At least up until the early 80s, Canada deployed nuclear weapons, an ugly little factoid Canadians don’t like to admit - and Canadian bases were used for command and control, fighter interception, and bomber staging. Canada would have been nuked harder than a frozen microwave dinner.
I would think that both the Suez and Panama canals would have been nuked? But, I guess technically, the Panama canal was US territory, so that one doesn’t fit into the OPs parameters.
In Down to a Sunless Sea, by David Graham, the author choreographs an apocalyptic nuclear exchange set in 1985 roughly like this:
Arab extremists poison Israeli water suppllies, killing thousands.
Israel responds a few days later with a nuclear bomb developed privately by wealthy Jews.
The USSR issue stern warnings of the retribution they are about to hand out; the USA, starved of oil and bankrupt but still with an extensive nuclear arsenal, warns them to keep their hands to themselves.
The USSR first-strikes against the West.
The West retaliates (including an RAF strike against Shannon after Cuban mercenaries land, the Irish Republic having seized the opportunity to announce the liberation of Northern Ireland).
China joins in the fun.
Australia broadcasts a declaration of neutrality and gets hit, apparently by both sides, within the hour.
By sunrise, mid-Atlantic time, pretty much all of the silos are empty and there is tolerably little of any continental landmass left habitable in anything but the shortest term; massive amounts of radioactive dust are floating miles high in the air and being blown merrily about on the wind. It’s like On The Beach but with the waiting measured in hours rather than months.
That makes no sense but it’s damn funny for some reason. 
Had to smile at those ideas 
Did either side have any plans to hold back any sort of reserve after a massive strike? I remember something of the sort being mentioned in a film before, possibly Dr Strangelove.
I believe the thoughts going through TPTB’s heads by that time ran along the lines of “Fuck you! We’re all going to burn, why should you get away with it?”.
And on the nuking of Shannon, one of the narrators, aboard a transatlantic super-jumbo which is fast running out of airfields on both sides of the ocean, remarked bitterly “That’ll teach the IRA to fart in church”.
There is humour in DTASS, but unsurprisingly it is rather black and bleak.
Can you tell me why fallout can’t cross the equator?
Just curious.
Wait a minute, is that really credible? I thought the DC embassy attic bomb was dubious at best. Is there really evidence of dozens of them here? If so, what the hell happened to them? And what happened to the one in DC, while we’re at it?
There aren’t any prevailing winds that cross the equator. You have prevailing northeasterlies north of the equator and southeasterlies south of the equator, and they bump into each other in the middle. So nothing to give the fallout the necessary push out of the equatorial zone.
Or course, come the summer, there would be hoardes of hideously mutated swallows crossing the equator eating children and other small animals
The Soviets would have been idiots to put a bomb in their embassy - it was probably one of the most heavily scrutinized buildings in the county. They would have smuggled bomb making material in by normal means (the same way that thousands of tons of drugs and millions of people get in every year), assembled them, and then placed them in a legally rented warehouse or private residence. Then when everything was in place, they would have pushed a button. I’m guessing the embassy staff in Washington probably would have been left off the “need to know” list.
I missed that first time round. I think that needs a cite. IMO smuggled nuclear secret soviets weapons on US soil belong in the “tin foil hat” school of foreign policy analysis
I can’t even imagine their air-speed velocity.
Most of those places mentioned upthread would have been nuked, no doubt. The U.S., all of Europe and the western Soviet Union, in particular, would just be pounded. Depending upon the closeness of ties between Moscow and Beijing at various points in the Cold War, I’d guess that either the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. would have nuked China in any event.
Even if prevailing winds didn’t carry fallout to the southern hemisphere in the short term (about which I’m unconvinced), such massive radiation releases would have a very nasty impact on humanity and the Earth’s ecosystem longterm, I suspect. And given the enormous size of the the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals, far in excess of what was “needed” for MAD at the height of the Cold War, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if both sides cold-bloodedly allocated nukes for major cities in second- and third-tier countries, to ensure that none of them could rise to eventually dominate the glassy ruins of the former superpowers.
In the Southern hemisphere the U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay (then the second largest U.S overseas base) and Clark Air Base (the Largest) in the Philippines would have been late first round Soviet draft Picks as hits.
Guam, Diego Garcia, would also be targets in any full on exchange
Other remote non-U.S. Euro-sites might be Thule Air Base (in Greenland) as well Naval Air Station Keflavik (Iceland), both would be likely early causalities. Because of their relative remoness both might be a way to escalate without escalating like hitting Tampa or Dayton would be escalating – and might be tempting early on.
FWIW Keflavik played a role in Tom Clancy’s take on the OP - Red Storm Rising
Do note that the Phillipines are entirely in the Northern Hemisphere (they stretch from about 6-18 N), as is Guam (about 13 N.) Diego Garcia is about 7 S, though.
Yeah, let me get right on that. I’ll just get on the phone with some old KGB men and ask them to verify their secret nuclear plans from back in the Cold War days.
And now I’ll use some logic.
1 - Does what I wrote make sense? Yes, for the reasons I gave. Anyone with a modicum of knowledge will tell you that a surprise military attack is more effective than an expected one.
2 - Is what I wrote possible? Yes, the United States has probably the most easily penetrated borders in the world. If Mexican migrant workers can sneak across our border on a daily basis, why would the KGB have had any difficulty doing it?
3 - Would the Soviets have done such a thing? Yes, we’re talking about nuclear war - making plans for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. Am I expected to believe that the Soviets would have been willing to kill 100,000,000 people with nuclear weapons - but would have hesitated to break a rule while doing so?
In police work there’s a saying about interrogating suspects - it’s usually pointless to ask somebody is they killed the victim because anyone who’s willing to commit murder in the first place is probably also willing to lie about it afterwards.
To be fair, it’s not precisely true that fallout can’t cross the Equator. A little of it undoubtedly would. But the prevailing winds would make it a very small proportion, relative to the amount that stayed on its side. And the prevailing winds take the patterns they do because of the combination of the tropical regions being warmer than the poles and the Coriolis effect: The former causes air to rise at the equator, resulting in surface winds blowing generally towards the Equator and high-altitude winds blowing generally towards the poles, while the latter diverts those north-south winds to blow around the planet.
Not so much as you may have been led to believe. Certainly, residual radiation would be harmful for those in the immediate vicinity and downwind, but the seriously hazardous radioactives decay in a few days or at most weeks. Secondary radiation poisoning–that is, injesting alpha and beta emitters–will have longer term, chronic effects, but again, output levels will drop exponentially with time and dispersal. Even given “dirty” weapons designed to enhance residual radiation and fallout, we can assume that the hazard to people outside of the region is manageable, particularly if precautions are taken to reduce incidental exposure. In short, there would be more cancer, more illness, et cetera, but not apocalyptically so.
How do we know this? Residents of the states of Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico were routinely exposed to radiation from atmospheric and improperly contained underground testing for the better part of a decade, and epidemiological health studies fail to isolate exposure as a unique cause for increased mortality or morbidity; in other words, the unhealthy aspects of the American lifestyle (smoking, drinking, excessive consumption of saturated fats, et cetera) were more significant than radiation exposure.
The “massive radiation releases”, as you characterize them, are actually pretty unimpressive in the scale of things; collapse of the Earth’s magnetic field (which occurs partially or completely during a polar reversal, every few tends or hundreds of thousands of years) will expose the entire surface of the planet to dramatically more and higher energy radiation than all of the nuclear arsenals on the planet combined, and yet massive dieoffs are not correlated with these events. The “nuclear winter” effects (initiated by worst case interpretations of the TTAPS report and promoted endlessly by Carl Sagan) are almost certainly overstated by orders of magnitude; at best we can expect regional climatological disruptions for a handful of years, rather than a lethal blanket of sun-blocking debris suspended for decades.
And regarding the climatological isolation of the hemispheres, you can choose to believe what you like, but the hard fact is that exhange across the hemisphere is minimal owing to Coriolis effects which direct wind patterns back into their respective hemispheres. This is basic physics. Ditto for ocean currents. The transfer of fallout from one hemisphere to another could only be conducted by low altitude drift and groundwater conduction, and this is minimal.
This is overstated if not patently untrue. Targeting a country like Australia–with no nuclear weapons of its own–would be a futile action. The entire point of (Mutually) Assured Destruction–which was a doctrine adopted by the United States and Great Britian, but not by the Soviet Union or (as far as we know) the Peoples’ Republic of China–is to have a dramatically overwhelming force, so that even an effective attempt at a disarming first strike would not eliminate the possibility of effective retaliation.
Under this strategy, you much maintain an excessive arsenal in order to present a credible threat. Our arsenal size (and despite certain Presidential campaign claims to the contrary, the lesser size of the Soviet arsenal) was budgeted for that purpose. Allocating masses of extra weapons and delivery vehicles to non-stratigic or non-critical targets defies that strategy. The Soviets, due to their more widely accepted belief in the survivability of a nuclear exchange, may have had a different strategy, but it was more likely directed toward protecting their borders from European, and more historically troubling, Asian incursion and annexation. So, we can be certain that the Soviets planned on leveling the Western European nations predominately allied with NATO, and the corrolary to be true for the U.S. and Eastern Europe. It is unlikely, though, that a signficant portion of the arsenals of either power were directed at nations like Chile, Australia, or Madagascar, and I’m morally certain that New Zealand would have slipped under the radar entirely.
Stranger
Soviet “backpack” weapons from PBS’ Frontline —> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/russia/suitcase/comments.html
I don’t know that this is true; such plans may have been destroyed or unreleased even with the dissolution of the Soviet Union out of fear of reprisal or personal responsibility. It’s certainly true that the U.S. Department of Defense regularly conducted studies of the feasibilty of various methods of covert or surprise attack; while none of these were offical integrated operational plans, there were certainly considered in detail. It would be no suprise to me that the Soviet Union would have similar schemes, and that they may have even gone further with the planning.
Stranger