re: Nuclear War in South Louisiana

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What’s the reason for different scenarios? If someone were willing to drop 500 nukes on us why wouldn’t they drop 2,000 if they have them available?

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2,000 warhead scenario is a first strike, targeting military installations and defense/industrial infrastructure. That’s why you see so many black dots around ND/MT/WY - trying to destroy our ICBMs.

500 warhead scenario assumes a retaliatory strike where our first strike would have (presumably) taken out a fair amount of their nuclear assets. So they have less missiles overall. And in that scenario it doesn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense to target ICBM installations if we’ve already launched. So they’re targeted at population centers to maximize casualties instead.

It’s all kind of hypothetical and hinges on key assumptions about how exactly a nuclear war would play out, but it’s basically an illustration of MAD principles.