I think it is less about "never again" (although that is there) and more about "been there did that" - with the GPW experience being studied and applied to the new problem. The scale ofcourse is different but core mechanics remain the same.

Well I would venture to say that even with only 75 of our ICBMs and 50 of yours making it to target most of them multiple warhead rockets it won't much matter who has what left anyways. We'll have irradiated both our countries into the stone age.

^ This. It just doe snot matter.

There is a reason why in this context time and again the term "overkill capacities" gets mentioned.

Shooting your head with 3 shots through both brain hemispheres, or with 30 or with 300, makes no difference. The result is always the same.

A full exchnage would not stop with just 150 missiles, btw. The arsenals would be spent competely (flooding the enemy's defences). Enormous ammounts of dust and ashes in the air, dust from the nuclear detonatiosn,a nd smoke and ashes from the hundreds of thousands of fires following in their wake. Vegetation dying even in parts fot he world that saw no direct impacts, due to sunlight losses in the range of factors between 50 and 100. Higher animal life forms dying, insects being good candidtes to survive - and threatenign every attempt for agriculture some years later. If then sufficient social structure still is there to run siomething like agriculture. Biospheric homeostasis completely off balance in many parts of Earth'S surface, with most animal life gone or at risk. Climate change, nuclear winter.

You cannot prepare for this, you cannot manage this, you cannot control this. Civilizational structures would desintegrate in reverse order of how their formed up or were built. The complex structures go first. No communication. No traffic. No transportation. Means: no trade. No medical drugs. No food. No gas and heating oil. No replacement of reserves being consumed. No state law and order. Anarchy. The rule of the strongest.

No gender equality debates. No climate saving policies. No injections at the dentists. Damn, not even the dentists without inhjections.

Pain. Agony. Dying. Despair. Hopelessness. And the omnipresent monuments ans signs of what once was, but is no more, and dear things and loved ones gone forever, killed and vaporized in unimaginable quantities.

Surviving to endure this, is no victory. It is the penultimate penalty.

I agree, there is no victory in a nuclear war, but imagine a scenario where there could be no retaliation, that only one power could get their weapons to target? How unacceptable does nuclear warfare become when the firing nation doesn't have to suffer the consequences of mutually assured destruction?

You can. The only problem is cost and degree of such preparations.

Secure reserves (ie Rosreserv underground warehouses), comunications (hardened backbone comms, redundancy), transportation (urban and suburban hardened underground metro systems).

Dispersal (pre attack) and evacuation (post attack) of industries, restoration of production. That is - of industries that cannot maintain production under attack, there are those as well (nuclear weapons production and storage)

I mean none of the above measures are cheap, nor do they allow one to maintain full pre attack production after the attack and even after the initial restoration efforts. If you are interested and if you did read the article I have posted a while back (https://rusi.org/sites/default/files...s_tomorrow.pdf) I can drop some more information on the topic in english.

p.s. if you feel like building a shelter, here you can access the current standard regarding construction of short term civilian shelters, the ones implying evacuation post attack:
http://docs.cntd.ru/document/1200111826

p.p.s. if you system of preferences values quick death more than survival - it would be rational for you to invest into means of suicide. I would suggest both firearm and a cyanide pill.

Blödsinn.

Come to your senses.

Well, for example lets consider comunications.

I know for sure that a certain company called Rostelecom had (and still has) extensive preparations for eventuality of the global thermonuclear war (or a conventional war or a natural disaster or an alien attack) and a mission to maintain said comms between priority users.

Much of those preparations do come from the Soviet times, but then we never quite stoped improving on them. Those preparations include hardening (secure comunications and related infrastructure), post attack restoration means, security forces.

As an example of the preparations in the comms industry - a civilian sister agency of the Rostelecom, the Central Telegraph sold the ГО-42 fascility in the post Soviet era (now a Cold War museum) because they felt that it was both redundant and obsolete.
(ГО-42 = Civil Defense fascility Moscow #42, obviously there is a fascility #41, #40 and so on, as a rule they are still in operation)

The floor plan can be seen here:


So such a generic obsolete low ranking fascility in Moscow has:
- 90 days of autonomy.
- secure transportation (civilian metro is hardened agaisnt blast and fallout).
- secure comunications (underground cables).
- 11000 m2 of usable floor space.

Na dann ist ja alles gut.

In case you ever change your mind, here is the current standard for the adaptation of metro stations for civil defense applications:
http://docs.cntd.ru/document/1200035935

I have sometimes wondered what would happen to the balance of terror(don't know if that is the correct phrase) if one of them (USA or Russia) developed a very advance defense system that allowed them to shoot down about 99-100 % of the ICBM or similar

Markus

The answer is simple - that party is no longer detered by the nuclear weapons. If significant tensions exists this would likely result in a one sided (nuclear) war.

I'd say that depends on the size of the country being attacked.

I think that the number of weapons that would have to be used in order to ensure there could be no retaliation from a country the size of the US, China or Russia would pretty much mess up the planet anyways. That in itself should be a deterrent although I don't know how well it would apply to smaller nations.

If that notion is a sufficient deterent, why doesnt USA (any other nuclear power) disarm?

I was talking about nuclear retaliation. Of course without them it wouldn't take destroying the planet to stop any conventional response that could be mounted.

I was speaking more in the instance of a nation developing an ABM system with a 100% kill rate. If a nation developed that, and also possessed a nuclear arsenal, then it would have the upper hand in being able to fire its missiles and not be hit with nuclear missiles in return.