How does the time-traveling USS Nimitz change the Cold War?

Great Debates
1

Based on the movie The Final Countdown, of course, and inspired by Boyo Jim, who asked in post 76 of the aforementioned thread:

“…if these guys from the future [the *Nimitz *crew] become powers behind the throne in the West, or at least very respected advisors, what happens to the Cold War after the hot one. Does it play out relatively unchanged because no one can think of better options? Or is there some game changers there too? For instance, we would know just how weak the Soviet nuclear arsenal really was, so maybe we could push them much harder than we did. Maybe we would even preemptively strike at Soviet nuclear facilities, to take them off the superpower list. Maybe this question is worth a thread of its own.”

So here’s that very thread.

I think we can all agree the Allies win WWII much more quickly than they did in our timeline. But what about the Cold War (if there was one), and after? What would happen? And what, if you were, say, FDR (or Truman, Churchill or Stalin) should happen?

2

It plays out relatively unchanged. There were lots of Essex-class aircraft carriers, most of which were modified well beyond original design specifications. What change could one aircraft carrier hope to effect when there were already 20 of them? The only way it might matter is if the advanced aircraft came with it, and even then the F-4 and A-6 had the Soviets pretty well covered conventionally, and the rest of the Nuclear Triad had that part of it covered as well.

The Nimitz and other carriers in its class are nothing more than large aircraft carriers with unusual propulsion. There’s no magic there. That’s not to mention that they were in service during the Cold War and it still took more than 20 years to end.

3

Jump back in time, what, 40 years?

You could do a lot of good… Give warning of such things as Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina, and the Japanese and Malaysian tsunamis.

You could tell the President what does and doesn’t work. (And…you could tell the President how the next election goes… He might want to make changes to that even more than to the course of the Cold War!) You could tell Reagan that the SDI idea is a bust. (Would he listen?)

The most useful thing you could do is talk about the future of science. There have been a lot of discoveries in the last 40 years, and if the scientists of 1973 simply knew about them as abstract ideas, it could shave off decades of R&D time.

(This, of course, causes a galoptuous time paradox, but, hey, who cares… I’m gonna invest in Microsoft and Apple anyway!)

But simply giving Richard Nixon advanced weapons systems? I don’t think it would turn the tide in the Vietnam war. So why bother?

4

The manhattan project changes, and with it, depending on how far along the russians were, it might push their aquistion of nukes back from 1947 to an unknown future time. The entire soviet intelligence network in North America and England is now compromised.

In the real world, time alters at the point of that ship and its crew being known and accepted for what they are. Germany and Russia will very likely accept diplomatic terms for the end of the war, this should be read as pull back to the starting lines, and await further development before starting up again.

I think we would see multliple civil wars breaking out, all over Europe, England has issues with India, if that comes out that the Indians were granted independence, a decade hence. Same with Israel, all though that would probably be a snakes nest of how the borders were drawn, and how events turned out.

Asia and South America, I dont have any guesses as to how the ramifications hit them.

Some people might make a case for scuttling the Nimitz near Antartica and try to keep history on the historical track.

Declan

5

My WAG is no carrier force could have affected the CW. The CW was mainly peace-time stand-offs between the USSR and the US and its allies, or proxy shooting wars in souteast Asia, Africa, middle east, and latin America.

6

Agreed. Hopefully we can avoid the whole witch hunt and concentrate on actual spies.

I’m curious as to why you see this happening. I would assume that the US would not be interested in allowing Hitler to remain in power. I think the US would be more interested in defeating the Nazis and redrawing the maps so that fewer countries are part of the Soviet influence.

What would drive the civil wars in Europe?

I’ve got a longer answer which I hope to post later.

7

The computers aboard the Nimitz would be more world-changing in 1965 (or even 1975) than the planes.

8

So, the Nimitz from today travels back to sometime during the cold war? I’d say it would be pretty earth shattering, even if we are talking about it traveling back to the 80’s. I agree with Bryan…it would be the computers more than the weapons. Hell, the crew itself would be a valuable resource alone. The crews stuff (iPods, smart phones, laptops, desktops, etc) would be equally valuable resources. The networks on the ship alone would be unbelievable insights to, say, 1970’s or even 1980’s America. And the planes and weapons systems would also be pretty valuable, especially the tech manuals and library.

I don’t know if the Cold War would be over quicker than it was, but certainly the technology alone would give the US a very valuable edge, especially wrt technology. Invariably it would all be classified, but unless they locked down the crew it would be a huge insight into what worked and what didn’t work, and the direction technology could take. Just the crews insights into things like the world wide web, coupled with the networks, servers and systems on the ship (and examples of things like IP and HTML, along with even prosaic stuff like Windows OS, Mac OS, etc) would be huge boosts. Imagine what it would do for Microsoft or Apple to see where their products would be going decades later…or Intel/Motorola to be given chip examples of technology from today back when they were just getting started.

Then there is all the history (I would assume this would be an alternative time line, but it would still be valuable insights into how things went in our universe), all the medical knowledge, the reference libraries and tech manuals…it would all be a huge treasure trove of knowledge and insights.

Not sure I’m understanding this part. If I’m FDR and such a ship arrives I’d immediately classify it and lock down the crew for a long debriefing, and put the lot of them and all their interesting equipment somewhere in as remote a place as I could. Then I’d assemble experts in every field I could think of, from industry and the military to pour over every aspect of the ship, it’s crew and all the stuff they have with them. I certainly wouldn’t use the ship in battle. About the only thing you might be able to do is use some of the tech manuals and maybe stuff in the library or that the crew has to jump start or vector research into, oh, say jets and jet design (imagine this is 1941 and you have pictures of and maybe details of things like the F-86 Saber…something that COULD be built in a fairly short time frame with the right insights), or even just historical information (like, hey, try putting those big ass Merlin engines the Brits have into that underpowered Mustang air frame!) on what worked well and what to focus on (maybe we should put a bigger gun on those Shermans, and perhaps a tad more frontal armor? Just a thought). There were a lot of things that the US could have focused on better with hindsight, and I’m betting there are at least a few WWII buffs on a ship the size of the Nimitz at any given time. Maybe someone who has detailed knowledge of building an AK-47, for instance…which, again, is something that COULD be built easily enough in '41 with the right insights.

9

Even though the Nimitz time traveled back to 1941, it’s supply chain didn’t. Presuming it and some of it’s aircraft survived the encounter with the IJN Pearl Harbor attack fleet, they’re going to be out of ammunition that not going to be replaced any time soon. Is there a gun in an f/a-18 and what does it shoot? 30mm? And aircraft constantly need replacement parts. There aren’t going to be any. In an era of vacuum tube technology, someone’s going to reverse engineer an intel z-80 or motorola 6800, let alone what’s in current aircraft?

Yes, it could inspire a lot of stuff and kickstart some modern technology, but I don’t think it’ll be all that much of a game changer. But yeah, I could be wrong.

10

Start with Germany, the big question really is if they actually declare war on the states, like they did in history. If they dont, then FDR has to aquire leverage to go to war in some way. But if the average German gets information on what happened, the casualty counts, the final solution, etc. Its possible that Valkyrie gets pushed up several years, but with different conspirators. We know what he did, but the average guy in pre WW2 might find it a bit fantastical.

As for the civil wars I am thinking Greece, Yugoslavia and perhaps the Ukraine. Releasing what happened at Katyn forest might be good for a spark. There still may very well be a cold war, but instead of the soviet union, it might be germany or japan that fufills that niche.

I see a jump to an all jet airforce within five years, and about ten for naval aviation. This would have been the beginning of the conflict, and not 1945, so about 7 carriers and I dont see them being modified for Jets in wing strength. Mind you, go with an all A-4 carrier wing, and the more modern carriers I could see going all jet.

No war means no huge bomber force, in the quantities that 7th air force had, I would dedicate those engines to the early model c-130 that came out in the late fifties in our timeline. If it does come to blows with Germany, the U-boat fleet has a life expectancy of hours, from alpha strikes on the pens, and an anti sub version of the c-130 changing the definition of happy times.

Declan

11

Well, you don’t have to reverse-engineer it. Any laptop aboard the Nimitz, all by itself, has several orders of magnitude more computing power than the entire world of 1945 or even 1965. How valuable would it be to an engineering firm trying to design a bridge just as a time saver? To a bank? To any record-keeping organization? To the U.S. government itself?

Heck, a guy with a laptop that can run Excel could become the financial center of the country, just by virtue of how easily and accurately he could keep track of things.

12

Is this the circa-1980 USS Nimitz and crew of the film Final Countdown or the current-day ship and crew (most responses seem to be assuming the latter, but that’s not clear from the scenario presented…)? Not only would the technology of the ship, planes and personal technology be vastly different*, but there would also be the whole matter of the 1980 crew not having seen how the actual Cold War played out.

And while, as other posters have noted, the presence of either Nimitz on the course of WWII would be so drastic as to render much of that CW historical knowledge useless in a direct sense, a canny Nimitz officer with a good sense of how pre-WWII history actually affected the real world could really make an impact in politics and policy (and not necessarily for the better, either!). Knowing how much and in what ways the aftermath of French and British colonialism affected the Middle East and SE Asia decades later, for instance, would be powerful knowledge completely independent of the events of post-war US/USSR/Europe/Japan.

*-“a guy with a laptop that can run Excel” could possibly become the financial center of the country, per Bryan Ekers, but “a guy who once saw a demo of VisiCalc on an Apple II” would have much less direct potential influence!

13

Good point. Let’s say the Nimitz moves back in time around 40 years, either from 1980 to just before American involvement in WW2, or from now to 1973. I expect either way it’s like the sudden appearance of a technological Atlantis.

Heh, I actually remember the first time I saw VisiCalc demonstrated, though it was on an IBM-PC (and started at around 17:30 here).

14

Uh oh, this is what we call the blue screen of death, Q1 FY 42 just got wiped out.

Declan

15

Just to be clear, the OP is about the supercarrier USS Nimitz going back in time from 1980 (when The Final Countdown was released) to early December 1941, just as in the movie, and its impact on WWII and the Cold War.

The knowledge of Soviet 1940s capabilities and espionage efforts that the Nimitz crew and its library would offer would be of incalculable value to FDR and the U.S. government. Later in the war, the real FDR thought he could charm “Uncle Joe” Stalin and maintain good relations. If shown evidence of how terrible Stalin really was, and how determined the Soviet leader was to get Manhattan Project data, though, I expect FDR would shift policy to take a tougher line with the Soviets, catch their spies and keep the USSR from acquiring nuclear weapons, or at least severely delay their acquisition. The Red Scare, with the benefit of hindsight, could be much less severe.

The technological boost to the U.S. military would obviously be immense. Radar, sonar, jets and the early, fully-realized need to fix U.S. torpedoes (very unreliable at the time) would be game-changers. No reason all of that couldn’t be shared with the British - of course, by late 1941 the changes of a Nazi invasion were slight. Intel on Hitler’s forces would be very useful, but other than the use of nuclear weapons, forcing him out of Western Europe and then out of power would still be very costly in lives and money, I suspect.

The Japanese navy could be decimated by a Nimitz-led battlegroup, and a surrender forced by either nuclear weapons use on Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki, as in our timeline, or (less likely) a demonstration detonation on some isolated island, as Truman’s Interim Committee actually considered.

The more time passed, the more history would be diverted from its known 1941-1980 timeline, but it seems to me an early and much less costly Allied victory in WWII, and averting the Cold War (perhaps even bringing about a much earlier downfall of the Soviet Union) would be eminently possible.

16

There are at least two wholly separate issues here. One is the technology. They have examples of future technology and they have hundreds of technically skilled people who know how to maintain it and repair it.

The Nimitz probably doesn’t have people who are specialists in materials creation/design. That is, there will be lots of stuff that can’t be replicated because the materials to build them don’t exist in the 40s. I’m not expert enough in the science to say how quickly those materials could be developed given actual working examples for examination. Some things, like for example guided missiles, were already in the concept stage early in the war, and while they may not have been able to build a replica Tomahawk or a replica Harpoon, they could probably develop a reasonably effective similar weapon (bigger, slower, shorter-ranged) that would be very useful.

Aside from the technology, there is an issue of the individual Nimitz crew members and their knowledge of history. That would be a crapshoot. Elendil’s Heir made this comment:

That’s one possibility that might be true. But what if none of the crew happen to know the names of the specific Soviet spies? Ok, maybe they know the Rosenbergs, but they don’t remember the names of all the others who stole nuclear secrets. Hell, the only name I remember for sure is Klaus Fuchs, and I’ve read books on the subject.

My point is that the crew can say definitively that there WERE in fact active Soviet spies in government, but may or may not be able to ID them. That could end up making the Red Scare even worse, because no one on either side will want to step back from spy hunting when the benefactors from the future assure them the spies are real, just not as many as people thought.

It’s this kind of stuff that maybe would have led to a Nixon victory over Kennedy in 1960. Or to J Edgar Hoover building a more powerful and intrusive FBI than we can even imagine.

So I am not one to think that this gift from the future would be all rose petals and sunshine, because the knowledge of how the future plays out will be incomplete at best, and maybe even wrong in many cases. And of course we have to assume that changing the course of events based on this knowledge will make history diverge ever further from what we know of it. Perhaps we get all the nuclear spies, pat ourselves on the back and move on. Well, maybe the Soviets mount a new aggressive campaign to replace the spies they lost, a campaign that didn’t happen in the past the Nimitz crew was familiar with.

I think an event like this will be subject to some law of diminishing returns. The more knowledge they have and the more they bend the shape of government, the military and society to deal with it, the more history diverges what what they knew and the less relevant their knowledge becomes.

If they (Roosevelt and Churchill) want these guy to be the most powerful weapon that can be, they’d have to treat them like the Ultra secret. No one but a very small circle knows where the information comes from, and the information is acted in indirectly, with plausible reasons developed as to how it might have happened without access to the enemy’s plans and intentions.

But if you make Nimitz the flagship of the fleet and send it storming all over the world to destroy our enemies in combat, that’s not gonna happen.

17

Both jet engines and airframe design were known at least in the later thirties, an english jet was the first to fly. It is the avionics that is the weak sister of what could be leap frogged in terms of technology

Kim Philby ? I’m sure you have heard of him. He had nothing to do with Nuclear secrets, but only a few need to be reeled in. As well, the Nimitz probably has a really good library

Its a democracy . we gotta trust the people.

I think J Edgar had more than enough time , and not enough over sight to build his empire, if it was not larger than it was, it was not for lack of trying. As well, by 1960, neither Nixon or Kennedy will have served, time has diverged too much by this point, to assume the same players will be around.

I think five years after the fork is about as long as your going to get, before events start to diverge. Some things should stay the same, as in our time, someone mentioned Hurricanes up thread.

Thats fine, I can live with Vietnam never happening, having FBI agents crawling over the grassy knowle, perhaps medical advances that the ships pharmacy and sick bay contain. Knowledge of hazardous materials and the like.

Wont happen, unless there is some uk exchange officer with the ship, they are all American citizens , sooner or later the crew is going to want liberty.

Its awacs planes can fly off existing carriers, there is no place for the japanese fleet to hide, they no longer have secure codes, the find and fix part of the equation will run the Japanese to the ground, while existing fleet elements will destroy them. Its laser guided bombs can decapitate existing govts, as their bolt holes are now historical fact.

WW 2 does not happen as it did historically.

Declan

18

I disagree. It’s not the Nimitz which is so important, it’s the knowledge from the future; knowing before hand what is going to work, what won’t, who are your good and your bad generals and admirals.

Knowing with certainty on December 7, 1941 that your torpedoes sucked could have them fixed in months rather than taking until the summer of 1943 to straighten out just one of the many problems it suffered.

Likewise, understanding that some of your strategies were dismal failures could have produced enormous changes. One obvious example would be the Second Happy Time, in January through August of 142, when the German submarines sank over 3 million tons with little risk to themselves, as the US was disorganized and distracted by the war in the Pacific. That amount is equal to 60% of the total amount which US sank again against the Japanese.

There would be the strategic knowledge, knowing that for the Japanese, you cut their oil and they are finished. While the US finally were able to achieve this in the historic war, it took several years before the US was able to sever their oil, where “future knowledge” would allow you to target this commodity much quicker.
The other thread was more restrictive, in that the Nimitz appeared in the flight path of the Japanese planes. With a Final Countdown moment where they would arrive soon enough to plan a counter attack, the *Nimitz *would be able to sink the Kido Butai the six carriers and support ships sent to attack Pearl Harbor.

My WAG is that the war in the Pacific would last at most two years, if not less, with the same result of the total destruction of Japan and a their military completely defeated. I agree with others that it wouldn’t magically end the war in Europe, but I think it would end it much sooner.

Here is my comments from the tread in question.

You look at what went right and wrong after the war. You want to make sure that you still turn Germany and Japan into democracies and allies of the US. The goal would be to try to keep as much territory post war in democracies hands and less under the influence of the Soviets.

Roosevelt would be wise to consider a different tack in China. Perhaps find a way to keep the Communists from taking over. But then you are stuck with a corrupt ally.

I think that life is messy and even though you could avoid the exact problems which occurred historically, others would appear. People thought that post-Cold War, there would be more peace, but the type of conflict changed, it didn’t go away.