[credit_guy]

It's an awful book. In the scenario, the US does launch SLBMs from a submarine close to North Korea, and they hit in minutes. But for some reason the author thought that's is plausible that the US would also launch 50 land based ICBMs. Why?

The author's technical expertise is very limited. She thinks that satellites fall out of the sky if their electronics are destroyed by an EMP attack. There are many other mistakes, you are better off skipping this book.

[jnurmine]

No, it's a good book.

They launch 50 land-based ICBMs because:

1. They expect the attack to continue.

2. The ICBM silos are in static locations.

3. Not using the ICBMs in time removes the possibility to use them at all, because the enemy, knowing where they are, will obviously destroy them. Therefore: "use it or lose it".

4. Because of #1, #2 and #3 there is a a limited time to launch a counter-attack at all using the land-based ICBMs.

5. Because the chairman of the JSC is pushing hard for strike option Charlie, which the president ultimately caves in to.

As for the EMP and satellites, that part comes from an interviews with Yago and Pry as well as Pry's book. Satellites certainly won't drop from the skies like burning seagulls, but if they cannot course correct because their electronics are fried, they will fall back into the atmosphere and burn much sooner than otherwise.

Edit: I can't count to 5.

[credit_guy]

> Therefore: "use it or lose it".

Not really. It's more like "don't use it so you can lose it". The US has enough SLBMs that the ICBMs can all be lost without significant loss of deterrence capability. However their existence complicates tremendously the calculus of an adversary. If the US does not use its ICBMs in the early moves of a full-scale nuclear war, its adversaries need to allocate missiles to disable them. From wikipedia [1]:

  > The solid fueled LGM-30 series Minuteman I, II, III, and Peacekeeper ICBM configurations consist of one LCC (launch control center) that controls ten LFs (launch facilities) (1 × 10). Five LCCs and their fifty associated LFs make up a squadron. Three squadrons make up a wing. Measures were taken such that if any one LCC was disabled, a separate LCC within the squadron would take control of its ten ICBMs.

  > The LGM-30 LFs  and LCCs  are separated by several miles, connected only electronically. This distance ensures that a nuclear attack could only disable a very small number of ICBMs, leaving the rest capable of being launched immediately. 

That is actually the reason the land-based ICBMs of the US are not MIRV'ed: in order to take them out you need to spend at least one warhead to take out one warhead.

The US nuclear strategists have given a name to this: the "nuclear sponge". Most certainly the options given to the President account for this. Nobody without top secret security clearance can know, including the book's author, but it's highly unlikely that a pre-scripted nuclear counterattack of the US against a single NK ICBM would remove 50 missiles from this "sponge", when a much better alternative is to use SLBMs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_launch_facility#Minute...

[edanm]

> It's an awful book. In the scenario, the US does launch SLBMs from a submarine close to North Korea, and they hit in minutes. But for some reason the author thought that's is plausible that the US would also launch 50 land based ICBMs. Why?

See my other comment, but to summarize - because they worry that an incoming attack would destroy the land-based ICBMs before they have a chance to launch them, taking out one third of the Nuclear Triad.

I don't think this was the book making up stories - the book is half fiction, half interviews with actual people who worked on these plans and gave inside info on them. This unfortunately appears to be a realistic scenario.

[credit_guy]

> they worry that an incoming attack would destroy the land-based ICBMs

We are used to mentally think of the Earth as seen in a sideways 2D projection. But if you look down from above the North Pole, you can appreciate how different an ICBM trajectory that goes from North Korea to Washington is from one that goes to Wyoming, Montana or North Dakota. There is no way to mistake one for the other, and the author does not even claim that this happened in her scenario; the incoming ICBM was fairly quickly identified as targeting something on the East Coast.

Which brings us to another thing. Geography is very funny, but it happens that an ICBM from NK to Washington overflies thousands of miles of Russian territory. An ICBM from Wyoming to NK overflies mabye a fifth as much, because it flies over a lot over the Bering Sea and the Sea of Ohotsk. Why are the Russians not worried when the NK ICBM overflies their country, but they are willing to commit suicide when the US counter overflies does the same, but over a much shorter distance? Well, they should not be worried in either case, because a missile can't just drop down in midflight, but an author that thinks satellites can fall from the sky can also think that a missile in suborbital flight can take 90 degree turns.