Yet another speculative scenerio (can you tell I love these?). Let’s say that somehow some great cosmic burp throws two nations from alternate realities against one another. One is equivalent to the United States circa 1945, including the ability to produce at least a trickle supply of 15 kiloton atom bombs. The other is equivalent to the United States circa 2008, only somehow nuclear weapons were never developed in their world. How do you see this shaking out?
We’d press a button and they’d be bombed to the stone ages before the B-52s ever got near our shore, and our jets would make swiss cheese of those bombers at about the same time.
2008 would win.
Not even close. 2008 wins…
First question: Is sea combat going to matter? If it is, things could get pretty weird.
The surface fleet of the 1945 power would probably be able to wipe the map with the 2008 power. If the 1945 power can bring the 2008 power to battle. 16"/50 guns would be something the modern fleet could not combat if they ever got ranged by them. And while individually, the naval air arm of the 1945 power would be grossly outmatched by the individual aircraft of the 2008 fleet, the numbers that the 1945 power could put into the air would do some devastating things to the 2008 fleet, and fleet air arm. I would have to be convinced that the heat-seaking missiles standard to modern aircraft would be able to target the prop jobs of the 1945 fleet air arm.
And, too, the AAW defense of the modern fleet could be saturated - An Arleigh Burke class DDG has an onboard missile load out of some 90 missiles, I think. Split between SAMs, Tomohawks, and ASROCs. I’m also skeptical of the ability of standard missiles of 2008 to actually counter the armor belts of 1945 combatants. Engineering a missile that can defeat that would be possible, but since no one (Not even the Russians) have any ships with an armor belt left in service, why bother? And in the time it takes to develop that missile, if the 1945 surface fleet catches the 2008 fleet in a battle, there go your launchers.
The joker in the deck for the 1945 fleet is that, honestly, I don’t think they have any ASW capability against modern subs. It would be a target fleet. But submarines aren’t all that good at protecting shipping from other threats - like, say, air attacks from land based aircraft.
So if there’s any naval component to this battle, I think things would bog down to a blood bath with both sides able to sink the other’s shipping, but unable to protect their own. With all the problems that would cause for actually pressing any kind of land campaign to a successful conclusion.
- How would a 1945 era military deliver the bombs, their bombers would get shot out of the sky as soon as they tried to take off (or blown up in their hangers) and so their nuclear advantage wouldn’t mean anything.
Simplicio - here’s one suggestion for you to consider*: 1945 has many, many more people under arms. Build up a conventional fortress, inviting an attack from the enemy. Make it a credible threat, too - with enough forces supplied and ready to go that the 2008 force cannot ignore the build up. Then when the fortress is hammered, when the 2008 forces are driving forward in triumph, all bunched up - then have your nuclear mines go off along the front.
*stolen lock, stock and barrel, from Harry Turtledove’s WorldWar books.
ETA: This would be especially devastating if it were the first use of nukes, so until then the 2008 forces had no idea they were possible.
Big if. Those guns have a range of what, 20 or 25 miles? And a Harpoon has a range of what, 75, 100 miles? Add to that the extreme superiority the modern navy has in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and there’s just no fight to be had.
Looking on Wikipedia, a Harpoon has nearly a 500 lb warhead. Since modern ASM missiles all have a pop-up attack mode, there’s just no way the armor plate of a battleship would defend against a modern missile. Besides, how many battleships were sunk at Pearl Harbor by 500 lb bombs?
Besides that, modern torpedoes wouldn’t be bothered by armor plate. Just set em to blow up under the keel. Half a ton of explosives right underneath a ship – who cares about armor plate?
If 2008 doesn’t have nuclear weapons, do they still have nuclear-propelled carriers and subs? I’m not that impressed by the abilities of North Carolina-class batleship if a Virginia-class sub (which can easily match its speed while submerged) can blow it away from 20 miles out with a mark 48 torp.
The only major advantage the guys from 1945 have is the nukes.
If the 2008 guys have 2008 satellites, 2008 eavesdropping and 2008 intel, a single squadron of B-52s takes out the Pentagon, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and any runway capable of launching a B29 in a single afternoon.
Even with overwhelming numbers, the rest would be embarrassing. An F-18 has 9 hardpoints. With a single radar guided missile on each one that’s 9 pretty much guaranteed kills. A P-51 couldn’t shoot back.
If an M1A was jumped by 10 Sherman tanks at point blank range, the Shermans last maybe two minutes. The Abrams might need a new paint job.
The naval battle is probably worse. Two or three cruise missiles would rip right through the wooden decks of a 1945 carrier of the USN. With no aircraft cover, it’s a training exercise for the 2008 guys.
Just being able to look at the satellite and figure out where the enemy is and communicate that to the fleet in real time has got to be worth quite a bit. The 2008 fleet is going to be able to pick when and where they want the battle to take place.
Marc
According to Wikipedia the 16"/50 Mk 7 gun had a range of about 20 NM.
I did say that getting into range would be a problem.
At Pearl Harbor, the most effective 550 lb was the one that hit Arizona between turrets #1 and #2. And there’s reason to believe that the problem was secondary explosions from poor powder controls, which wouldn’t be so effective against the experienced 1945 force. Most of the battlewagons at Pearl were sunk by torpedos, I’d always thought. Oklahoma was sunk by torpedos. Maryland wasn’t even sunk, though she was battered in the attack, and unable to move because of the other ships sunk around her. (Including Oklahoma. Wikipedia is a little confusing regarding California. The entry about the ship says she took bomb damage, but the general article on the attack says that she took bomb and torpedo hits, and sank only after her crew was ordered to abandon her. I don’t recall from my researches into Nevada’s story what more authoritative sources say. There’s certainly room, I think, to suggest that California, like Arizona can’t be considered to be representative of how a battleship during a state of war would deal with 500 pound explosive charges. Tennesee was only attacked by bombs, and was relatively unscathed by the attack. One main turret was silenced, but she kept fighting through the raid. Her biggest fear was the oil fire from Arizona. *West Virginia* was sunk by the effects of torpedos and counter-flooding to keep her from capsizing like Oklahoma. Certainly none of the bomb damage done to Nevada was enough to silence her, though she was sunk. (I can’t find a cite at the moment, but I think the sinking was due to the effects of torpedos, not bombs.)
I don’t think you can point to Pearl Harbor as proof that single 500 lb bombs would be able to sink or even take out of action a prepared battlewagon. Again, going from my remembered quals for Surface Warfare, one reason that Long Beach was kept in commission for so long, even though her combat systems were generally considered to be so outdated was that her armor belt gave her a level of protection against Harpoons or Exocets that couldn’t be matched by anything else in the fleet. For that matter - no one expected Harpoon or Exocet attacks to do much besides annoy a Kirov-class battlecruiser.
You do raise a good point about the improved command, control and reconnaissance that more modern ships would have. Esp. if that’s being provided by a modern carrier. OTOH, the 1945 fleet would have the numbers that they might be able to overcome, again, the individual superiority of the modern fleet. Return to the old idea of radar picket subs, and things don’t look nearly as bleak, I don’t think.
Which is why I said that modern subs would have fun with their new targets. I just don’t think that modern surface combat would be as one-sided as you suggest.
ETA: I’d still bet on the 2008 force. I just think it could end up bloodier than some people are suggesting. (And part of it is I’m just being contrarian, because I like the older ships, too.)
To me it seems the critical question is whether or not the 1945 forces would be able to successfully deliver nukes with consistency. Unlikely, of course, but if they could 1945 would win for sure.
I say this because IMHO victory comes when one force can remove the other’s ability or will to fight. So, no matter how powerful the 2008 forces, if the 1945 forces could get nukes through consistently where the 2008 forces were losing, say, 100,000 civilians per day on average, the 2008 society wouldn’t be able to tolerate such massive losses and would surely surrender Imperial Japan-style.
A kinda-similar earlier thread; there’s discussion of nuke use farther down: "The Final Countdown": Tomcats vs. Zeros - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
Not to be Captian Bringdown, but IMO some clarification is necessary to really come up with good answers here. Do the two powers have adjoining borders, or do they have to project force great distances? Are they invading each others’ territories or trading strikes by air and sea? Does the 2008 force still get to use nuclear propulsion for naval vessels? Are nclear weapons introduced early in the conflict or after the combatants have slugged it out with conventional weapons for years? The answers to all these would have significant impact on the scenario.
In very general terms, it would seem the 2008 force has it all over the one using 1945 tech in pitched battles, no matter how one slices it. The land, sea and air forces all would have weapons with far superior precision to those of their opponents, and large numbers of area denial weapons which would play havoc with any ground-based counterattacks by the 1945 forces. Lastly, the 2008 force presumably would have low-observable aircraft, which would be able to carry out precision strikes at night that the 1945 force probably wouldn’t even be able to detect at all prior to the payloads hitting their targets.
Nevertheless, both the US/Vietnan and US/Iraq conflicts have shown that defeating a technologically inferior foe and occupying their territory without poltically unacceptable losses, when they really don’t want the occupiers to be there, are two different things.
I agree that the ability to deliver multiple nuclear strikes would be important, but I’m not sure that alone would be enough to end the conflict in the 1945 side’s favor.
Delivery of nukes by the 1945-era force via piston-engined heavy bombers, flying at maybe 20-30,000 feet, would make them sitting ducks for missile-equipped fast jets or SAMs. V2-type rockets might be an option, but I’m not sure they’d have the payload capacity to deliver a 1945-era nuke a useable distance. The only ways around this I could see would be embedding the nuke carriers in a mass formation of bombers and hoping they get through, or the 2008 force discounting the very first nuclear strike as an apparent reconnaisance mission not worth attacking in force until it was too late to mount a defense, as apparently was the case in the Hiroshima bombing.
Another factor, as mentioned previously, would be at what point in the conflict nukes were introduced. Devastating as two or three nuclear strikes on major cities might be, if these occurred early in the conflict, before war-weariness set in, the 2008 force would probably still have the political will to mount a conventional counterattack aimed at taking out the 1945 powers’ nuclear infrastructure and thereby prevent further use of its already nearly expended nuclear stocks. I’m not saying the 2008 power wouldn’t get its hair mussed, but it could carry on with only two or three of its cities destroyed and a reasonable expectation that its opponent would have great difficulty destroying more.
Sorry for the length; I’ll sit back and follow the rest of the discussion without further comment.
99% of the Atom Bomb Crowd’s (A.B.C) airplanes are prop aircraft.
No contest there.
The No Bomb Crowd (N.B.C.) has Stealth, laser-guided weapons, Hyperbaric Weapons Tech, & air-to-air missiles.
As for ground forces, ABC would be mostly armed with semiautomatic rifles, at the platoon level. NBC–full auto, plus under-rifle grenadle launchers, plus LAW rockets, plus anti-tank missiles.
And don’t forget–body armor!
If things got really hairy for NBC–break out the chemical or bio. Genetic engineering guarantees better bioagents.
But plain old superior C3 probably guarantees NBC the victory.
Just a bit. Assuming they had operational AWACS infrastructure (never mind satellites) team 2008 would know the exactly location of every single enemy naval asset within a few hundred miles, and would just be able to manouevre away from them.
I would have thought the main armour is pretty much irrelevant against real precision weapons which can effectively guarantee ‘Golden BB’ hits within a short timeframe. Hit the fire directors and the rudder/prop assembly and the battlewagon isn’t going anywhere or doing much for a while.
I would have thought a single F15E or equivalent loaded with laser-guided bombs or missiles would certainly cripple and probably sink an Iowa-class ship with little difficulty. Even a helicopter with Hellfires or equivalent would mess it it up good.
Whether a modern surface combatant with a computer-controlled 5" gun and missiles could blind/cripple a BB is a different matter. But even a matchup like that isn’t totally one-sided, since a gun that could fire at a high rate while manouevring at speed and still guarantee a hit, using modern ammo, would be outside the experience of the ‘oldies’.
Good questions![ul][li]The 2008 force does have nuclear-propelled vessels: in their timeline, nuclear energy was discovered but for some reason (evil gremlins?) every time they tried to build an atomic bomb they got a miserable .05 kiloton fizzle. They dismissed the atomic bomb as unworkable but did develop reactors. []The 1945 side has enough enriched uranium and plutonium stockpiled for about 20-30 bombs. The bombs are available from the start of the conflict.[]Like the US in 1945 and in 2008, the primitive force has the sort of mass conventional army typical of WW2 while the advanced force has a smaller number of professional warriors dedicated to the air, naval and land arms typical of today’s military. [*]You’re right that the strategic situation makes a huge difference. Since the whole point of the thought experiment is to allow the 1945 side the chance to use nukes, then the war is a strategic one in which long-term industrial production is an important factor. I had difficulty thinking of a proper geographic setting for the conflct, since I had strategic bombing, naval AND land warfare in mind. Exactly why they’re fighting might make a difference as well. [/ul]Ok, let’s try this: faux-1945 and ersatz-2008 find their entire countries transplanted whole onto yet a third alternate version of the planet they come from, one otherwise empty of human life. Faux-1945 is like 1945 America only worse: religiously fundamentalist, morally straightlaced and not a little racially bigoted. Ersatz-2008 is like 2008 America only more so: the ethnic group that is a scorned underclass in faux-1945 is middle class and holds important positions of power in ersatz-2008. Ersatz-2008 is a second Babylon by faux-1945 standards. Gay marriage is the least of it: polygamy, consentual incest, pretty much anything that consenting people agree to goes. The two powers hold their respective continental homelands which are connected in the far north by a sparsely inhabited isthmus. The ocean between them is about Atlantic width, with some intermediate islands that could serve as bases.[/li]
Once the shock of the Big Shift settles down, the two nations start interacting and relations start to get chilly. since both sides regard the other’s social mores as repugnant. Mere dislike escalates into open hostility as the two powers start to make claims to the unihabited territory of their new homeworld. The ersatz-2008 power is much more heavily dependent on imported raw materials, and so it can’t let the matter sit- it HAS to have vital materials and so starts planting the flag all over the globe. Faux-1945 objects in increasingly vitriolic fashion. Interesting times occur.
You might want to check out Weapons of Choice. It’s a science fiction novel about a naval task force from 2020 that accidentally gets sent back in time to the battle of Midway. The author does a pretty good job of explaining the mechanics of the wholesale slaughter that ensues.
The remaining two books in the trilogy are great as well, BTW. They chart the course of the rest of the war and describe the culture shock that occurs when you dump several thousand twenty-first century Americans into the world of 1942.
Until Ersatz-2008 erase every ship and aircraft possessed by faux-1945 (timeline - about two weeks max), then moves on to sever all land lines of communication between the faux-45 homeland and its dispersed territories (timeline, four weeks, max). After that, ersatz-2008 can pick its own timescales for methodically hacking apart the infrastructure of the faux-45 homeland while concentrating its forces to systematically overpower the dispersed territories one by one.
I can’t see nukes making a big difference to this scenario, unless the faux-45s manage to pull off something crazy like smuggling nukes into most of the major industrial centres of the ersatz-08s and letting them off in a pre-emptive strike, or some sort of combined 9/11-pearl harbour scenario, or utter ineptitude on the part of the ersatz-08 military.
Anyone using widespread nuclear power is going to notice very quickly that the Laws Of Physics are behaving differently, and will figure out that nuclear WMDs are a possibility before things kick off[li]. The setup you posit plays directly to the strengths of the more advanced side - they will spot any large force deployment towards their home territory very fast, and can cut it apart before it becomes a threat. If they were cheek by jowl and the faux-45s could just roll a big wave of conventional/nuclear forces over the border, they might have a chance to overwhelm the more advanced nation, but I can’t see them having much of a chance in your scenario. [/li]If it were to all kick off instantly with no leadup, the faux-45s would have a very good chance, but mainly because the ersatz-08s would find things tricky suddenly arriving in a world bereft of the oil wells, uranium mines, aluminium smelters and so on that used to supply their high-tech economy. But few years lead-in would give the ersatz-08s time to build out the resource supply infrastructure, stockpile materials, and adjust their forces for dealing with a lower-tech opponent. Then they could claim the planet whenever they wanted.
** - Given a sufficiently long time for relations to deteriorate to the point of war (2-3 years?) it’s entirely possible that ersatz-08 would have more nukes fielded than the faux-45s. A nuclear-energy nation with 2008 tech (lets say Japan-equivalent) could pull off a manhattan project pretty fast if it suddenly felt the need.