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In nuclear strategy, a first strike or preemptive strike is a preemptive surprise attack employing overwhelming force. First strike capability is a country's ability to defeat another nuclear power by destroying its arsenal to the point where the attacking country can survive the weakened retaliation while the opposing side is left unable to continue war.
Nuclear winter is a severe and prolonged global climatic cooling effect that is hypothesized [1] [2] to occur after widespread firestorms following a large-scale nuclear war. [3] The hypothesis is based on the fact that such fires can inject soot into the stratosphere, where it can block some direct sunlight from reaching the surface of the Earth.
Nuclear warfare scenarios are usually divided into two groups, each with different effects and potentially fought with different types of nuclear armaments. The first, a limited nuclear war [22] (sometimes attack or exchange), refers to the controlled use of nuclear weapons, whereby the implicit threat exists that a nation can still escalate ...
The book covers standard American military protocol in the event of a nuclear first strike against the United States.It particularly highlights launch on warning as a dangerous and potentially catastrophic policy of nuclear armed nations and concludes that any nuclear conflict has the potential to end in near-total human extinction.
After all, ANY nation possessing nuclear weapons thereby has a "first strike capability," - that is, the ability to use their weapons first - but in the context it seems to be used (suppression of enemy weapons to deny them second strike capability) this is more properly a [pre-emptive] disarming nuclear strike - another variety for instance is ...
In response, Soviet nuclear capable aircraft were fueled and armed ready to launch on the runway, and ICBMs were brought up to alert. Soviet leaders believed the exercise was a ruse to cover NATO preparations for a nuclear first strike and frantically sent a telegram to its residencies seeking information on NATO preparations for an attack.
Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy which posits that a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by an attacker on a nuclear-armed defender with second-strike capabilities would result in the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. [1]
In short, a counterforce strike is directed against an adversary's military capabilities, while a countervalue strike is directed against an adversary's civilian-centered institutions. A closely related tactic is the decapitation strike , which destroys an enemy's nuclear command and control facilities and similarly has a goal to eliminate or ...