There is alot skeptism over the “suitcase bomb” claims. Even if they do exist there is a big difference between having suitcase bombs and actually deploying them, and act which would be probably be considered tantamount to a declartion of war if discovered.
And there were countless ways they could have been discovered (remember the soviets knew full well how heavily infiltrated they have been thanks to likes of Robert Hansen and Aldrich Aimes). It you can’t claim that the soviets had nukes deployed on US soil without at least some evidence. Given the risks involved if they were discovered (almost certainly it would have resulted in war), the benefits were not all that great, both sides assumed they command and control centers were to be the first targets in a war so there is no way they could have acheived “decapitation”.
True, I’m sure the idea occurred to both sides (along with all sorts of other crazy schemes). But IMO to say “the first wave would have been nuclear explosions in command centers…most of which would presumedly be hit by nuclear weapons smuggled in and detonated on site” you need some kind of evidence.
I think I see the confusion. I never claimed that the Soviets had actually placed nuclear weapons on American soil. I was just saying it was almost certain they had made contingency plans on doing so in case they ever decided to “launch” a first strike attack - and I assume the United States had similar plans against the Soviet Union.
There’s actually very little question that booster fission nuclear weapons capable of fitting in a large suitcase exist. The Army (and in slightly different form, the Navy) had in inventory man-portable nuclear devices (see Special Atomic Demolition Munition) and no less an authority than physicist Ted Taylor, responsible for the design of many of the DoD’s early boosted fission weapons, admitted knowledge of a weapon capable of being held in the palm of one hand. (We may presume that he was speaking of the Primary and explosive shell sans other support equipment, but even at this it could conceivably be packed in a normal size Samsonite.)
It’s true that deploying such weapons would immediately raise threat levels and possibly precipitate a preemptive strike; it would be a foolhardy thing to do, but that logic has not uniformly prevented major governments from planning and undertaking completely inadvisable actions before. I highly doubt anyone smuggled a weapon into, say, the Soviet Embassy, in preparation for a hypothetical future need, but it woudln’t suprise me that somewhere along the way someone drafted out a plan to do something of this nature.
If the equator was an absolute wall against wind, sailing ships could never have crossed the line. Better to say that no major trade winds cross the equator, and that relatively little fallout would cross over. Of course if the USSR reserved a hundred or so nukes for ANZ, south Africa and South America, it would be a moot point.
No MikeS I didn’t know that. It was very arrogant of me to just go from memory/assumption and I am (sincerely) glad, if embarrassed, that you called me on it.
Russian ballistic missile submarine doctrine holds that the SSBNs should put to sea in protected waters close to Russian shores. These patrol areas, known as bastions, can be protected by patrol aircraft, sonar listening networks, surface anti-submarine vessels, and friendly submarines. cite
OK I get that and having said that: why on earth would the Soviets have any need of smuggling bombs in like Al Queda for a first strike when - from about 1977 on - they could simply move those Sea based nuclear weapons closer to the U.S. shore and instead of having ~22 minutes warning, most U.S. targets would have ~6ish minutes?
To be clear: I understand that Nemo and Stranger have both said “they wouldn’t be surprised if” and I agree that some jamoke in some planning Institute probably did do that - it is almost certain. But also to be clear the USSR was not dependant on some crazy half-a$$ed trick to pull off a disarming first strike.
Isn’t where they lose that half-billion pretty important? I mean, if all their major urban centers and industrial infrastructure gets vaporized, leaving half a billion peasants in the countryside with no leadership…you might have a land called “China,” but I’m not sure you’d have a country.
Well, I did say “prevailing” winds. It doesn’t preclude the equatorial regions having their own local weather systems that move stuff about on a smaller scale; you’d still get some fallout transference, just not the industrial-strength distribution systems further from the equator. The horse latitudes would be another natural barrier too… I suppose a radio-map of Earth from space some time after all the big ones went off would look a little like Jupiter.
You’ve heard of the horse latitudes? Crossing the equator, particularly in mid-ocean, was often the most tedious part of a circumnavigation. (Nearer to land you’ll have local currents and wind patterns that can help you make it over the equator. As Malacandra has already noted, the prevailing winds, and particularly at high altitude, do not go across the equator. Whatever fallout may remain suspended, only a small fraction of it could conceivably make it into the Southern Hemisphere. And primary fallout will not remain suspended indefinitely; the larger bits fall immediately downwind, and the more volatile or fine components will tend to nucleate and cause precipitation, which again is a hazard to those in the regional prevailing wind patterns but isn’t going to travel around the globe in quantity or concentration. In general, the long-term hazards from fallout are often grossly overstated, and the notion that even a full-up nuclear exchange would eradicate all life–or even human life–on the planet is hyperbole. Even with the greatest power we can muster, we are but a grain of dust compared to the desert sandstorm that is Mother Nature.
Seriously, as boys, my friends & I were all certain the Last War would happen in our lifetimes, & that there was no hope. I was in an Episcopalian Youth Group in the 70s, in Wisconsin, & we all believed that we would not live to our old ages.
Thinking back, that’s sad. None of us were 13 yet. And we all had surrended all hope.
I grew up in the UK slap bang in the middle of a whole bunch of top notch targets like Greenham Common and the UK’s atomic weapon research instituteatomic weapon research institute I’m sure somewhere in a back room in the former USSR there is a satalite photo of my parents house with a huge crosshair on it
No reason they couldn’t have. There are still prevailing winds at the equator; they just don’t cross it. And the multi-masted behemoths of the Age of Sail might not have been quite as maneuverable as a modern yacht, but they could still tack to at least some extent (I’m not sure exactly how much, but the exact amount isn’t critical, here, just that they could do it).
However, it’s incorrect to say that fallout can’t travel “around the world”. We’ve gotten hazy days here in Montana a time or two from forest fires in Asia, 180 degrees of longitude away. So any fallout particles the size of smoke particles, at least, could make it (and some fallout is smoke, so there would be at least some such fallout).
They didn’t want to start a nuclear war, just to be in the best position to win. Sure, they’d break rules to get the strategic edge, but they didn’t want to get exposed conducting surreptitious acts of war. Getting caught sneaking nukes into the border = major egg on face, instant massive retaliation.
Of course it’s not entirely implausible… there’s the old chestnut floating around that the best way to smuggle a nuke into the US is to hide it in a bale of marijuana.
I’m tempted to think the Korean Peninsula and Japan. The Korean War was more or less fought to have an American front in mainland Asia before it completely fell to the Communists. Too important strategically to be left alone for the whole war.
