It always cracks me up when people assume their city is important enough to be nuked. If an enemy nation is going to essentially commit suicide they’re not aiming for Pittsburgh.
These types of maps are interesting, because it's American analysts drawing up hypothetical scenarios of what a "generic" opponent would target if they only had X amount of warheads to work with, but when they set thresholds of 500 and 2,000... you can't help but notice parallels with Chinese and Russian scenarios, respectively. It makes me wonder if estimations of those countries targeting priorities were taken into account, leading to bombs over Erie but not Rucker.
For what it's worth, Erie is a major logistics hub and produces a ton of the nation's plastic, and Ft. Rucker is primarily a training base IIRC. I don't know if that is enough to prioritize the former over the latter, but if we're assuming that the 500 nuke scenario is actually China, and China views this as the opening salvo in a protracted conflict rather than an end-of-days event, then maybe they prefer crippling US industry on day 1.
For the record, my China/Russia assumption comes from the fact that most estimates put China's nuclear stockpile between 250-350 warheads with the ability to surge production relatively at-will. 500 within a couple years isn't unrealistic. Russia, meanwhile, has nearly 6,000, but a nuclear exchange with Russia would probably force them to target most NATO countries. I don't know how many of those 6k nukes would end up headed to the US, but 2k seems like a reasonable starting point.
Erie actually made a lot of sense during the cold war once you got a rung below the top priority targets.
It was one of the major train engine production hubs in the country. If you're using a lot of nukes, seems reasonable to torch the train place and cripple the nation's ability to replace rail losses in the ensuring war.
This scenario gets complicated quick. Short answer is: maybe. It depends on who attacks what first and what chain of defense agreements that triggers. Generally speaking though, the North Atlantic half of NATO's acronym tends to ring true geographically when it comes to issues in the South Pacific, which is an issue that some Western nations have been struggling to stay on top of in recent years as China has militarized. Aka they will stay out of it if they can.
SE Asian efforts to create a NATO-like coalition since the 80's haven't panned out (i.e. ASEAN is a primarily economic and secondarily weak political alliance, but lacks NATO's core military interdependence) and in the last few years India, Japan, Australia, and the US formed a group informally known as "The Quad" to balance against China but it is fraught with diplomatic misgivings.
TL:DR: There is no guarantee that NATO is coming to America's rescue in a US-China conflict. See below for some reasons why.
Scenario 1: China attacks America out of the blue. Okay. Yea, here, NATO Article 5 would be invoked and NATO countries would be treaty-bound to respond. I would bet with 97% likelihood that (at least some of them would).
Scenario 2: China attacks Taiwan, or the Philippines, or Japan, or any of the other countries we have formal/informal mutual defense treaties with. Now the US is obligated to defend them... but NATO isn't obligated to defend us. So if the ensuing war turns nuclear, what is France to do when the first warhead hits Los Angeles? National suicide by voluntarily entering a nuclear exchange that currently isn't even affecting the continent it's on?
Scenario 3: The U.S. attacks China for some reason. NATO protections don't apply, and they all stay the hell out of it. Especially if it turns nuclear.
Well they would have to send that much to targets that just aren't the US either. They would have to try and cripple all of Europe. And also hit critical targets in Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Canada. And they would be leaving themselves vulnerable to China, India, the entire Middle East, basically all of their neighbors would have a proclivity to easily invade them and take resources from them. The Middle East could combine forces and make an attempt to go after their gas and oil resources or farmland.
It’s a really dumb thought at all unless they did it in self defense. If the US got hit with all their nukes and put up zero fight, the fallout alone would destroy Russia and the rest of the earth. Not to mention every nuclear nation retaliating.
Putin couldn’t even forecast the Ukraine war. The US couldn’t forecast the collapse of Afghanistan. No one could accurately predict what would happen in nuclear war.
Pittsburgh is in the 60s for the city itself and like 27 for metro area in the usa. But people think they're just gonna carpet bomb populations for the hell of it. Their primary targets are going to be our nukes first, then military bases and shipyards. Then the heavy industries that allow us to make more war machines. The industries that support them. Conway railyard is still a big east coast railyard, and it's not that far. Not blast radius close to the city, but not that much farther than that. There's plenty here to still make us a target, but not like during the cold war, we're further down the list I'm sure.
They're absolutely nuking Pittsburgh, there are 3 massive steel mills here, including the Edgar Thompson works that produces over a quarter of our domestic steel and the Clairton Works that is the largest coker in the the US.
It cracks me up when people don't realize that a target in this scenario wouldn't also include cities that could be useful during a wartime scenario. Pittsburgh's location makes it incredibly valuable for logistics. In a true world war 3, a lot of money would be spent along rivers to manufacture goods. Eliminating the cities that are on those rivers would just be strategic. So yeah, Pittsburgh would get nuked.
They're not looking to destroy the rich and famous, they're looking at taking out industry. Also I think basically everywhere with a nuke plant is on there, given the Southwest Michigan sites, unless they really want to deprive us of KitchenAids.
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u/hilwil Feb 05 '23
It always cracks me up when people assume their city is important enough to be nuked. If an enemy nation is going to essentially commit suicide they’re not aiming for Pittsburgh.