Honestly with the way Japanese industry worked in 1940 you had to bomb a city flat to get it to stop making war materials. You'd have little garage shops all over the city turning out individual parts in batches and the factories were really just assembly yards. Bomb an assembly plant and they'd put machine guns together in a movie theatre. This is why we firebombed so much of Japan but used targeted high explosive in Germany.
Shonus, I really don't understand what you're getting at. A missile hits within 150 meters of its aimpoint with ten thousand kilometers range. That's the definition of pinpoint accuracy when you're lofting twenty megaton hydrogen bombs. I never said cities won't be hit as a side effect, but you did say they couldn't aim for anything smaller than a city. Here we have the issue. Lastly, a B-52 dropping its payload from 400 feet with a drag chute is going to be on-the-nose accurate, so the missiles are only half the story.
Yes, 150m is very accurate. Only US and Russian land based bissiles are close to that accurate. Trident SLBMs are that accurate under ideal conditions, but they rely so heavily on GPS to achieve that accuracy that they might as well not have it once boms start going off and screwing up the ionosphere. I never said that the capability
did not exist. I said that
most weapons lacked it. A B-52 or TU-95 might be able to drop with precision, except for the tiny detail that anything even remotely approaching a pinpoint target would be protected enough that conventional bombers would find it almost impossible to approach without being blown out of the sky. Theat's why the US spent hundreds of billions of dollars on Stealth. The only practical means of attacking a heavily defended target are:
Last-generation ICBMs with pinpoint cabability.
Stealth bombers
Lob-toss gravity bombs
Saturation bombardment with cruise missiles and more primitive ballistic missiles.
Only two and one half of those have the accuracy needed to reliably take out hard targets like bunkers and silos. The first two I have already discussed. The "half," cruise missiles, suffer both from range problems and the fact that they are still rather vulnerable to fighters and anti-aircraft weaponry, though less so than non-stealth bombers.
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Topic: Are people capable of starting a Global Nuclear War? (Read 11397 times)