> So, yes a MIV could take out 8-10 cities across Texas while not impacting 99% of the land. But, a more likely approach is to carpet bomb suburbs and redundantly target cities with different warheads from different ICBMs.
Why? Wouldn't it be more useful from a militaristic perspective to take out enemy missile silos, industrial plants which could be converted to produce wartime materials, and to take out military bases? Essentially, target cities, ignore the residential areas except for ones that are near a missile silo? What strategic advantage could possibly come from carpet bombing suburbs?
The world only has on the order of a thousand of these things. Russia, as the GP points out, only has ~300. They can't just glass the opposing hemisphere, they have to pick and choose important targets.
Total war, if you reduce the US population from 300 million to 10 million we are a vastly smaller threat mid term. Consider, if you removed everything but 1,000,000 infantry they would need to go make food, bullets, boats etc. On the other hand if you have 100 million civilians they can quickly train a few % how to shoot and will be very angry while producing a surplus to keep a war going.
The general assumption is an ICBMs counter attack happens when your attack is in the air. So, you would mostly be hitting empty silos thus your country has little military or economic strength left. Worse, it's much cheaper to fake some silos in the middle of nowhere than a suburb. 'Wasting' nukes on corn fields is very costly.
Why? Wouldn't it be more useful from a militaristic perspective to take out enemy missile silos, industrial plants which could be converted to produce wartime materials, and to take out military bases? Essentially, target cities, ignore the residential areas except for ones that are near a missile silo? What strategic advantage could possibly come from carpet bombing suburbs?
The world only has on the order of a thousand of these things. Russia, as the GP points out, only has ~300. They can't just glass the opposing hemisphere, they have to pick and choose important targets.