Seggybop wrote:I always thought before that if the war between the USA and Soviet Union had taken place, we would have shot several thousand missiles at eachother and it would be for the most part finished after an hour, with both sides destroyed utterly.
But in a recent thread concerning a war like this, someone said that the idea of MAD was BS. It was also said that there would still be large armies moving across the land and fighting as in WW2.
So how would it go? This is assuming it takes place at whenever the height of destructive ability for both sides was.
Right now I imagine hundreds of ICBMs going back and forth over a period of a few hours and then slowing to a light rain of missiles, while huge NATO and Soviet armies fight in Europe, the sky darkens from dust clouds, with tac nukes going off in the background constantly. How far off is that?
There might two plausible scenarios for a direct conflict:
1. Escalation of a regional conflict not involving the major powers until they are drawn in.
2. Misinterpetation of non-hostile action as hostile, and retaliatory response to that action.
This only really applies from the late sixties onwards. Before then the USA could win a nuclear conflict with the USSR before the USSR's arsenal was incapable of inflicting major harm on the USA.
At that point we could, for instance, have an escalation of the Vietnam War, with China being drawn in. As U.S. forces are flung back, nukes are used to save the situation and a general conflict develops with the USSR drawn in. That's just one possibility with a regional conflict scenario.
The Soviets would begin to advance across Europe, easily rolling across all opposition until we started using nuclear devices to slow their advance. The Soviets, of course, would also use them to counter that offensive. World War Three would indeed "be fought to the last German."
As the war became more developed, strategic attacks would be launched to disable the support mechanisms for the armies in Europe. By necessity these would involve the use of nuclear weapons. Now the command on both side would be faced with the prospect of losing their own arsenals to nuclear attack, or using them. They would use them.
All of this would develop relatively quickly.
Nuclear attacks with missiles and bombers would be carried out with counter-force strikes (at the enemy's nuclear arsenal), at military targets, and at industrial targets, the later two of which would involve most of the civilian collateral damage--however, ground-burst strikes on hardened nuclear missile silos would produce the most radiation, as opposed to the large number of airbursts used elsewhere, and many of these silos are located in food-producing areas. Famine would be inevitable for the survivors.
The armies in Europe would continue to fight as long as they had supplies, supported with all available tactical nuclear weaponry and quite capable of fighting in NBC enviroments. They would be motivated by the damage done by the enemy to their homelands and their families, and one expects that the combat would be very savage. It's impossible to say if either side would make significant gains, or even if, supposing there was a victor in Europe, that victor could exert even a marginal sort of control over the surviving European populace, which would certainly be the hardest-hit in the world.
On the strategic level, warfare would go on until the nuclear arsenals were exhausted. This would take weeks for the bomb arsenals and--counting submarines, perhaps years for missiles. The goal would be to smack down the enemy so far that he would take longer to recover than you would. To this end, the Soviets built up their nuclear arsenal much further than we did in the 70s (not applicable for this vague scenario but certainly in general to such scenarios)--their goal in doing so was to use the excess nuclear weapons to target vital centres
in every single country in the world (even Soviet bloc states, reputedly), so that nobody would be able to become an instant superpower by virtue of the annihilation of modern civilization in most of the northern hemisphere.
In general, the remaining technology would be around that of the 18th century, perhaps with some pockets of 19th century industrial technology in places. Recovery time varies upon damage and intact infrastructure. Casualties are broadly around 30% of the world population. "Victory" as such on the global level goes to whichever side recovers first.
