Both nations would be destroyed as nations. I think that neither the USSR nor the US would ever recover; some sort of multiple successor states would take their place.
The US “recovering” faster in any of the described scenarios seems at best a highly rosy view.
In all fairness, there was four viable options that were concidered.
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General shoot out , nothing held back. Nato has the edge with nukes, but the sovs were planning on mixing in Bio weapons with their nukes.
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The other end of the spectrum was the warning shot, ie Minsk v Birmingham, which may have worked with Carter and was mainly about detering our allies from joining in WW3, as in it could be worse.
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Tactical party with conventional forces doing WW2 redux, its main con was that the loser in the conventional sense was going to go pyric and launch the sluggers.
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Was a Naval engagement that would have gone nuclear , as was said that swaths of dead fish dont really bother anyone and not as messy.
In terms of ecomonic capacity , options 2 and 3 would have been a prime concern for the soviets , as it could have taken a decade or more just to get their logisitcal net back together, simply moving fuel and food , and refugees to other parts of the country had option 1 occured.
While the Soviets made a big deal out of their civil infrastructure, no one really knew how it was going to play out in the real world. Other than simply being rational , towards the end of the nineties , they would have been reduced to simple localized bastions of a failed country, fearing that an American bunker buster was just seconds away.
What most people dont equate with nuclear weapons is that people wield them, just like any other weapon that we have ever possessed. The psychology and will to use those weapons matters more than the amound of rounds that you have in the gun, or the amount of guns you possess.
In the end , the soviets did not think they could win and the Americans did not think they could lose, hence the Reagan doctrine. During the Clinton administration, teams from both sides went to each others countries to examine the war machines of both and the Americans had concluded that some of the Russian equipment was dangerously decrepit, the only way that some classes of missiles were going to launch was to detonate the nuke under the rocket.
The above is not what you base your foreign policy or military strategy on , but it does ilustrate that the Soviets were not all that they were described as a threat. The way our respective systems were set up , in my opinion the soviets would have been erased, while how bad the states got roughed up , was dependent on what Russia had ready in the bullpen.
Declan
In a full scale nuclear war the United States would have ceased to exist as a political and social concept. I’m not sure how much clearer it can be made.
It all depends on how accurate the weapons were. By the 1980s probably reasonably accurate, so given the USSR’s greater size and overall lower level of industrialisation under government control, it would probably have been able to repeat the previous 50 years far more easily than the more urbanised USA under commercial control centralised in Wall Street. The Communist system would have made it easier for survivors to pull together to repeat development that had been very fast in their own lifetime, while I think that without central government the USA wold have lapsed back into the kind of raiding tribalism that existed before Europeans ever got there. It would be full of survivalists surrounded by guns without ammunition too macho to grow anything for the future when they could shoot it. The real winners would be everybody who kept out of it.
Yes, because we know those Redskins were all bloodthirsty savages.:rolleyes:
Why does this baseless, ignorant, racist bullshit belong in GD exactly
Because all survivalists are bloodthirsty, lazy, ill-prepared and completely lacking in agricultural skills.
Are there any other ignorant stereotypes you wish to perpetuate in this thread Jerseyman?
So, basically you’re saying they would have been subject to widespread famine, suppression of economic development and retardation of industrial growth, followed by progressive dependence on (now unavailable) foreign imports for basic sustenance.
Wall Street is (one of) the financial center(s) of the United States, but it never had direct control over industrial production or agriculture. You could eliminate the stock exchange, utterly disrupting the financial system of the United States, and still have something like a viable sustenance economy, especially in states like California and Nebraska that enjoyed a wide variety of agricultural and industrial diversity, while the centralized economy of the Soviet Union with its “One Big Factory” planning schedules would have been more problematic in terms of basic survival for the majority of inhabitants. The Soviet Union was economically bankrupt even before the 'Eighties, a fact tacitly acknowledged by the importation of grain in exchange for natural resources.
Stranger
Are those states self sufficient in terms of fuel, food, agricultural machinery, water and fertiliser? If not then you aren’t going to have anything like a viable sustenance economy within 12 months if the national and international trade that depends on Wall Street were to collapse.
The US as a nation is approximately self-sufficient, but I find it hard to believe that any one state approaches self-sufficiency.
A certain computer from a classic 80’s movie remarked that the only way to win the game of Global Thermonuclear War, was not to play.
They way their economies are currently configured, no, they aren’t self-sufficient (although I’d guess that California is pretty close save for fuel) but given the reduction of population in industrial centers, they could become self-sufficient, albeit at a dramatically reduced quality of life. However, I doubt many areas of the former Soviet Union could be independently self-sufficient by design; the Soviets kept independent industry sectors out of the outlying republics so that they would be dependent upon Mother Russia, while Russia itself was utterly dependent upon food and textile imports from the outlying republics and the East Bloc nations.
I don’t think any nation involved in the conflict could expect to return to a modern state of industry and quality of life within two decades, perhaps much longer. Herman Kahn came to the opposite conclusion, but only by making grossly optimistic assumptions about the ability to rebuild infrastructure and projected advances in medical and agricultural technology.
Stranger
I read that and was surprised at how comparitively optimistic it sounded. A cataclysm sure, but at worst it makes it sound like thirty years down the road global civilization has been set back to the early nineteenth century. It also makes it sound like the USSR gave much worse than it got. Frankly, I could see a sufficiently fanatical contingent within the Soviet leadership considering that scenario “acceptable”.
I can see by your coat, my friend,
you’re from the other side,
There’s just one thing I got to know,
Can you tell me please, who won?
-Crosby, Stills, Kantner, “Wooden Ships”
I think you are seriously misreading that document. It profiles a reversion of North America to subsistence agriculture with no industrial support nor hope of return, 9-13th century at best. Southern hemisphere might be early 19th century, but probably less.
Not to mention the possibly irreparable damage to any satellite technologies thanks to earth’s junked-up orbit.
As hard as it is to label as “optimistic” a scenario where 5-10% of the human population is dead in one day, and 40-50% in a year, I’m afraid you may be right. I suspect the models of global thermonuclear war underestimated the extent to which the the rest of the world was dependent on the US, Europe, USSR and PRC for trade, technology, medicine, and food in the 1980s.
And we came a lot closer to global thermonuclear war than we should have. :shudder:
The bolded part IMO makes little to no sense.
Why couldn’t Americans and Russians at least be able crawl back to a Little House on the Prarie / Deadwood (those cocksuckers!) level of socio-economic development ?
Methinks somebody has taken the phrase “bombed back to the dark ages” a bit too seriously.
This is a very controversial question. I’ve heard people point to Europe’s recovery after WW II and say that humanity could bounce back. If the WW III scenario was a global exchange until all the nukes were fired, I’m not so sure.
Quick: name 1,000 cities in North America. I’ll help you: Wiki List of US Cities (over 100k) by population and Wiki Table of US Micropolitan Statistical Areas (over 10k, but under 50k). Since surrunding areas are included, there is some overlap between the two lists. OK, that’s 2000 census data, not 1980 or 1990 data, but I think my point that there are fewer than 1,000 cities in the US with population over 10,000 people is still valid.
The Rooskies had enough nukes to hit each one of those cities 5 times, with plenty left over for other targets. If every US city larger than Pecos, TX has been blasted off the map, I don’t think there will be much recovery for the people that are left.
Even the Little House on the Prarie folks needed things from the cities, and people who knew how to make those things.
I’m glad we have not had to find out!
Really ? You don’t say. :rolleyes:
The only question in my mind is how LONG it takes to make a comeback and how close that comeback can be to “modern” times.
Again, I ask, why the heck are we gonna be STUCK in the 9-13th century?
Remember, America went from Indians and tepees to 21st century in a couple hundred years…and in some places more like a 100 to a 150 years.
And that was WITHOUT all the current know how and smarts that will still mostly/somewhat be floating around post big boom.
You can’t really say “America went from Indians and tepees to 21st century in a couple hundred years though” - that was down to the arrival of some much more technologically advanced outsiders, which is precluded in this hypothetical. Admittedly we would keep some important smarts and know-how - but we would have lost every single link in the chain more advanced than a local smithy, and we have also used up a lot of our easily accessible metal ores and fossil fuels, leaving much less for our replacements.
Nobody would win a fullscale thermonuclear war, then or now. The political systems, societies and economies of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union would almost surely collapse, and “the living would envy the dead.” Fallout, nuclear winter and radioactive contamination would have messed up most of the world. The environmental damage would severely impact agriculture, and starvation would follow.
Targeteers on both sides had so many nukes at their disposal that any remotely-located ally of the other side (sorry, New Zealand) would probably have been hit to prevent its postwar rise to dominance.