From Scott M. Kozel:
On Saturday, December 17, 2016 at 3:21:24 PM UTC-5, Stuf4 wrote:
snip
I disagree with you totally here. Specifically, this statement:
"The space shuttle would obviously not qualify as an attack due to its trajectory."

I see this to be a perfect Trojan Horse candidate. No one suspects the
shuttle. It overflies all these nations. If the US wanted to initiate
a nuclear attack, a very easy way to do that would be by launching the
shuttle with a nuke warhead FOBS-type platform in the payload bay.
You've just achieved the element of surprise.

No way that would be feasible. One craft even with multiple warheads
could execute only a very limited attack. A strategic nuclear attack
would have involved at least a thousand warheads well distributed around
the USSR and Warsaw Pact.

Perhaps I did not communicate clearly.
The scenario I was trying to describe was where the Space Shuttle is used as the First Strike of a First Strike.

USSR is poised to launch on warning (LOW).
To do this, there is a hair-trigger to retaliate based on observing the known launch sites in the US. SAC bomber bases are monitored. ICBM silos are monitored. Oceans are monitored for subs. But no one suspects the Space Shuttle as the means of initiating the attack.

You could claim to be having some kind of emergency, and you could divert the trajectory straight into the USSR and it is easy to imagine that you would be given the benefit of doubt.

You'd get this first strike for free. No launch on warning retaliation.
And then, at some point with the Shuttle thing going on, you'd do the standard massive strike of launching everything you've got.

If there was some sick twisted plan to win WWIII within the first couple hours of it starting, this would have been one way to do it.


I thoroughly expect that there were many plans brewed up along these lines. As mentioned previously, there would be other avenues toward sneaking warhead behind enemy lines as part of the initial attack. Suitcase bombs, truck bombs, etc, etc. Of course if any one of those elements gets busted, you are in a world of hurt as the entire plan unravels.

Perhaps there are fiction authors who have written stories about the Shuttle being used as a nuclear warhead delivery vehicle. The other stuff, I would definitely expect stories to have been written on that.

And some decades from now, we can expect the actual plans that SAC had to be declassified. And then we will all get to see how sick and twisted the Cold War really was.

Nuking the Moon would be seen as the lesser of the weird stuff.

~ CT