Heh. You might be right, but then again, you might be right.
This.
I would note that more than a few nation-states/peoples have disappeared due to losing wars (Austro-Hungarian Empire and Carthage, for examples), and the consequences of losing grew in the 20th century, but AK84 is right that the risk is too great…
…Unless something comes along that changes the equation. If Reagan’s “Star Wars” had been fully feasible (always unlikely), a Soviet attack, at least prior to it’s deployment, would have become more likely, IMHO; the risk of having their nukes become irrelevant and opening them up to destruction without deterrent might have caused them to consider a slim gain worth the risk.
And that is the only possible reason I could see for any full-scale exchange; someone comes up with a ‘game changer’, like space-based grasers to destroy missiles or some type of “Star Trek” force fields to protect cities/countries…and others try to destroy them before that system becomes functional.
Unlikely, I believe. But not totally impossible.
Oh, and I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis (albeit I was 8 at the time), so yes, this concern has been around before the 80’s.
Indeed.
Heh, I have mixed feelings about it. The War Lobby seems to demand action every decade or so. The 50s had Korea. The 60s-70s had Vietnam. The 80s? Billions wasted on Star Wars- well, at least we got some new weapons without starting a real war, could’ve been worse, right? Then of course Iraq, Iraq again + Afghanistan, and in our time it looks like Iraq again/Syria etc, and from the rhetoric it sounds like Hillary has been captured by the War Lobby and is ready and willing to pull the trigger. Maybe she will finally succeed in the decades-long quest to run up national expenses so high we are forced to eliminate Social Security. Hell, maybe in retrospect it will even seem worth it to give up Social Security in exchange for ending all the wars motivated by sinking it.
So yah, Latro, I can see why you would question America’s motives- when it comes to war, my country often seems stupid and even evil. But I don’t see why you think the US would launch nukes- it is yahoos who talk about glass parking lots, not military leaders. The US gets involved in protracted wars with wimp states like Iraq and Afghanistan where the tab can be run up for years and years without ever exposing us to any genuine military risk (aside from the soldiers themselves). No need for nukes.
He’s probably talking about the incident involving Stanislav Petrov. Put simply, the computers said that the US had launched an overwhelming attack, but other data sources didn’t line up, so he chalked the whole thing down as a malfunction, rather than firing the alert up the chain of command, thereby averting WWIII.
I remember the 80s, and I concur with the others- the chance of major MAD-style nuclear war is MUCH less, even if the forces are still there and ready to rock… in a sense. There have been huge morale and cheating violations by the Minuteman missile crews and leadership; if the US forces are so messed up, I can only imagine what a bad state the Russian ones may be in. Even so, the US and Russia aren’t really on a hair-trigger anymore- a lot of the strategic nuclear weapon mission is simple inertia, IMO. Nobody’s really willing to dismantle them before the other guy, but the two countries’ fundamental relationship has changed, in spite of Vladimir Putin’s best efforts.
I do think that it’s likely that we’ll either see a terrorist nuke or a lesser nation nuke in the next 30 years; my guess is that it’ll originate from Pakistan or N. Korea. I don’t see the Israelis or Indians being likely to use them first, nor do I see the other 5 nuclear nations doing it either.
OP’s question is ill-defined. Detonation of a few Hiroshima-scale devices is hugely different from detonation of thousands of large H-bombs. The former, which is all North Korea is capable of, might cause less total damage than Bush’s War against Gog and Magog. The latter is the “holocaust” that might end civilization.
No one’s mentiond the story of the Soviet submarine B-59, which almost launched a nuclear torpedo against a U.S. aircraft carrier(!?) in 1962 when I was in 8th grade. The U.S. Navy had apparently notified the Soviets that it was using only practice depth charges, but the B-59 was out of radio contact, assumed a nuclear war had started when it was attacked with depth charges, and prepared to launch the nuclear torpedo. The sub’s captain and its political officer agreed to the launch; normally these two OKs would be enough. However that ship happened to have the flotilla commander, Vasili Arkhipov, on board with veto power over the launch. Had the torpedo launched I won’t guess what would have happened, but JFK’s advisors were hawkish and destruction of a carrier would surely have been consternating!
(The Cuban Missile Crisis has entered American folklore as the time JFK’s wisdom saved the world from nuclear war. The reality is rather the opposite: It was JFK who played the brinksman, partly to negate the weakness he showed at the Bay of Pigs 18 months earlier.)
You are aware that, at the time, we a) were the only nation with a nuclear bomb, and b) had just won a world war, right? Conditions were very different than they are today.
Well, it was a bit tongue-in-cheek and contrarian to the usual attitude that other nations are always the boogey man, like NKorea, Russia etc. while the US is, as you agree, quite meddlesome on the world stage and loves war.
I think Iran is still the most likely next target.
Still holding your breath for the perennial all out US attack on Iran?? 
Oh, well, since we are just talking out of our asses about a low probability event and getting digs in on other countries, using your criteria here I’d go with the Europeans. Violent, arrogant, greedy and irrational…yeah, they get marks in all of those. So, there you go.
Almost every home fallout shelter in my area has been converted into a wine cellar.
No they weren’t, the early Reagan era was sometimes termed ‘The Second Cold War’ because of the increase in tension after the Detente of the 70’s. It was probably the most dangerous time of the Cold War after the Cuban Missile Crisis.
During the Operation RYAN / Able Archer incident it is alleged that Andropov told the Politburo that war with the West was now inevitable and supposedly Reagan was spooked when he found out just how paranoid the Soviet leadership was about the perceived threat from the West, and thats partly what made him take a less hardline attitude later in his presidency.
And in the 1980’s there were many more nuclear weapons and a much greater parity in capabilities between the two sides.
edited to add that during this period the CND and other movements were back up to strength, actually in some respects the early 80’s mirrored the 60’s, you had the situation in Poland as well for example.
I remember the disaster drills at school. Even as an 8-year-old kid, I suspected that crouching under my desk wouldn’t do much to save me from a nuclear bomb :dubious:
I’d say that MAD is dead & buried, but a limited exchange is probably more likely now than ever. If North Korea ever decides to start shooting, I’d expect it to go nuclear.
China went to war with Vietnam is the 70s.
Full-scale, too.
No nukes…still…
It wasn’t “full scale,” although it was fairly large. Also, if memory serves, Vietnam instigated it.
And, anyway, China has changed drastically since then. China also had the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, but those wouldn’t happen today.
It’s a little like saying, “The U.S. invaded Mexico once, so it might happen again today.”
(However, who knows? China could change again, for the worse. Some hard-line faction might pull off an internal re-arrangement of power, reverse the reforms of the past thirty years, and go all “North Korea” on us. Unlikely…but never impossible.)
Do you have a cite for this? As far as I understand things, computers are thousands of times faster than they need to be for this task. The limiting factor is that :
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The weaponry (missiles) to shoot down ICBM missiles is many times more expensive than building more ICBMs. So, given roughly equal resources, there is no way to build enough missile defense weapons to counter the additional ICBMs the Russians could build in response.
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Fundamental physics. You’re talking about trying to hit something accurately thousands of miles away, or, in the terminal phase, is moving kilometers a second.
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Fundamental image is the same : High frequency radar is still only able to resolve details on the order of centimeters. At that resolution, a balloon shaped the right way will appear identical to a MIRV. So there is no way to tell them apart. It isn’t a matter of computing power - the information to distinguish them is simply not there.
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No way to test your system on the real threat. The Russians will not sell the U.S. examples of their ICBMs so that the missile defense system can be tested against them.
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Complexity and extremely expensive, complex sensor and mechanical systems subject to vibration and other stresses. This is why most of the missile tests have failed - a bit of moisture, a separation charge that fails to fire, etc etc etc means that each test one of the thousands of things that has to go right for the anti-missile to work fails.
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The other legs of the triad. With enough time and money, theoretically an ICBM defense system that is capable of stopping everything and heavily tested (including red team testing, where another crew of Americans launches unarmed ICBMs without warning to try to break through) could be built. But what about the short range missiles fired from submarines that travel on much lower, faster trajectories? What about stealth cruise missiles? What about bombers?
Nuclear weapons are immensely destructive and extremely small. America concentrates it’s best educated and most productive (in terms of dollar value) people into cities just tens of miles across. As long as most of it’s people are such easy targets, the party firing nukes will come out ahead in the arms race against the defenders.
I do think a real defense against nukes is possible, but it requires technology far, far advanced of anything existing today. (a real defense is that “people” have to be digital beings stored on faraday cage shielded computers and backed up on a vast network spanning the entire planet, all underground. Physically possible but not really comparable to our current reality)
Isn’t the conventional wisdom that the most likely nuclear exchange would be between India/Pakistan? Given their close proximity, it could quickly get out of control because there wouldn’t be much time to think.
If I were going to live through a nuclear holocaust, I’d want to be drunk.
The Sino-Vietnamese War was indeed anything but “full scale”, it was a punitive expedition on the part of China in response to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.
Most of my sources on this were from the 1980s, when Reagan first proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative. At that time, computers weren’t fast enough; the problem was simply too large.
Even today, it would be an immense software problem.
Remember the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act and the problems with the computer interfaces for user sign-up? An anti-missile program would have the same problem: all of the flaws would become glaringly obvious the first time the system is actually executed. But instead of people being made to wait…people would be made to vaporize.
I like to respond to the original OP, so forgive me if this has been covered already. By the time Dr. Strangelove was released, it was known to the people who actually ran the world that the nuclear arsenals were now large enough and deadly enough that winning would still likely result in the destruction of one’s country (and the rest of the world as well). There was never a real danger that a full nuclear war would happen, because it would be suicide.
In the 80s there was zero risk of a nuclear war. The calculation were done in the 50s by nuclear scientist working on the bombs, and they knew then that even a 1000 H bombs would be quite enough to destroy human civilization, the fallout would kill so many people that civilization would end.
By the 80s nuclear war was unthinkable, as it is at present. The simple reason is the presence of nuclear power plants. Anything that seriously disrupts a country that has nuclear power plants, (like having several dozen H bombs wipe out the infrastructure), just can’t be allowed, for any reason. The same could be said of an old fashioned invasion and bombing war. You can’t invade a country that has even a dozen nuclear reactors (and cooling ponds full of spent fuel). You certainly can’t allow an old fashioned bombing and destruction of a country with a hundred reactors, and 40 years worth of spent fuel rods sitting around. Just one disaster at a multi-reactor nuclear plant would poison the world, and certainly make any invasion of the country a no go situation.
The idea in Dr. Strangelove, that any atomic attack would result in a world wide disaster, a mass release of fallout of deadly nuclear materials, was realized long ago, in the simple truth that any country with dozens of reactors, and the far more dangerous spent fuel ponds, has already set up a doomsday weapon. If you bomb that country (even with conventional bombs), you risk setting off an uncontrollable reaction that will result in mass poisoning of the world.
This is no fantasy. Unless you have some insane world leader with nuclear weapons that wants to destroy the entire world, no sane leader will ever order a nuclear attack on another country that has reactors. It’s suicide, and this has been known for a long time. While during the brinkmanship era people thought it was a possibility, since the construction of 480 working reactors worldwide, and the massive amounts of deadly spent fuel stored next to them, the doomsday weapon has existed.
And nobody wants to set it off.