MGlBlaze said:
Furburt said:
Nuclear Weapons.
Sure, it means we might have a few more wars, but I'd take a few hundred thousand dead over the spectre of total annihilation hanging over our heads anyday.
The truly scary thing? I'm fairly certain there's enough nuclear weapons collectively held by the countries that have them to blow up the entire surface of the planet a few times over. Why do that many even exist?
To guarantee succesfull MAD in any and all scenarios. There are the warheads that are in maintenance, in transit, in silos/bunkers, in tubes, several for backup, even more to backup the backup.
Essentially enough nuclear weapons to ensure the attacker dies as well, even if you lose up to roughly 80% nukes to enemy weapons and sabotage before even knowing you are under attack, and a third to half what you
do launch are shot down on the way by enemy defences.
The numbers are made up, but illustrate the point.
I once heard that for every missile that you want to reach an enemy target with, you need to launch 3. To ensure you can launch those three, you need 10 ready for launch.
To have ten ready for launch, at any time, you need a total of 15 to cover the timegaps caused by logistics and maintenance.
Any precise numbers that strategic offensive/defensive/MAD scenarios are based on are more or less are secret.
OT: We'll, I'd like to say NBC-weapons, but will have to narrow it down due to the OP. So I'll just say ICBM-missiles. Not as a weapon, but as a delivery system. Around-the-globe range with ridiculously powerful payloads of nuclear or alternative warheads... Yeah,
not good.
To take out a single weapon is useless: we have so many innovative methods to kill eachother off with such a variety of ways, losing one weapon doesn't really make too much of a difference.