(01-25-2017, 05:53 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Counterforce targets THE EXTERNAL ENEMY's launch sites and other nuclear facilities. What are you talking about?
Heh heh. I thought that would get your attention. The nuclear winter idea is really rather silly--as if they worst thing we would have to worry about after a nuclear war would be particulates in the atmosphere. The concept emerged during the political debate about nuclear war in the 1980's. Lots of silly ideas are floated in politics, nuclear winter isn't any sillier than supply-side tax cuts.
Even sillier was the counterforce concept, which as you note was supposedly about targeting the USSR's launch facilities. The CF concept was publicized during the MX missile debate. The argument for this new missile was that it was super accurate and could be used for counterforce applications for which the existing Minuteman missile was unsuitable.
The CF concept doesn't make any sense unless the targets were silos occupied by missiles. But the only way you can strike at silos that still contain missiles is if these missiles had not been launched, that is you struck first. This lead to charges that the MX missile was a first-strike weapon or at least would be seen as such by the USSR and so was destabilizing. What followed by an increasingly bizarre concepts of partial strikes and counter-strikes which made increasingly little sense.
To get to the heart of the CF concept you have to look at the original MX concept, which was a way to address an obvious critique of the US "triad" nuclear strategy. The logical question is, why did the US maintain land-based missiles? Such weapons were obviously a target for which no defense existed. Why not just get rid of them and rely on our nuclear subs, which unlike the land based weapons, were mobiile and undetectable, making them invulnerable to attack. In other words why not hand over the job (plus the funding and prestige) of the job of providing the nuclear deterrant to the US Navy? This of course did not sit well with the USAF, who came up with the CF concept to justify the land missiles (i.e. their piece of the pie). SLBMs were not sufficiently accurate for CF purposes, for that you needed the land-based platforms. These could be made more secure from attack by going to a mobile-based (MX) system in which the 1000 Minutemen were replaced with 100 super-accurate highly-MIRVed MX missiles that would be shuttled between the existing array of silos so that at any time, 90% of the silos would be empty. If the USSR then launched a CF assault they would most strike empty silos, leaving intact a substantial fraction of our CF capability, plus all of our SLBMs.
THe MX system was too expensive and it went down, but the USAF still wanted the missile, and went double down on the CF concept, which is the only justification for land-based missiles that was being offered. Of course the obvious counter to the CF concept was, if the MX wasn't a first strike weapon, and would only be used for retaliation, why wouldn't the USSR not strike at all of our silos, taking out all of America's CF capability? The USAF woud have no response to this, but the argument never went here--it wasn't PC I guess.
I finally concluded that the CF argument was simply a justification for keeping the USAF involved in providing the US deterrence, instead of delegating this to the USN, as would seem logical. Hence my tongue-in-cheek claim that the real target of the CF doctrine was the US Navy.
The MX missile debate was one of the first times I developed a cynical view of American foreign policy politics. It would not be the last. More than 20 years later I ended up embracing the views expressed in the libertarian site Antiwar.com.