|
Not everyone kept even a substantial minority of their nuclear weapons under hair-trigger alert constantly, throughout the entire force, or at all really. From a base design standpoint, lots of early weapons needed way too much finicking around to do that, and these kinds of problems had to be solved multiple times for ever more efficient and miniaturized designs, over multiple nations and sometimes even branches. Then there were the technical limitations of delivery 'vectors' if you will, where even prompt use was very time-lagged, introducing multiple options for recall. Torpedoes, manned bombers and liquid fuel early missiles come to mind. After that there were a number of policy decisions that kept the warheads out of the hands of the end user and in custody with depots, dual key arrangements in case of nuclear sharing, or the KGB and whatnot. Finally you had alert states with some very overt firebreaks built in to signal your adversary that you were willing to cross a certain preparedness threshold. All in all I'd say that weapons states were not only pretty unwilling to use the things, but also quite circumspect in deploying them, though always looking for more flexibility and better response times.
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2015 06:32
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 00:11 |
|