Theory behind allocation of Soviet Nuclear warheads…?

A good chunk of your destructive force is the medium moving out of ground zero at the speed of sound or better, then returning to fill the void. The heat isn’t going to disintegrate the airfield. A cratering warhead is focusing all that heat at a slightly below ground point and that creates the tunneling effect that is much more destructive to the surface.

hmmm,

it is an excellent illustration of what i was getting at. Weapons designed to have enough destructive potential to be able to destroy a city are not deemed powerful enough to take out an airfield…..

I will see if i can find out any more…

The runway bed ultimately survives. You can fix superficial damage in tens of hours. A crater the size of a village in the middle of the facility is not worthy of repair.

I’m sorry, we are talking about nuclear weapons generating massive amounts of heat across all possible wavelengths….?

How does an airburst weapon of 500kt (assuming its not miles about the target) leave the runway intact? I query whether a 1 meg ground burst warhead is even required to do the sort of damage you are talking about.

(Although perhaps the soviets stopped bothering to make smaller bombs by that stage because they needed big damage to balance out relative targeting inaccuracy).

There is a fascinating documentary on the effects of a 1MT airburst weapon going off over London on youtube. There would not have been a runway left if a ( small?) 500kt weapon detonated above it….

I don’t want to sound combative but its just not logical to me. But then i suppose this is what i am querying. Is there any logic to allocating weapons with so much destructive power. After all Madrat, you may well be right. It may well be the case that the soviets thought something like this:

“We don’t have the accuracy to detonate over the runway, but a small warhead will stop the airfield from working, and then we follow up with an weapon adequate to eliminate any threat one the UK air defences are neutralised.”

I wonder though whether in this particular case it has anything to do with the surrounding military infrastructure of the Salisbury/Andover area….

You do not take out the runway with an airburst, the airburst is anti-personnel and destroys the unshielded equipment and facilities. A runway is too deep and sturdy to take out like that. You destroy the hardened facility with subterranean ground bursts, shallow penetration before detonation. Leaves a huge crater.

Ken – topic may be a bit morbid, but thanks for all your info packed posts.

^ accuracy is a big factor in choice of weapons.

Thanks guys. The redundancy idea I can understand, but surely one 500kt airburst warhead would put an airfield out of action for good? I mean, the runway would literally vapourise….

So I was wondering why a 1 megaton warhead (good enough to take out London) would be allocated?

I mean lets assume in this very specific instance that they have allocated 2 warheads of each type so there is a spare one in case one doesn’t get through.

They are drastically different yields and will have markedly different effects in terms of blast and fallout because of the airburst/groundburst thing….

Am i putting too much thought into this? are all big nukes the same and not viewed as weapons with different utility and suitability for certain jobs.

The 1 megaton ground burst being airdropped would have come after the initial strike to take out the military base and strikes me as an attempt to ruin the Salisbury plain area as much as target Boscombe down (and i am assuming that is not the only target in the Salisbury area…).

How much is enough? In 1948 the West knew USSR had taken megadeath (?27Mn.) and kept going against its invader. So what must we be evidently able to burn, to deter them from rolling towards Antwerp? US judged that many targets must be hit: US/CAS resisted A-raiding China mid-51 as he had a “shoestring” (447 Bombs!) to deter USSR P262, R.F.Futtrell in H.R.Borowski, Military Planning in 20thC, USAF, 1986. Faced with 00s of B-47/B-52 USSR chose to attempt the same. US and USSR could never resolve the paradox of pre-emption: if the other side believes that I will never strike first…they have every incentive to do so…so I better keep them guessing…so, logically, the other side develops a first strike capability…so I must, too…

The only point of hitting Boscombe Down, or any Medium Bomber site was to do so before its dispersed V-Craft launched (ditto any silo: no point in hitting an empty shaft). A ground burst would be good, an air burst will catch staggerers. Need to insure against attrition, so 2 becomes…well, at least 4, preferably rather more.

China, UK, France settled on “the Moscow criterion” – if we are able to delete Leaders, they will be sensible. It was the precise policy of Overkill that caused USSR to over-extend itself and collapse: not the fear of another 27Mn. dead, but the fact of economic over-stretch.

Two reasons come to mind:

1. You want to be positive that the target is completely annihilated – if it is worth a nuke in the first place, it is probably worth a couple more for good measure 😉

2. You want to have some reserve capability in case one or two of the warheads you sent on their way never make it to the target (missile reliability & bomber vulnerability, essentially)

It is certainly scary to contemplate the implications of such considerations, however.