[Beastro]

China can't use a strategy like that because it only takes one MIRV warhead to take out their entire population of 1 billion.

Keep say it, but it's bullshit until you describe exactly how one warhead would kill a billion people when it's insufficient to wipe out even a single city.

Besides, warheads aren't commonly targeted at population centers, they are sanely targeted at the enemies war make capabilities. It just so happens many of them fall within population centers.

The Soviet Union varied from that because of their different take on a nuclear exchange. They didn't think it would end after the first exchange and prepared weapons to be fired after that to keep the enemy down.

They also looked on the world differently and had pretty much every capital, NATO or neutral regardless. The SU would be hurting and the turd world would become a threat potential threat post-WWIII and since all those countries are centered completely around their capitals, nuking them would keep them out of the picture.

The Typhoon Class SSBNs were built to this premise, they'd remain under the Arctic ice during the main exchange and then only surface and fire their SLBM months later to attack NATO as they tried to rebuild.

The US on the books strategy for dealing with nuke attacks is to absorb the first wave and just let whoever is targeted die.

This is result of Kennedy, McNamara and the Democrats dismantling of the SACs anti-ballistic missile defence projects in the early 60s and them later cutting into the new attempts at it when Bush was in power.

They're also responsible for the shift from manned bombers to ICBMs which reduced the reaction time during a nuclear crisis from days and hours to 5 minutes.