MX (Peacekeeper) deployment concepts.

Maury Markowitz said:
I've done a lot of reading on these topics over the years, my personal interest being ABMs but that often pushes over to counterforce issues. Some of the studies I've seen are truly hair-raising.

One of the earliest is the PSAC report on Nike Zeus. They note that even if the system worked perfectly, the Soviets could simply drop their warheads upwind of the cities, just out of range of the missiles. These would cause so much fallout that it would kill almost as many people as a direct attack. With a few thousand warheads, 90% of the US population would die. Now later descriptions of such wars never seem to mention this, and I'm curious why. Does anyone know of changes to the understanding of fallout that might explain this?
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You may be interested in this article on US plans for suppression of the Soviet ABM systems.

 
RyanC said:
One of the earliest is the PSAC report on Nike Zeus. They note that even if the system worked perfectly, the Soviets could simply drop their warheads upwind of the cities, just out of range of the missiles. These would cause so much fallout that it would kill almost as many people as a direct attack. With a few thousand warheads, 90% of the US population would die. Now later descriptions of such wars never seem to mention this, and I'm curious why. Does anyone know of changes to the understanding of fallout that might explain this?

So, NIKE ZEUS forces the soviets to move from direct casualties (Blast/Thermal Pulse) which are somewhat hard to defend against, to indirect attacks such as down wind radio logical dirty bursts; which can be defeated with relatively cheap fallout shelters, and this is a failure, how?
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No, you overwhelm the defenses.

 

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