Ryan Snyder, "Assessing the Lethality of Conventional Weapons against Strategic Missile Silos in the United States, Russia, and China," Science & Global Security 32, no. 1-3 (2024)
This paper provides a framework for assessing the vulnerability of strategic missile silos in the United States, Russia, and China to conventional weapons with any accuracy or explosive yield. Comparisons between ground motions induced by nuclear surface bursts and earth-penetrating conventional explosions were made to calculate the maximum distance at which a silo-based missile would be vulnerable to a conventional detonation. Single-shot kill probabilities then confirmed that U.S. long-range air- and sea-based precision conventional cruise missiles possess lethalities against missile silos comparable to U.S. nuclear ballistic missiles: typically well above 90%. This result suggests that long-range conventional weapons may not only be substituted for the silo counterforce targeting roles of nuclear weapons, but may have broader strategic stability and defense implications due to the relative survivability of and reliance on specific nuclear forces among nuclear powers and regional defense dynamics driving the acquisition of similar weapons by more countries.
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