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Comment by throwaway_xl5 | Hacker News Reader

In England we have defense facilities disguised as farmhouses. We don't have land-based missiles but this [0] is/was a government bunker from which launch orders could be given. I wondered if you meant idiotic in the sense of unrealistic for America, or as a bad idea tactically?

[0]http://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/

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Sorry, I meant the US ones are nothing like that. It was totally inaccurate. In the USA, all the farmers/ranchers know where the stuff is.

"Excuse me, we're looking for Sierra 7." "Yeah, it's down this road for a mile, then left on 127."

And the Soviets wouldn't have been fooled either. So they look like military installations.

It's not about hiding the facilities from locals, it's about hiding them from satellites. Or at least providing enough uncertainty that the enemy doesn't know for certain how many or which installations are where.

More morbidly, in a first strike scenario you want the enemy to waste nukes on actual farmhouses it couldn't tell for certain were launch facilities or not. Then even if no facilities are missed (something you would be hoping for), that's still fewer nukes to be dropped on cities and conventional military installations.

Whatever the reasoning, the USAF didn't do the farmhouse thing. We did the big fence, nasty signs, and heavily armed guards.

There is no point dropping a nuke on a single tactical target. Nukes have a blast range of miles and a regular missle can take our a facility just fine.

That may be true in some but certainly not all cases.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/15/us/roswell-new-mexico-miss...

That's a decommissioned silo. When it was operational, it would have had the fence and usual such around it. The Northern Tier facilities are mostly underground, too. The actual silos (Launch Facilities) look like basically nothing from the top, were it not for the fence and nasty signage starting "Use of deadly force authorized". Also the Southern Tier silos had the launch control facilities integrated with them.

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