-30 minutes to reach CONUS. Europe is another story entirely. They'll have 10 minutes warning or less.
@POOetryma @CanisPundit There's a Russian nuclear submarine currently in Cuba, and while allegedly not armed with nuclear weapons there's nothing preventing Putin from staging them there just as he's broken numerous other Soviet-era treaties.
@Coctaanatis @CanisPundit This is true, but the scenario outlined above specifically mentioned only land based missiles. For this exercise, we're ignoring long range bombers & subs. A typical ICBM launched from the northernmost silo there would take about 20 to 30 minutes to reach the continental U.S., giving the president about 2 minutes to issue shelter & evacuation warnings and maybe 15 minutes to decide whether to launch a counterstrike, though it likely won't take near that long.
@POOetryma @Coctaanatis shelter or evacuation means very little with radiation sickness in the short term and nuclear winter from all the particulate matter made airborne to block out the Sun. Not the note I’d like to call it a night on, but there it is.
@CanisPundit @POOetryma Here's a good summary of the effects of nuclear weapons and war.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/devastating-effects-of-nuclear-weapons-war/
@Coctaanatis @CanisPundit It's theorized that even a limited, regional war - say, between India and Pakistan - would have devastating global consequences, causing global cooling for several years and rendering large areas uninhabitable for decades to centuries.
Per Nuclear War: A SCENARIO by Annie Jacobsen our president would have approximately 6 minutes to decide whether or not to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike and to what degree.
BTW Jacobsen does some deep sourcing for her books.