That sounds very reasonable, Blake. I for one welcome our new New Zealand overlords.
What about South America?
Parts of Europe that aren’t in Nato?
The Nato countries will be pretty fucked up, same with China, Japan and Russia for example, including the rest of nuclear capable countries. A thick cloud of fallout will hang over Europe. I’ve always been a bit curious about what would happen to Scandinavia. I am sure the fallout would be immense and many (most?) would die, but would there be any direct hits?
Since Denmark and Norway are in Nato, I think that even though Sweden and Finland are not, the fallout and possible hits would make the difference academic.
The cockroaches. I don’t really fancy even the damned dirty apes’ chances, and while Blake makes an excellent point concerning New Zealand, I’m reminded of David Graham’s Down To A Sunless Sea in which, as an aside, Australia broadcasts a declaration of neutrality during the three-hour war and gets hit by both sides almost immediately as a giant Fuck You from the rest of the world for thinking they’re going to be allowed to sit on the fence.
The thin layer of highly radioactive dust in the fossil record would have made interesting food for thought for archaeologists in AD 1500 000 000 or so, though.
South American governments during the cold war were all propped up by foreign interests, whether through economic and military aid or through direct military intervention. Despite that coups were a dime a dozen.
With the sudden removal of foreign interference and a catastrophic collapse of the economy I imagine the whole continent would have devolved into first civil war and then into regional war.
Although there would have been survivors it’s hard to see any winners there.
With the nuclear arsenals of the 80s anyone within a 500 miles of any NATO capital would have been in serious trouble. Added to which the trade interdependence of Europe would have seen any unscathed areas knocked back to the steam age at best. There simply weren’t any self-sufficient European states in the 80s.
I really think this is a point that is too often overlooked in doomsday scenarios. Most of the world is dependent on global trade just to be able to feed its population. Even nations that produce a food surplus are generally dependent on foreign manufacturing for their fertiliser, machinery, fuel etc. truly self-sufficient nations like Australia, South Africa, Russia or the US are a tiny minority. For the rest, the catastrophic failure of global trade networks is going to result in mass starvation in fairly short order.
Entertaining as that is, there are two minor problems.
Firstly it’s difficult to imagine Australia declaring neutrality. Australia is a staunch US ally and gets involved in every US war. There’s a sound defence reason for that: Australia is sparsely populated and would have a tough time defending itself. So declaring neutrality would be more suicidal than simply upholding the appropriate treaties and siding with NATO.
Secondly, Australia would become a major strategic asset in the aftermath of any war. The NATO side would see it as an allied power with major strategic reserves to help rebuild, and the Warsaw?Red China side would see it in much the same way, but needing minimal effort to conquer first.
And of course there’s the major problem that wasting nukes in an all-out exchange to make some sort of point makes no military or political sense.
The only real reason I could see for nuking Australia would be as the act of a losing power to deny a strategic acid to the victor. A continental scorched earth tactic. In an all out exchange there is unlikely to be the time available for the loser to make that sort of evaluation.
Wasn’t it a well-known factoid though that the nuclear powers between them had enough firepower to reduce the Earth to a gently glowing cinder several times over? In those terms lobbing half a dozen spare ICBMs in the direction of Canberra, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Darwin is just a drop in the bucket, and anything left over can be marked “To Whom It May Concern” c/o Wellington and Christchurch.
Quite right if you’re considering your options rationally, but I wonder how cool the world heads would have been in the event of the worst imaginable “Prisoners’ Dilemma gone tits up” scenario. :dubious:
They had that sort of firepower because it was considered necessary. Most of the nukes of the side to shoot last would have been vapourised in their silos. Many nukes on both sides would have been shot down and many more would simply have missed the target.
To overcome that each side worked out what percentage of missiles would get through to strategic targets, what number of missiles were needed to achieve the effect and then divided B by A the two together.
IOW there were no “spare” nukes left over. Nukes are expensive to build and maintain so nobody had spares to waste in acts of petty spite.
Realistically I imagine either military discipline would hold and protocols would be followed, or else staff would desert their posts. In neither case would anyone be firing nukes at random targets without cause.
What would be the strategic value of wasting valuable weapons to do anything else? NZ is a military non-entity. It is no threat to anyone, and it couldn’t possibly lend any serious military aid to the US in any post-nuclear conventional war. It isn’t even a large enough food producer to make significant contributions to post-war aid. The landmass itself is of absolutely no military strategic value unless you want to invade Antarctica.
It’s identical to suggesting that the Nazis would have invaded NZ because they were a US ally. Actually it’s even sillier than that because NZ contributed some troops to the allied war effort, and it had some value as a southern ocean port. Neither of those factors exist in a nuclear exchange.
All that nuking NZ would achieve as far as I can see would be to waste valuable munitions. Nations don’t just attack useless landmasses out of spite when they have a war on their hands.
Not exactly, the mid to late 80s relations between the US and NZ were decidedly frosty, ANZUS was on hold and all the rest that went with the cold shoulder.
This was because of NZ refusal to let US ships into our ports unless they would confirm that they weren’t carrying nuclear weapons - something the US refused to do.
ETA And given NZs size, they are never really going to be a “major” ally.
That would depend if they are thinking in ideological or military terms though. It’s possible that one side or the other might decide that the other is so awful that it’s better to devastate every nation that might help it take over the ruins. When you have that much overkill, taking out the biggest cities in a third party nation isn’t a significant diversion; the “valuable munitions” aren’t really all that valuable because they had a lot more than they needed to lay waste to America and allies ( as we did to do to them ).
I thought that both the US and the USSR had plans to have their missile subs invade neutral harbors. This would presumably accomplish the following: (1). launching their missiles from a site with carefully plotted coordinates, increasing their accuracy. (2.) Hide from antisubmarine forces operating in the open ocean. (3). Forcing their opponent to attack a neutral.
Yes, I was going to ask whehter it was LeMay, as ISTRecall, who later said that if WW III left only one couple alive, he wanted that couple to be American. (Gene pool requirement? What’ that?!)
And Mad Magazine had a two-page spread field day with the second remark.
The first page showed a genteel Southern gentleman with his pretty young bride in front of their dream mansion home, which was somehow unscathed.
This was what LeMay probably had in mind when he made the corrected remark.
Turn the page over, though, and you see what would have given him nightmares. There was still a pretty young white woman, but she was with an angry young balck man, armed with a machine gun. They were standing on rubble.
A recent thread on the same topic [thread=527499]here[/thread] contains this link to a scenario for a global thermonuclear war. It’s text only, and one of the most frightening things I’ve seen. I’ll probably have trouble going to sleep tonight just from reading it this morning.
In the first day of the war the USSR was projected to have about 40 million killed out of a pre-war population of 285 million, the PRC about 100 million out of 1,090 million and the US 110 million out of 245 million.
Three weeks after the war 140 million Americans are projected to be dead. Two months after the war projected dead are 160 million Americans (65% of pre-war population), 90 million Soviets, and 30 million in the UK. A year after the war estimated surviving US population is 45 million (18% of the pre-war total) and world population estimated at 3.3 billion (64% of the pre-war total).
In 1978 there was a novel, The Third World War: August 1985 by British General and NATO commander Sir John Hackett, that dealt with a Warsaw Pact invasion of West Germany in 1985.
Hackett wrote two final scenarios. In the first, the Warsaw Pact invasion bogged down. As a last resort, the Soviets launched a single nuclear missile and wiped out Brimingham, England. The British realiated by nuking Minsk. At that point the Eastern Bloc countries rebelled against Moscow, the Soviet Union disintegrated and the war ended.
In the second scenario, NATO forces were unable to stop the Warsaw Pact advance. West Germany and then The Netherlands fell and The United Kingdom, although remaining nominally independent, left NATO and effectively became a Soviet client state.
Hackett was crticized for loading both scenarios with a lot of fortunate conincidences, but the point of both endings was that neither side was willing to risk an all-out nuclear exchange.
Am I right in thinking that the Soviets had a more elaborate system in place for preserving their power structure post-war, ie more nuclear shelters, underground cities, and a populace more specifically trained for the eventuality? Would these preparations had matter much? I know millions of the USSR’s citizens would still have died but would continuity of administration/civilisation been maintained?
I don’t know where you got this, but it makes absolutely no sense. First of all, no boomer (ballistic missile submarine) is going to go anywhere near a harbor except its own resupply and refit port. Harbors and littoral regions are terrible operating environments for boomers, as they restrict maneuverability and routes. Nuclear-powered boomers go straight out to deep water, dive to a comfortable depth, and go about on their programmed patrol pattern while trying their hardest to be a “hole in the water” (acoustically invisible), popping up to periscope only at planned intervals or due to ELF signals to send and receive messages. US boomers generally patrolled in the North Atlantic/North Sea on the east side, and the Central to North Pacific on the west side, in broad patrol patterns that aren’t near anything. Second, the broad ocean accuracy of UGM-96 C-4 Trident I and UGM-113 D-5 Trident II systems with the Mk IV RV was adequate to ensure reliably hitting soft targets (cities and unprotected industrial zones), and the Mk 5 RV with the W88 warhead is potentially capable of low CEP kill strikes against hardened targets (shallow underground bunkers and silos). Third, for a limited conflict, neither the US or USSR would want to occupy a neutral country just to maintain neutral ground from which to negotiate settlement or sue for ceasefire. In an all-out conflict, enough residual damage and economic disruption would occur that no neutral country in Europe would remain unaffected anyway.
This was the story that the West believed, and in fact the Soviets did place a fair amount of effort into civil defense and continuity of government (compared to the US with their Site R and a couple of auxiliary sites), but in a full-up exchange this would have been little more than a Potemkin village, as the wide scale destruction of Soviet industry (which was never very robust to begin with) and disruption of agricultural logistics from Eastern Europe and (into the 'Seventies, the West) would have been devastating to the USSR, regardless of any protective measures. This highlights a difference between US planning, which was based on strong deterrence (if we look unbeatable the Russians won’t even try) and USSR war plans (accepting massive losses in return for annihilation). In the case of a shooting war, the Soviets likely would have engaged in a prophylactic war against China to give a buffer zone against invasion, which is the ongoing cultural nightmare for Russians.
To answer the o.p., no player would win in an all-out exchange, and any limited exchange that wasn’t immediately repudiated would very likely devolve into an all-out exchange. (See the Diner’s Dilemma game as an example of why this is the case.) I would agree with Blake that only industrially-independent and stable Southern Hemisphere nations without significant economic or political ties to the US and Europe would thrive, which is pretty much limited to New Zealand, Malaysia, maybe Indonesia and Australia. In South America, Brazil is the only nation I’d put money on, and even that is pretty marginal. Africa and Central/South America would pretty well disintegrate without foreign aid and support, as has been seen with Haiti and Nicaragua currently.
