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The 2005 Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations remained unchanged. It removed the distinction between defensive and offensive deterrents, saying:
"The new triad (land and sea-based strategic bombers, land-based missiles, and ballistic missile submarines) offers a mix of strategic offensive and defensive capabilities, active and passive defenses, and a robust research development, and industrial infrastructure to develop, build, and maintain offensive forces and defensive systems....it provides additional military options."
NPR 2010 and current Obama policy leave land/sea/air triad deterrents unchanged. On high alert, nuclear missiles can be launched preemptively.
So can bunker busters with conventional or nuclear capability, including the so-called 30,000 pound Mother of All Bombs "massive ordnance penetrator (MOP)." It's designed to penetrate up to 200 feet of reinforced concrete before detonating an enormous explosive blast.
If any nation launches enough thermonuclear warheads, humanity's threatened. Krieger and Ellsberg explained:
"This is because smoke from the enormous nuclear firestorms created by even a 'successful' US nuclear first-strike would cause catastrophic disruption of global climate and massive destruction of the Earth's protective ozone layer, leading to global famine."
Helen Caldicott's books say enough nuclear explosions "would create nuclear winter, with the U.S. covered with a cloud so thick that it would block out the sun for years, and that would be the end." Other nuclear experts agree.
Nuclear bunker busters can do it. Krieger and Ellsberg said they cause huge underground nuclear explosions "with much blast and heat and radiation. It's called activation by neutrons--millions of tons of earth and dust--so you have a much greater radioactive fallout that's shot out into the air than you would if a bomb is exploded in the air above a city."
Atmospheric scientists Alan Robock, Brian Toon, and others say a large enough attack produces "immense firestorms" able to cover the planet in dense stratospheric smoke. Heated by the sun, it would remain at least 10 years and block sunlight from reaching the earth's surface. Mass starvation would follow.
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