In a nuclear war what would the primary targets be?

Question

In a nuclear war what would the primary targets be?

Answer 1

In an all out Nuclear war the main targets would be any metropolitain area with significant amount of civilians, military installations, infrastructure such as power and water plants.

Answer 2

Usually the ruling parties, when the terrorists took aim against the US they went after the Pentagon, where wars are decided and strategics figured out.

The world trade center was a center of commerce.  They thought without that we could not have the money for staging a war.

Our economic system would fail and money would be worthless.

The white house where all the seat of government was so we would have no leadership.  That one ended up in a field in Pennsylvania.

Then I heard they had Islamic people waiting in Detroit to take over thinking we were all a bunch of wieners who could easily be taken over.

It shows how little they actually knew about the USA.  They couldn't have even fought off Texas, Ft Hood.

That is probably another place a military base.  There is nuclear weapons aimed at other countries at this time just waiting for them to pull something like that.  They would go off automatically and finish off any country that wanted a nuclear exchange.  There is enough nuclear weapons to kill every man, women, and child in the world 12 times over.  Reminds me of the scripture in Matthew 24:21,22 which says if God didn't step in no flesh would be saved alive.

So he knew some how we would come to a time when destruction of the planet was imminent.  Guess what, we are there.

Answer 3

America -

New York, Washington DC, California and possibly Florida.

Britain -

London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Belfast

Australia -

Sydney, Adelaide perhaps.

Russia

Moscow and random areas.

It is pretty much cities and capitals, places recognized globally and contain most power over the country. In war, places are not random, they are chosen.

Yours,

Daniel.

Answer 4

Industries , communications and transportation, military bases and government.

,

Answer 5

First and foremost, the enemy's nuclear weapons.  Secondly, it's air power and naval forces, so as to cripple its ability to respond to the attack, thirdly its military command and control to similarly limit its ability to launch ground forces at any targets, and to weaken its ability to defend itself.  Fourth (although often, these would all be first strike targets handled simultaneously) would be national command authority (the decision making body of the government, without which the entire nation is paralyzed).  Depending on the goals of the attacker, population centers and means of production might also be targeted (see Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Answer 6

Does it really matter?  The accompanying radiation that will come from it will destroy much more than the "targets".

Answer 7

This is not a hard question to answer, it's impossible 8^)

When we first developed the bomb, we picked two cities in Japan that had never been bombed before.  This is why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were picked, so we could do more accurate damage estimates.  Hiroshima had some defense industries on the edge of town, but the bomb was targeted at the center of the city (the center of population) for just that reason.  So it was not a -military- target.

After the war the US did experiments with nuclear weapons in the desert in Nevada.  They built small towns and blew them up with nukes, then had soldiers rush in to simulate an invasion preceded by small nukes meant to 'soften them up'.  Thousands of soldiers ended up dying from their exposure to fallout, some of them decades later (including my father in law).  So that scenario was dropped.

Then during the Cold War we planned a 'nuclear defense' of Europe which included small 'tactical' weapons like nuclear artillery shells and small 'battlefield' nukes.  We never got a chance to try these in a real war, thank goodness.  There was a joke about having invented a nuclear hand grenade that had a radius of total destruction of 500 yards, but it was never used because nobody could throw it more than 50 yards.

The thing is, we realized that we could never use nukes except in the most dire emergency situation.  Even a small one destroys a city and makes that area unlivable for years or decades.  So we developed big nukes that could take out whole metropolitan areas, and small nukes that could be used in a battlefield situation, but none were actually usable unless our backs were against the wall and we were ready to sacrifice much of the earth to win.  And that situation never came up.

Today many nations have nukes and all of them have signed a no-first-use agreement (all except the US of course).  No leader of a nation can imagine a scenario whereby he has anything to gain by the first use of nukes.  Even if he doesn't destroy much of his own country in the process, using nukes will immediately turn his country into a global 'enemy' and every other country will join forces against him.  Think about North Korea--it would be almost literally wiped off the map!  Or India and Pakistan nuking each other.  It would create a global disaster that could take literally centuries to overcome.  Hundreds of millions dead is just the beginning.

So what the targets would be depends on how you can use them.  If you can't use them, the targets don't matter.

The way the world is today, I think the most likely scenario (and still not all that likely) is that some terrorist organization might get their hands on one and sail it into a harbor.  This is not a strategic target, it's a target of opportunity.  But as far as ICBMs destroying cities, or India and Pakistan destroying Kashmere, or Pyongyang destroying Seoul, or Beijing bombing Taipei, I think any of those are about as likely as us being invaded by Martians.

Carl Sagan said, decades ago, that the nuclear arms race is like two people standing in a room up to their waists in gasoline, arguing over who has more matches.  He turned out to be right.  8^)