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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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How much payload could subs deliver versus other approaches?

A lot. Say, 6 submarines times 20 missiles a sub times 8 re-entry vehicles a missile = nearly a thousand nukes. Not enough to totally cripple Russia in a first strike, but if your theory is that all you need to do is kill the leadership then more than enough to do that.

Do they still launch if all of the leadership are vaporized in the first 5-10 minutes though?

5-10 minutes should be sufficient. But if for some reason it wasn't then regardless the answer is still yes.

Who gives that order?

The dead hand. Fully automated second strike command system probably based on detecting nuclear explosions on Russian soil from orbit.

Does the order come in the 20 subsequent minutes it takes to vaporize the rest of their stuff?

Probably. But even if not, don't underestimate the survivability of this stuff. Don't overestimate the destructive power of nukes. Military hardware needs to be hit directly or it will likely survive. Those mobile ICBMs are gonna be hard to find. Part of the reason for the insane overbuild of the cold war by both sides was 'we only need a small percentage of this stuff to survive a first strike to totally obliterate the enemy'. Nukes miss, they fizzle, they burn up in orbit due to manufacturing defects, they fail to launch, they fail in flight, they are mis-targeted due to faulty Intel. And you don't know in advance which sites you will fail to destroy so you have to shoot and look. It's like a game of whack a mole with 5000 moles, and if you miss one you get your brains blown out. For these reasons and more, the US never really believed it could pull off an unanswered first strike.

Fully automated second strike command system probably based on detecting nuclear explosions on Russian soil from orbit.

"fully automated" part is AFAIK quite dubious. But it would release control to much much lower ranked personnel.