History, Politics And Current Affairs

EDIT -- This appears to be substantially the same speech that was given to the representatives of all services at SAC Headquarters, Offutt Air Force Base, Omaha, on 15 March, 1954 by SAC's Deputy Director of Ops. Basically the "Smoking Radiating Ruin at the end of Two Hours" Speech. Compar...

It’s very much a golden age of not just knowledge creation but knowledge dissemination. I'm currently using the French Mistral AI -- right mix of pricing $14/month and free testing to see if my use case worked to transcribe stuff I've had for at least 10-12 years, but the quality was too poor to OC...

From a Soviet military journal circa July 1961 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/1962-04-30.pdf During 1960, SAC conducted four large exarcises, Full Play - February 1960; Sky Shield - September 1960; Big Play - October 1960; Full Coordination - November 1960, with the actual participation of up ...

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB130/SIOP-21.pdf

17 January 1961 guidance:

NSTAP prescribes 75% assurance of delivery at each bomb release line of the necessary weapons to achieve the specified levels of damage to targets on the NSTL.

This is the SIOP that went "hot" in August 1962 and was active during the Cuban Missile Crisis... https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb236/SIOP-63.pdf HISTORY OF THE JOINT STRATECIC TARGET PLANNING STAFF: PREPARATION OF SIOP-63 HISTORY & RESEARCH DIVISION HEADQUARTERS STRATEGIC AIR ...

I'm not sure we are ever going to have the full answer when the aircraft as opposed to space plane based component of SAC or its successor is still in business. Although thinking along these lines a part of me thinks the answer is probably less than everyone assumed. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAE...

So lets look at a typical targeting problem in an average sort of strike. We are going to give the capital of Outer Loonyistan a really thorough seeing to. Now we don't just explode a bomb in the center of the city and say bye-bye. Believe it or not that won't do any real good. Initiate a 1 megaton...

https://breakingdefense.com/2025/05/air-force-now-expects-sentinel-icbms-will-predominantly-need-new-silos/ Air Force now expects Sentinel ICBMs will ‘predominantly’ need new silos “Part of the requirements, initially — ten years ago when this program was started — was to reuse the holes, the missil...

A slightly different version of Stuart's "Lectures" was recovered from the Fallout 3 forums of all places: https://www.giantbomb.com/fallout-3/3030-20504/forums/nuclear-warfare-101-wall-of-text-alert-2999/ =========================== From: "Stuart Slade" <shiva06804@yahoo.com> Da...

"The SAC Alert System 1956-1970" says: "When operating at peak strength during the [Cuban] crisis, approximately 65 airborne B-52s and 240 nuclear weapons were 'target effective' at any given time." In "Strategic Air Command Operations in the Cuban Crisis of 1962" the c...

You've forgotten Victor and Valiant and Vulcan in the bomber calculations. Plus whatever the French had. Well, the context of that post was reconstructing data from WSEG-50, which is what was handed to McNamara in 1960, and helped form a large basis of his decisions for the later 1960ies; so the V ...

The primary land-based bomber weapons for the 1960s were, per Chuck Hansen's SWORDS OF ARMAGEDDON -- This had to be done to figure out the megatonnage deliverable by bombers to enable cost/efficiency calculations. RAF/US Canberras 1700~ Mark 7 Fission (1952-1967) (8/19/22/30/31/61 KT, 1600 lbs) B-58...

kdahm wrote: ↑Fri May 02, 2025 8:41 pm All of that is very true. I don't know has been declassified in the last 25 years, and I don't know what was actually classified before then.

Even wikipedia has declassified info now; namely a 30 July 1963 JCS briefing, with some interesting slides

BTW, I love it when censors screw up and allow me to recover totally obliterated data with some precision by scaling off said graph.

Stuart has heavily implied, if not outright said, that all of the publicly available numbers for CEP on US systems were a bunch of hokum. The actual ones were heavily, heavily classified, and anyone who did have access to them wasn't talking. I can't help but wonder how much of Stu's POV/worldview ...

I'd be very careful about using those numbers for anything but casual comparisons. The source that Stumpf cited for MM3 CEP (and MM2) etc was: "History of the Strategic Air Command, FY1970" Volume II - Narrative, Redacted Copy, DNSA, NT00923 pp. 274-275. Snippets of this study are online,...

From Minuteman by Stumpf: The CEP estimates approved by the JCS for use in SIOP Revision G, 1 January through 30 June 1970, for Minuteman IB with the Mark 11 and Minuteman II with the Mark 11C were 1.6 and 1 nm, respectively. The CEP estimates for Minuteman III’s first, second, and third Mark 12 ree...

I've been playing with radar horizon calculators as well as Google Earth. Baylor's simulation of a LGM-30F (Light, No decoys) on a maximum range target was: Stage 3 Burnout @ 212.4 km altitude. Apogee @ 1452 km altitude. He also said that from Minuteman II onwards, the launch programmer allowed for ...

https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/wordpressua.uark.edu/dist/3/246/files/2016/05/Minuteman-Trajectory-Simulation.pdf In conjunction with the slight deceleration of Stage III, separation springs in the RV mechanical system pushed the RV away from the NS10 guidance set. From this point - 272 nautical miles...

I've had several years to think on this; and I've realized something about SAFEGUARD + GMD. Remember that the original systems design for SAFEGUARD was actually called SENTINEL and was a much bigger deployment: Sentinel-Deployment.gif Notice how: Fairbanks, AK Seattle, WA Malmstrom AFB, MT Grand For...