The one significant thing I was confused about was why the upper bound survivability for stationary, land-based ICBMs is only 25%.
Good catch! I wasn’t considering the fact that a countervalue attack might be ‘launched on warning,’ rather than after a first strike had already destroyed a portion of a country’s nuclear arsenal. I’ve updated the Guesstimate model in the third post to reflect that full-scale countervalue targeting could get a bit deadlier than I originally accounted for, and I’ll make sure my post on nuclear winter takes this into account as well. I don’t have the bandwidth to update all of the figures in the post immediately, but I should be able to do so soon.
Also, maybe you intend for your adjustment for US missile defence systems to be negating 15% of the lost warheads rather than adding 15% to the total arsenal?
Right, again! Thanks for flagging this. Here’s an updated version of my calculations. I now find that somewhere between ~990 and 1,500 US nuclear weapons would survive a counterforce first strike by Russia. I’ll update the post to reflect these changes soon.
Good catch! I wasn’t considering the fact that a countervalue attack might be ‘launched on warning,’ rather than after a first strike had already destroyed a portion of a country’s nuclear arsenal. I’ve updated the Guesstimate model in the third post to reflect that full-scale countervalue targeting could get a bit deadlier than I originally accounted for, and I’ll make sure my post on nuclear winter takes this into account as well. I don’t have the bandwidth to update all of the figures in the post immediately, but I should be able to do so soon.
Right, again! Thanks for flagging this. Here’s an updated version of my calculations. I now find that somewhere between ~990 and 1,500 US nuclear weapons would survive a counterforce first strike by Russia. I’ll update the post to reflect these changes soon.
Neat. Happy to be a little bit helpful!