Would you fight in a nuclear WWIII vs USSR?

[Tzefa]

Reading the Fulda Gap thread in the AFV got me thinking.

 

Suppose at any point during the 70's and 80's, one side, whichever one, decided to take its chances and launch a surprise nuclear strike on the enemy.

Retaliation immediately ensues, and according to conventional wisdom, the world comes to an end.

 

But it wouldn't, really. There would be still - albeit scattered - some units left on both sides, some equipment, some soldiers would survive.

 

So what happens next?

Say you're stationed in Germany - and I know not a few tanknetters actually were - when this happens, and somehow your unit wasn't entirely wiped out by nuclear fire. What would you do - what did you think you'd do, and were there any official plans and scenarios for after the nuclear exchange?

Do you think there would be any semblance of a chain of command left, any unit structure, would anyone care?

 

Would you say, "my unit would be surely destroyed first so it never really concerned me"?

Do you think anyone would still try to press to the ruins of Moscow, or whatever remaining units would just break down and disintegrate into 'every man for himself'?

 

It seems unlikely to me that anyone left alive would want to fight on after most of what they knew would be destroyed.

[Kenneth P. Katz]

I was based at a US Air Force base in the continental United States during this period. One of my additional duties was to serve on what was called a Disaster Preparedness team, and my role was to operate shelters in the post-nuclear attack environment.

 

It was obvious to anybody involved who was not a total idiotic that this was a waste of time, that there were not adequate shelters or stockpiles of supplies. Furthermore, no matter the shelter or supplies, at some point we would have had to emerge from the shelters. And after getting hit by 10,000+ thermonuclear weapons, the United States would no longer exist. Sure there would be people surviving somehow, but a coherent country with functioning national government would no longer exist.

 

After a total nuclear war, nobody would be driving on Moscow or for that matter doing anything else other than trying to survive in small bands.

[DemolitionMan]

According to what I read in my German military handbook everyone was at least supposed to continue to fight...but I don´t think that whoever wrote the chapter about the use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield and how to react in that circumstance really imagined what his words meant in reality...to quote from "Chieftains" by Bob Forrest-Webb:

 

Hang on, lads...it´s over...it´s all bloody over!

[zaevor2000]

According to what I read in my German military handbook everyone was at least supposed to continue to fight...but I don´t think that whoever wrote the chapter about the use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield and how to react in that circumstance really imagined what his words meant in reality...to quote from "Chieftains" by Bob Forrest-Webb:

 

I wouldn't be here... and probably none of my buddies would either. With our GDP positions on the border (2/2 ACR), we had less than an hour of life expectancy. None of us would have seen dawn on the 2nd day... (in fact for many of us we had around 5minutes or less of life expectancy once the balloon went up.

 

Thank god the balloon didn't go up between 85-88 or I wouldn't be talking with you now...

 

Frank

[Ssnake]

Conventional wisdom says that us Germans would have gone belly up immediately with the first mushroom cloud. But the question to me is, would there have been enough political control to prevent an escalation. Would a German government have had enough control to order the Bundeswehr to surrender. Wouldn't it be more likely that if you see your country go to hell you at least want to take a bit of revenge. If there's no home to return to, there's no reason to attempt to survive that stupid war so you can just as well go down in a blaze.

 

I think the primary deterrence for politicians was that a nuclear strategy would threaten the annihilation of their own country. But a second-order fear might have been the inability to stop the mayhem once that all hell broke loose. How much were American guarantees worth to let their allies have a say in the release of nuclear weapons, once that US forces are being vaporized on German soil (or elsewhere). Would everybody have kept their cool and said "Whoa, let's step back for a minute and see what happens during the next five hours before we decide what we will do next, whether we will retaliate or not"?

 

With two airliners in the World Trade Center, how much political freedom did the US government really have not to retaliate? Not trying to suggest that the US shouldn't have reacted any way differently, but suppose Bush would have seriously considered a policy of "deescalation" and not made a decision to invade anywhere and just have sent some special forces commandos to Afghanistan to hunt OBL and his cronies in a covert operation while officially putting up the image of "holding the course" and "not play into the terrorists hands" because "no innocents should suffer from the colladeral damage of a military operation" and "as good christians we're turning the other cheek", "Love thy enemy".

How long would such a hypothetical "Peacenik Bush Administration" have survived politically?

 

 

Conventional war is unpredictably enough. The use of nuclear weapons threatens to sever political control over the war machine. In a Clausewitzian way nuclear weapons might be considered as war in its purest observable form where friction is limited to the accuracy of battlefield intelligence and the guidance systems of the delivery systems, and the bombs themselves as unrestricted, maximized violence according to the nature of war as such. But the ability of political leadership to determine the outcome of such a war, to exert control over actually stopping the exchange of hostilities in a cycle of aggression, retaliation, and counter-retaliation in the short time before everything is lost, with a rapidly deteriorating accuracy of what is actually going on on a globe-spanning battlefield - well, that political control isn't firm and reliable.

Ultimately it did work during the Cuba crisis, but all the people involved admit that it was a kind of hair trigger situation that could just as well have escalated within minutes to a globe-spanning nuclear war.

[Darth Stalin]

Well, even in case the world being "destroyed" (i.e. state structures of most Western and Eastern countries cruched with flames of nuclear fire), the military units would still survive and retain their structure (even in case of being 90% wiped out) due to a very simple but evident reason: they would be armed and organised.

Even a single tank with a few APCs and a handful of trucks + group of determined, trained, organised and armed men can be a formidable force when compared to all bands of civilians scattered everywhere.

Thus though I do not believe that any "rush for Moscow" would occure, yet dozens or hundreds of "warlords" would emerge from ashes of the global war.

[DesertFox]

Curious about countries like Brazil...I don't believe that they were targets for nuclear weapons, wouldn't they within a couple of decades become leaders of the world?

[DesertFox]

Until they start dropping dead from hard radiation exposure. Tanks are about the best place to be but they aren't impenetrable, and eventually you have to get out to resupply.

 

Its really tough for me to wrap my head around the whole concept of mass nuclear exchange - this is destruction with no precedent in human existence. We're talking about something that is really an extinction class event.

 

I agree but not quite at the class that some predictors tried to state......the human race and technology would have survived

Edited May 26, 2008 by DesertFox

[DesertFox]

tough to say actually, it would be interesting if they plugged in some of the data on a mass nuke exchange into the fancy dancy climat and meteorological models they have now and see what comes out.

 

Do they actually have some models which can actually predict the weapon as it happened...last I heard, they could not model anything accurately enough to even get past trends right.....

[DesertFox]

the models are pretty good now - where they break down is how they tell them what to do - radiation release and exposure is a fairly more straightforward problem than trying to predict these complicated feedback systems like with the climate change stuff.

 

at least IMO.

 

I was thinking more along the lines of the nuclear winter which was suppose to occur.

I am sure the radiation would shorten lives but not be fatal.

Does anyone have the calculation for how much radiation it would put into an atmosphere.

[JohnAbrams21]

I was born in 1985 and would have been 3 or 4 in 1989, probably the last year where a USSR/NATO war would occur. I wouldn't have been able top do jack if the balloon went up. We lived in Baltimore city MD at the time and were near MANY prime targets. We almost certainly would not have survived. My dad served in the US Air Force in Turkey from 1968-72, he was 39-40 in 1989, would he have been recalled to the service in the event of WW3?

[Hellfish6]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_2000

[Marek Tucan]

Living some few hundreds of meters from one supposed nuke Tomahawk target (railway station) with our milit'ry intel estimating one more Tomahawk (on steelworks) and for a better measure one Pershing, and being born in 1982, I'd also be able to do roughly nothing.

[Corinthian]

I was born in 1979, and if the sh1t had hit the fan in 85-88, Clark and Subic could've been nuked, and I probably would've first noticed it when The Centurions would abruptly stop as FEN is vaporized.

[Ssnake]

I agree but not quite at the class that some predictors tried to state......the human race and technology would have survived

...provided our leaders would have been wise enough to prevent the mineshaft gap, which they didn't.

Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless *distinguishable*, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.

[Redbeard]

Initially (77-79) I was in the Home Guard and here the doctrine was close co-operation with the regular army mainly performing surveillance, but if/when being run over by enemy units (we expected to be where I lived in S. Jutland), we would stay behind and go into a partisan like mode. We did not expect to survive for very long, but the general consensus was that it would be better to die doing than surviving not doing – something. Equipped with 84mm Carl Gustav, LAW, MG3 (MG42) and G3s we expected to be able to hand out a punch or two.

Later (81- 01) I was in the regular army reserve in an artillery unit expected to dig in on SE Zealand coast and wait for the Soviet/Polish/GDR forces to cross the Baltic. If given the time to mobilize and dig in (24-48 hours) I think we would have had a decent chance to give an invader a warm welcome, but I doubt many of us would survive the battle – I anyway had no intention of going into captivity.

Makes an interesting contrast to present day colleagues, where going on “real action” overseas missions (presently mainly Afghanistan) is an unavoidable part of service. They have danger in close proximity, and although they expect to survive, some actually come home in body bags. We expected not to survive “if the balloon went up”, but as it didn’t we all survived and are now well-fed and well. As it all went I’m not in doubt that my young colleagues today got the tough part, if not for other reasons then because it is so difficult to run a good family life when dad is on mission every now and then, and the most scary sight they can think of at home is a uniformed colleague of yours knocking on the front door.

Regards

Steffen Redbeard

[RETAC21]

Depending on the level of surprise, such a war may be very survivable for the attacker, let's say you are the USSR and decide to end the Cold War once and for all, since you are launching satellites left and right, try to get a FOBS into orbit like OGCh http://www.astronautix.com/craft/ogch.htm under the cover of a routine satellite launch. Then try to get an SSBN close to the Atlantic and the Pacific coast, like the K-219 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_K-219 and put a SSN to try to clear it's tail from intruders, easier before 1985 when the Walker spy ring was rolled up. Additionally, some suitcase bombs may be smuggled up to go for difficult targets.

 

To top it off, Spetnaz/KGB units may be infiltrated to destroy the BMEWS sites

 

With the weapons in place it's a question of tracking the US chain of command and go for a swift decapitation strike followed up by a massive counterforce strike aimed at missile fields and SSBN bases. Little could be done for the IR satellites, though the FOBS allow for EM pulses to disrupt comms over CONUS.

 

Simultaneous communiqués to the Yurropeans warning them of absolute destruction if they dare to intervene will at least make them pause. This leaves the SSBNs at sea untouched as well as the bombers, but with a proposal to negotiate in the air and the death of billions in the balance, the remaining chain of command in the US may pause and be ready to concede defeat... or not.

[RETAC21]

I dont know, whilst that strikes me as theoretically possible, you would have to have perfect planning, coordination and no mistakes. For example, being aware of what makes up a BMEWs site, it strikes me that they would be a bit more than your average Special forces team could put out of action. Damage temporarily, maybe. Any even if you did, whats to say America or Britain wouldnt interpret that as a potential attack, and fire first? You could minimise how much your hair got mussed, but I dont see the USSR walking away from a nuclear exchange in the mid 80s without major damage. it sure as hell couldnt be seen as a win. Survival, maybe.

 

Interesting story from my father. He joined a local TA unit in the early 60s, ostensibly an armoured car unit, which appears to have a number of roles. One of them was apparently going into and securing cities that had been destroyed by nuclear weapons. I recently put on a DVD of a BBC 'documentary' called 'The War Game', made in the late 60s. Whilst it played with a lot of the facts, much of it seemed plausible, particularly the bits where they shot looters and the army were seen stacking bodies in the cellars of houses and cremating them. Lets just say, it was a bit of a wakeup call for him.

 

As for myself, I can recall vividly in the early 80s having CND putting a leaflet through the door and showing what would have happened if someone had dropped a bomb on RAF Fairford. Even Gloucester 30 miles away would have had its doors and windows blown in. Somewhere around then I had a nightmare where I was at school and saw an atomic bomb explode (just like the opening sequence in Jericho) and I can still feel the heat of it on my cheek. Freaked me out for a bit, till my father pointed out that living less than 4 miles from a microwave comunications node (which had then unknown military applications) and less than 6 from a military airfield with a 10000 runway, it was highly likely we would have gone out with the first seconds of the attack.

 

I felt better after that.

 

Cozier I suppose.

 

Timing is a big problem here, but the Sovs wouldn't need to be subtle, you smuggle the suitcase bomb and park the van near the instalation and let it go off at a predetermined time, not as difficult, the IRA was able to pull it off in London.

 

It's also very risky, what if the surviving NCA decides to launch anyway? you can probably plan for that, leaving one of the "doves" as survivor. Remember also that at the time Europe was hostage to the huge numbers of SS-20s deployed, a point that could scarcely be missed, so the Soviets could neutralise NATO politically by scaring West Germany and France. Same would apply to Japan/South Korea.

[Ssnake]

Timing is a big problem here, but the Sovs wouldn't need to be subtle, you smuggle the suitcase bomb and park the van near the instalation and let it go off at a predetermined time, not as difficult, the IRA was able to pull it off in London.

Then again, C4 and other conventional explosives don't emit gamma radiation. Once that you get a hint that your nation might get infiltrated it's not impossible to check out at least some of the likely locations to verify or falsify the suspicion.

[ScottyB]

...provided our leaders would have been wise enough to prevent the mineshaft gap, which they didn't.

 

 

That was a funny, funny movie! Even if it would have been a horrible event in human history.

[ScottyB]

I remember a movie called "Threads" that was aired on a local PBS station in Washington, D.C. before I went into the Navy. It was a pretty frightening film, of course leave it to the Brits to get it right. "The Day After" was a bad disaster movie in comparison. I suppose it wouldn't have mattered before I went into the Navy, the whole DC area would have been gone and after I got to my first ship in '87 had we been inport I think my atoms would have been floating above the giant hole in the ground that would have been the Tidewater area in Virginia. If we were at sea I would like to think the Navy would have fought, maybe to the death, whoever attacked the US. Going up to Murmansk to bombard the place with 5"? Probably not. On another note, I saw something on a end of the world show on History Channel saying something really low, like 20 nuclear explosions, would be enough to end life on Earth. Dosn't seem like a lot to me but they have the computers to model the scenario so who knows maybe they are right.

 

Scott

[Gunguy]

The massive radiation that would circle the globe would make life very unfun. It might almost end human life in most countries except for those that are living like the 1700's, some remote areas in China maybe? Don't forget all fuel is going to go quickly, all food pretty quick, disease will be rampant due to reduced immune systems, no real communications. Life would be very harsh and then you might die soon after that. If you didn't get farming going fast and grab a good fishing spot, you would starve. Medical care? non-existant. It would be very, very bad to have to live like farmer in the 1700's or even much earlier. Not fun at all. I guess you could fantasize about McDonalds! Now, if you could get to South America or India/China, you might be able to live a halfway decent life, but those countries would not have a lot available for a large influx of people.

[mnm]

The massive radiation that would circle the globe would make life very unfun. It might almost end human life in most countries except for those that are living like the 1700's, some remote areas in China maybe?

 

Not only human life, other animals would die too, so no chickens, cows, pigs, etc. Expect a a diet of contaminated salad.

[DougRichards]

Curious about countries like Brazil...I don't believe that they were targets for nuclear weapons, wouldn't they within a couple of decades become leaders of the world?

Or imagine, a New Zealand lead renaissance?

[Jim Martin]

Southern Hemisphere likely would have made out okay. Expect MidEast to go up in conventional conflict, most likely even nastier and more existential than has ever been the case. Without the restraint of the superpowers and no "world opinion" to worry about, Arabs and Israelis would have fought a horrifically barbaric war. Who wins? If the Israelis' ammo supply can hold out...

 

 

Expect to see Latin America come out dominant. A Brazilian "superpower"? Again, possible armed conflicts without restraining influence of international organizations, and scrambling over the bones of the old world.