Super Creepy!

[rickshaw]

I believe that if group went down that another group (or groups) would take over control of its posts. That scenario is shown in 'Sound an Alarm' where, IIRC, it is mentioned that one group is doing the job of three.
The CND types could be amazingly ignorant of the subject they were involved in. A mate of mine currently at uni once went to a meeting because they were showing the film 'Threads' (only reason he went) and the CND members didn't understand the concept of 'half-life', or nuclear decay. They just thought that everything stayed radioactive for ever.   

I don't doubt some CND types might have been that ignorant.  I am also sure that many weren't.  Broadbrush characterisation doesn't always work.  From my experience with the downunder equivalent, the Nuclear Disarmament Party (I knew its founder, Michael Denborough who was a nuclear physicist by trade), they were like any group of concerned citizens, made up of the smart, the foolish and the merely ignorant.

The Nike ABM system should have worked very well. It is an interesting fact not often mentioned by those against ABM that the US Army had achieved skin-to-skin kills of a Lance as far back as the '60s, plus Nike-Hercules had a small atomic warhead, which would have made it even easier for the missile to destroy any incoming warheads.

All ABM systems can be easily swamped.  Nike Hercules might have been sufficient until about the late 1960s, before the widespread introduction of MIRVed warheads in the Soviet arsenal but once they appeared, its ability to prevent nuclear warheads from overwhelming it was slight.  Anyway, ABM systems are inherently destabilising in any nuclear deterrence system.  They move the existing first-use imperatives in MAD from merely being desirable to being a certainty.

[coops213]

My dad grew up in Manchester in the 1960s. He told me at his school there were air raid shelters left over from WWII that were kept for use in the event of nuclear attack. However, they were so run down no-one was allowed play on them in case they collapsed. 

Chris

[BillSlim]

There's a good discussion on MRVs, MIRVs, MARVs and their effects on a potential ABM system etc here.

[rickshaw]

There's a good discussion on MRVs, MIRVs, MARVs and their effects on a potential ABM system etc here.

Some bad assumptions there.  Perhaps the worst is the assumption that technical solutions can solve political perceptions.  As I've already mentioned, if you build an ABM system, both sides, who already have a first-use imperative will find that imperative becomes even greater.  Both sides will desire to strike first to ensure that their nation is the one which survives any exchange.  The ABM builders because they are assured they will be protected, their opponents because they must strike first to either beat the building of the ABM or its deployment.

One of the other assumptions is that accuracy matters with multi-megaton devices.  As Comrade Stalin was want to say, "sometimes quantity makes a quality all its own".   A city hit with multiple kiloton devices or multiple megaton devices is not going to be particularly valuable real estate for a long time.  Destroy the cities of a nation and you essentially destroy that nation.  Not many nations can recover from the loss of the majority of their population, commercial, manufacturing and transport centres.  It is far easier to swamp an ABM system than those fellows assume.   

[bobbo]

WOW!!  Is this what happens when an old thread gets resurrected??  I'm glad I did it!

bobbo

[NARSES2]

My dad grew up in Manchester in the 1960s. He told me at his school there were air raid shelters left over from WWII that were kept for use in the event of nuclear attack. However, they were so run down no-one was allowed play on them in case they collapsed. 

Chris

Believe you me people used to "play" in them 

[raafif]

Slept in an underground Nuke Shelter used as a youth-hostel in Switzerland (1981).  It was noisy as they left the blast doors open all the time & the fire-engines in the station upstairs kept going out all night !!