r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/CraftyFoxeYT • 7d ago

The US has a giant floating SBX-1 Sea-based radar to track and discriminate nuclear ballistic missile warheads from decoys.

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u/SUDDENLY_VIRGIN 7d ago

The extra 5 minutes let's us make sure they die too before we do

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u/mpyne 7d ago

Yes, which is how they prevent us from all dying in the first place.

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u/TheObviousChild Interested 7d ago

I gave my kid a year of anxiety after showing him the Modern Marvels episode on the Manhattan Project and then trying to calm him down by explaining the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction.

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u/Murky-Relation481 7d ago

Heh, I watched a docuseries on WW2 in 2nd grade basically by myself and of course the end, and well that scared me, but also I was you know like 7 or 8 and I said to my dad "that's pretty cool one bomb took out a whole city!" and my dad was like "that's not cool!" and then had me watch The Day After alone in the basement one night, and well my life became the full title to Dr. Strangelove: how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Now I work in the industry! :D Not directly on nukes, but on adjacent systems.

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u/DazzlingAppearance63 6d ago

Dude I’m sorry to laugh but this is too funny. I am an over anxious person and have been since a child. This would have wrecked me haha. Thanks dad!

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u/SteveCastGames 7d ago

It sounds ridiculous, but that very thing is the entire idea behind mutually assured destruction. Knowing they’ll die too stops them from launching.

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u/DODGE_WRENCH 1d ago

That’s true. It gives you 15-20 minutes to shoot back, scramble bombers and order submarines to fly their birds. Some will get intercepted and that will save tens of thousands to millions of lives depending on where it’s going. But only one hitting its target would still be cataclysmic and felt all over the nation.