A 1945-era military with atomic bombs vs. a 2008-era military without

Great Debates
41

[QUOTE=Lumpy]
Ok, let’s modify the premise of the OP slightly: what situation do you envision in which having nukes would give the 1945 force parity, or at least a fighting chance?
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If the 2008 forces were concentrated and, having no knowledge of nukes, were caught totally by surprise by the electromagnetic pulse, especially if the 1945s could detonate them over 2008’s communications centers (flying them in bombers with suicide crews?). Then maybe the 1945s could send in waves of bombers and fighters and whatnot and chew the 2008s up as much as possible. By the time 2008 recovers, 1945 has more nukes to deploy. That first attack better be devastating, though - if 20 B-2 bombers survive (the total currently deployed by the U.S. Air Force), they strike back with a vengeance. 1945’s RADAR will never see them coming.

42

[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
if 20 B-2 bombers survive (the total currently deployed by the U.S. Air Force), they strike back with a vengeance. 1945’s RADAR will never see them coming.
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Or a few F-111, F-15E, B1 - doesn’t really matter. Anything of post-1960 vintage is overpowering. Doesn’t matter if the RADAR can see the strike coming when there’s nothing capable of intercepting it.

43

[QUOTE=clairobscur]
Is this important? It was my understanding that the only advantage of nuclear-propelled subs was that they could stay submerged for way longer, and that even that came at the cost of being less silent than a modern non nuclear-powered sub.
I can’t see how a different propulsion system would make a non nuclear-powered modern sub any less lethal, anyway. It’s not like they’re using outdated weapon systems on regular modern subs.
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Like their 1940s-era predecessors, modern conventional subs have superior acoustic signatures only when running on batteries. And 1945 battery technology was pretty crappy compared to today’s. Most 1940s-era subs ran on the surface 99% of the time, submerging only to attack.

Modern sonar (towed a side-arrays) has it all over 1940s-era gear. The modern nuke, being submerged, would hear a diesel-electric running surfaced on diesel, and without ever sticking their periscope out of the water, track and work up a firing solution for a Mk-48 homing torpedo. Diesle-electric dies without ever having seen its executioner, much less knowing it was even within 10 miles.

44

[QUOTE=ExTank]
Modern sonar (towed a side-arrays) has it all over 1940s-era gear. The modern nuke, being submerged, would hear a diesel-electric running surfaced on diesel, and without ever sticking their periscope out of the water, track and work up a firing solution for a Mk-48 homing torpedo.
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At the end of the day, any modern sub (nuclear or conventional) would probably hear a submerged WW2 sub on battery power from fifty miles away. Even something as sophisticated as the German Type XXI wasn’t exactly a miracle of streamlining.

Incidentally, it’s worth looking at the Belgrano/Conqueror incident to see how a seventies-vintage nuclear sub using 1929-era (!!) torpedoes messed up a battle group of elderly ships lacking adequate ASW gear. A modern type 209 or Kilo-class is probably even more capable than a Conqueror class in terms of combat, and the only limit on how much they could sink would be the number or torpedoes they have on board.

[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
caught totally by surprise by the electromagnetic pulse
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Isn’t there a significant yield & altitude requirement for really effective EMP? As in, megatons and tens of kilometres? What material I managed to quickly google up isn’t very precise but seems to suggest this might be a bit out of reach for WW2 tech.

45

This question gets more interesting, IMHO, when you start adding years to the 45’ers and try to detemine when it gets to be a fair-ish (not even-steven) fight. 1960? 1970? 1980? Desert-Storm Era vs. 2008? And so on.

I assume the introduction of ICBMs (early 60s?) changes the game considerably … and then Polaris (mid 70s?) even more.

46

[QUOTE=bordelond]
This question gets more interesting, IMHO, when you start adding years to the 45’ers and try to detemine when it gets to be a fair-ish (not even-steven) fight. 1960? 1970? 1980? Desert-Storm Era vs. 2008? And so on.

I assume the introduction of ICBMs (early 60s?) changes the game considerably … and then Polaris (mid 70s?) even more.
[/QUOTE]
I’d put the breakeven point earlier, at about 1954. By that time the less advanced force had hundreds of nukes rather than dozens, the kilotonage per bomb was higher, they were reduced enough in size and weight that smaller faster planes could deliver them, and much more importantly they’d had years to develop a doctrine of being prepared against a preemptive attack. Even if most of the strategic force was destroyed, the 1954 side might still have scores of nukes in hidden reserves. They would have figured out the tactic of flying in at treetop level, and even if it required suicide missions could inflict a vast amount of harm.

47

Wow, I went and checked on Wikipedia on the introduction of ICBMs and Polaris missles to the U.S. arsenal. Both were considerably earlier than I thought. The first successfully-tested ICBM was the Atlas in 1957 (!). As for the submarine-launched Polaris, that was essentially early 1960s technology, and was starting to get phased out for the Poseidon missles by the early- to mid-70s.

48

[QUOTE=bordelond]
As for the submarine-launched Polaris, that was essentially early 1960s technology, and was starting to get phased out for the Poseidon missles by the early- to mid-70s.
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Once you get to reasonable numbers of SLBMs and dispersed ICBMs things start to get a bit more uphill for the modern force (assuming they haven’t got any kind of ABM capability). They could probably close the window of opportunity fairly quickly by wiping out the SSBNs and hitting the launch sites (a modern bunker buster can crack even a hardened silo), but it would be very very risky, since the 45s would only need to get off a handful of multi-megaton launches to make a big mess.

Lumpy - what were the delivery vehicles in the early to mid fifties? The A-3/A-4 and F-100 are the only ones I can think of that might be able to penetrate modern air defences without needing to resort to “send more planes than they have missiles” type scenarios.

49

[QUOTE=slaphead]
Lumpy - what were the delivery vehicles in the early to mid fifties? The A-3/A-4 and F-100 are the only ones I can think of that might be able to penetrate modern air defences without needing to resort to “send more planes than they have missiles” type scenarios.
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The B-47 Stratojet was officially in service by 1951 and considered fully operational by 1953. It was designed as a nuke-deliverer from the get-go, and could do about 400 knots at treetop level. That’s about as good as 1954 technology got. Other tactical aircraft may have been nuclear-capable with the second-generation bombs available in the early 50s, but I’d have to research those.

50

[QUOTE=slaphead]
Isn’t there a significant yield & altitude requirement for really effective EMP? As in, megatons and tens of kilometres? What material I managed to quickly google up isn’t very precise but seems to suggest this might be a bit out of reach for WW2 tech.
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I’m just trying to come up with a way for 1945 to use nukes to its advantage. A sneak coordinated attack on an enemy with a few well-defined targets and following up with wave after wave of conventional attack.

I still think they don’t have a chance in hell, but this is their best shot to bloody up the 2008s a bit before being annihilated.

51

I think what would make the fight really interesting is if the 1945 force completely abandoned a force-on-force strategy in favor of completely asymmetrical tactics. Could you imagine an insurgency with something like 15 million trained personnel turned into insurgents? (Figure is based on the number of Americans who served during the whole of WW2, not the size of the military in 1945, which I don’t recall and can’t find.)

That would mean giving up all the WW2 battleships, but could also bring the nuclear weapons back into play (eg., smuggle them in to 2008 in a shipping container, etc.)

In fact, I think I’d put my money on the 1945 force if it relied on purely asymmetrical fighting. Let’s put it this way: how many swarm boats do you think it would take to severely damage a carrier battle group? Or, more importantly, how many do you think it would take to severely damage 10 battle groups? If you’re drawing on 15 million insurgents, I think they could get that many boats together.

52

[QUOTE=Lumpy]
The B-47 Stratojet was officially in service by 1951 and considered fully operational by 1953. It was designed as a nuke-deliverer from the get-go, and could do about 400 knots at treetop level. That’s about as good as 1954 technology got.
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Hmmmm…

[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
Operational practice for B-47 bomber operations during this time went from high altitude bombing to low altitude strike, which was judged more likely to penetrate Soviet defenses. Bomber crews were trained in “pop-up” attacks, coming in at low level (425 knots) and then climbing abruptly on nearing the target before releasing a nuclear weapon
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Sounds pretty feasible.

[QUOTE=wikipedia]
notable mishaps involving a B-47
…
a simulated combat exercise with an F-86 Sabre, the bomber simulating an attacking aircraft and the fighter a defender. As was the practice at the time, the B-47 was carrying a single 7,600 lb Mark 15 thermonuclear weapon. During this exercise, the F-86 collided with the B-47. The F-86 pilot ejected and the fighter crashed, while the B-47 suffered substantial damage
…
The bomber pilot had to “safe” soft drop the Mark 15 weapon off the coast of Savannah, Georgia near Tybee Island (where it remains)
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:eek:

[QUOTE=Ravenman]
Could you imagine an insurgency with something like 15 million trained personnel turned into insurgents?
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Ccouple of problems with this, the main one being that an insurgency is an uprising, meaning that they would be restricted to their home country (otherwise you’re looking at infiltration rather than insurgency). In Lumpy’s scenario, the planet is devoid of habitation and any settlements outside '45 and '08 territory will likely be scattered and one-side-only (at least after the first wave of violence). Walking to war with a noticeable force that has no logistics other than rucksacks and no civilian population to forage off is going to be a challenge.
In the '45 homeland insurgency would be a viable scenario - although the '08s don’t have to invade (they could content themselves with ‘contain and suppress’ air interdiction). If they do, it sounds like they could recon on a fair amount of cooperation from the various minority groups, plus they would be able to buy off at least some of the population with money, medical care, gadgets etc. How that would pan out - no idea.

[QUOTE=Ravenman]
how many swarm boats do you think it would take to severely damage a carrier battle group?
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Assuming, say, ten 20mm or 30mm cannon shells fired per swarm boat destroyed, you could work it out if you knew how many cannon shells a battle group would typically carry. However since the ships would typically be about 100km offshore and would make better speed in the ocean than the swarm boats, they could probably decline combat altogether if they wanted. Or just have their helicopters/aircraft do the dirty work. Again, when it’s just two-sided total war on an uninhabited planet there’s not a lot of scope for sneaky. Likewise for the shipping container idea - you’d probably need a pretty long period of playing nice before anyone got sloppy enough to fall for a trojan horse.

The problem as I see it is that the scenario posited by the OP (exactly equal sides, different tech, empty planet) sets up a straight us-or-not-us win-lose dynamic that massively favours whoever can muster most lethality - 2008 only lose by being so utterly inept that they effectively Darwin themselves. Drop the two sides down on a populated planet at about 1880 tech level, assume that neither side wants to go to war with the entire world at once (e.g. both nations are relatively small and find it easier to trade for resources than to seize everyhing they need) and things might work out differently. Now the '45s are probably more culturally and technologically compatible with the ‘natives’, and have populations and traffic to blend into. They would still be at a disadvantage militarily and in terms of what they can offer in terms of trade, but it wouldn’t be such an utterly one-sided proposition.

53

It boils down to the same issues we’d face if Al Qiada or a similar group got hold of a nuke. The fact they lack a sophisticated delivery method is academic, they could just load their nuke on a civilan transport of some kind (plane, truck, boat) and there’s pretty much nothing that could bee done to stop them. Though of course setting off a nuke in New York or London would NOT win you the war, the war machine would be almost totally unaffected by such an attack.

In fact the current “war on terror” boils down to pretty much what the OP describes, minus the nukes. They are taking a superpower with pretty much nothing that wasn’t available to the Warsaw pact forces during the 50s. There is a reason the pentagon calls it "asymmetric’ warfare.

54

[QUOTE=griffin1977]
It boils down to the same issues we’d face if Al Qiada or a similar group got hold of a nuke. The fact they lack a sophisticated delivery method is academic, they could just load their nuke on a civilan transport of some kind (plane, truck, boat) and there’s pretty much nothing that could bee done to stop them.
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But in Lumpy’s scenario the world consists of just two groups - the moderns and a whole nation full of Al-Quaeda, plus a lot of empty space. How dumb would you have to be to receive a shipping container from The Foreigners Who Hate Our Freedom (aka The Other Tribe) and not screen it well enough to notice the big lump of uranium/plutonium inside? It’s not as if they are going to be able to fake a computerised shipping manifest.
You can be as sneaky-minded as you want, but without a population to blend into you just end up re-enacting How Not To Be Seen. Imagine if the entire not-Taliban population of Afghanistan and Pakistan were to disappear a la The Rapture. Coalition forces could turn the entire area into a free-fire zone without worrying about any adverse consequences and it would all be over pretty sharpish.

55

[QUOTE=griffin1977]
In fact the current “war on terror” boils down to pretty much what the OP describes, minus the nukes. They are taking a superpower with pretty much nothing that wasn’t available to the Warsaw pact forces during the 50s. There is a reason the pentagon calls it "asymmetric’ warfare.
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Uh, no. While analogy between OP scenario and “war on terror” is tempting, it doesn’t really fit the facts. “They” are taking a superpower with much, much more than equipment available to Warsaw pact forces during the 50s. They have cell phones, digital wireless communication, Internet, funding-through-wire, miniaturized electronics, knowledge about enemy tactics, international media allowing social recognition and gathering funds and so on. It’s assymetric in a sense that used forces on both sides of conflict aren’t analogues, but it isn’t like one side stopped their development half century ago.

56

If they had nukes I could see them delivering them by truck or boat or whatever. I mean even in modern times i have read that many of our cargo containers are not even checked for things. And i could see a speed boat or a fishing boat taking out the fleet with a nuke.

57

[QUOTE=ChrisBooth12]
If they had nukes I could see them delivering them by truck or boat or whatever. I mean even in modern times i have read that many of our cargo containers are not even checked for things. And i could see a speed boat or a fishing boat taking out the fleet with a nuke.
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Trouble is, detonating a nuke (especially a small Hiroshima-size nuke) at ground or sea level dissipates much of its energy. For maximum effect, you need an air burst. Maybe a speedboat with a small nuke nestles up to a 2008 capital ship and trashes it. It’s not likely to do more than that, though, unless the entire fleet is in port. Once deployed, the ships will be too spread out to get more than one at a time.

If the 2008 nation is as large and diverse as the United States, 40 smuggled nukes detonated by surprise would be quite impressive. Trouble is, the modern U.S. has more than 40 military targets. The surviving air forces retaliate and crush the 1945’s military and economic infrastructure, even if it is also the size of the U.S.
Now, if we’re talking 2008 Britain vs 1945 U.S. and the 1945s have full access under cover of trade and tourism to get their nukes all over the place…

58

[QUOTE=ChrisBooth12]
If they had nukes I could see them delivering them by truck or boat or whatever. I mean even in modern times i have read that many of our cargo containers are not even checked for things.

[/QUOTE]

Yes, but once again, the difference is that we have a planet of 9 billion people and almost 200 countries, with a gigantic amount of international trade. If you live on a planet with a few hundred million people tops, divided into two countries that hate each other and have only coexisted for couple of years. Visualise planet earth minus everyone but the US and the USSR, at the height of the cold war. I think the number of containers going back and forth would be many orders of magnitude less than we are used to. That’s aside from the fact that containerisation was only invented in 1956.

[QUOTE=ChrisBooth12]

And i could see a speed boat or a fishing boat taking out the fleet with a nuke.
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Would need to be a very big nuke. The Operation Crossroads tests showed that a ~20kt nuke would do minimal damage to ships more than 1,500 yards away from either an air burst or underwater explosion. You’d be lucky to get more than one or two ships with a single sensible-sized bomb unless you move the timeline forward. And again, who’s going to let an obviously enemy vessel blithely sail straight into the middle of a taskforce?

59

[QUOTE=slaphead]

:eek:

[/QUOTE]
Hey, I’m from Savannah/Tybee!

60

For a more graspable (and fairer to 1945) test, let’s say it’s the battle of time-crossed North America. Canada of 2008 finds itself confronted with the U.S. of 1945. Let’s go nuts and say the Canadian Forces are unfamiliar with the term “budget cut” and have:

62000 regular personnel, 25000 reservists, equipped with C7s (i.e. M-16s) with grenade launchers, night vision, Kevlar, etc.

1000+ modern armored personnel carriers.
200 Leopard and Leopard-2 main battle tanks.
100 CF-18s
150 helicopters of various types
4 Victoria-class subs
12 Halifax-class frigates
…plus all variety of digital communications equipment, satellite surveillance, modern radar, what have you.

1945 USA has whatever conventional forces they had at the end of WW2, but not nukes. Each side rumbles and postures for a week before hostilities break out, so neither is caught by surprise. How does it play out?