Nuclear war with Russia: end of the world or not?

I’ve often heard it said that in a nuclear war there would be no winners. As in, the whole world is basically made uninhabitable.

But I’ve also been doing a lot of reading into the recent Russia situation and it appears that compared to the old Soviet Union, the Western powers have Russia soundly crushed.

I have trouble reconciling these two ideas. In a military sense, what practical advantage do we have over another country, if that country is able to cause the whole destruction of the world?

Or perhaps nuclear war doesn’t lead to worldwide Armageddon. Perhaps the West really does have an advantage. If so, what military specific advantages do we (NATO) have?

Our conventional forces are far superior to Russia’s. If a war stays conventional, we will win. In a nuclear war with Russia, the comparisons are meaningless, since both sides are off the scale.

Keep things limited to conventional and NATO would enjoy a sizable advantage in quality and technology.
And even if the USA and Russia thoroughly nuked each other, it wouldn’t be “the end of the world.” Billions of people elsewhere would probably survive in Asia, Africa, South America, etc., albeit with major health issues from fallout.

I don’t know if this is a significant factor that matters in this conversation, but I’ve heard that Russia’s nuclear delivery capabilities are strong in the sense that they possess the land air sea triad. But the missile systems themselves are not very good.

Perhaps one day our missile defense systems will be so strong that nuclear missiles no longer become a significant deterrent?

Unfortunately, the world is not that easy to get rid of. It seems to be here pretty much to stay. As for a catastrophic war, the result would just be different greedy special interest groups abusing their power.

Depending on whether you define “the world” as the astronomical planet, of the human species occupying it.

To piggyback: do missile systems really need to be better than “sufficient” in order to pose a deterrent threat? N.Korea, for example, is not quite sufficent for nuking anything but water. Russia & Associates have been more than sufficient to deliver a warhead anywhere on the globe for many decades.

As for the OP: if it is to be believed the world is actually an oligarchy entertaining the mirage of independent governments, I have to wonder if a nuclear war would ever be allowed to happen. Before things got that tense, a proxy war would almost assuredly be had someplace far away from the nice things.

Um. That’s never, ever been NATO military doctrine. I mean, yes, NATO troops tend to be trained to a higher level than their Russian counterparts (with loads of caveats), and enjoy more advanced (though not necessarily more effective) technology - but the European forces are (relatively) small, as are the American forces. The traditional scenario, during the Cold War, was that NATO conventional forces would try to deter and/or contain smaller Warsaw Pact incursions, but that tactical nukes would eventually be needed to counter Soviet numerical superiority. As of the 1980s, both sides more-or-less agreed that NATO would lose a conventional war.

Of course, the Russian Federation isn’t the Warsaw Pact, or even the Soviet Union, and technology has changed a great deal since the 1980s. Russia’s numerical advantage isn’t what it was - but it’s still substantial.

This doesn’t mean that Russian tanks could roll into Berlin tomorrow - the Russian Army just isn’t built to do that. But there’s this idea that Soviet-model militaries are helpless when confronted with NATO-style forces, largely based on the Iraq experience, and it’s just not true.

We’re not talking about doctrine, but about the world as it actually is. The West’s conventional forces are, in fact, superior to Russia’s. The US’s conventional forces alone are superior to Russia’s, even before you toss in all our allies. Now, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our noses bloodied, and Russia would be pretty much the worst possible enemy we could go up against, but we’d still beat them.

Actually, it’s a lot more even than it seems; the US Army is upwards of 540,000 men, and the Russian Ground Forces is about 285,000 men. The US Army has another half a million reserve/NG forces that are highly trained and equipped, while the Russians have 2 million semi-trained (i.e. they were active duty at one point) reservists who may not have seen a rifle or tank since their conscript days.

On top of that, the US forces are all professional- they volunteer and serve in some capacity for years. The Russians are something like 1/3 to 1/2 conscripts who serve for a year, so the overall capability of the forces is quite a bit less than that of a comparable US unit.

The concept you discuss is MAD - Mutual Assured Destruction. In the dying days of WWII, Hitler for example tried anything he could, but apparently most of his minions were anxious to surrender to the Americans before the Russians arrived, not interested in suicidal last stands. Would he have destroyed the world if he could at that time? Good question - the real question is would his people have obeyed.

You underestimate the nuclear arsenal of the “good old days”. Apparently, each side had about 20,000 nuclear warheads, and various fairly reliable delivery systems. The “unreliability” of Soviet missiles mainly dealt with their accuracy. US missile silos were hardened bunkers, and they supposedly could take a near miss of X feet and still launch. The burning(!) question of the cold war strategists was whether the Soviets could reliably hit all silo targets within an accuracy less than X. (There were complicating factors - would the first warhead disrupt the aim of the others, thus leaving a large number of silos undamaged and free to retaliate?) The nightmare was a surpise attack by the other side that took out the retaliation capability. Then the pearl-haorboree was a sitting duck for conventional takeover.

Should retaliation be necessary, then it was also possible the two sides would proceed to trade waves of bombs for Assured Destruction. With 20,000 warheads, there were enough duplicates to make the result “assured”. However - a paranoid USSR could not allow a Britain, or France, or any NATO country to survive to exploit their weakness after an attack; could the USA count on China to remain neutral if the now-pulverized USA were lying vulnerable? Or was it prudent to take them out while things are booming anyway? Ditto for the USSR - don’t leave Australia or South Africa or Argentina or Brazil to mop you up; with 20,000 bombs you can make sure they too revisit the stone age.

Also, keep in mind the destructive power. Many of the city-busters were 20-megaton weapons, orders of magnitude greater than the 12 kilotons that flattened Hiroshima. Supposedly, these would not only liquefy a city for miles but set fire to the forests and grasslands 50 miles away - and if aimed at silos, make X as large a distance as possible. Any decent city, transport hub, military base, or industrial installation would be a good target. here was speculation whether the fallout would basically kill all life on the surface of the earth with radiation poisoning, or raise enough dust to block the sun and bring on an ice age.

In the last few decades the two sides have climbed down from this peak, but the question remains - how much do we still have left and how accurate is it? One theory said that as targeting got more accurate, the size of the bombs got smaller. So instead of an ice age, we’d just have a stone age.

The latest New Start strategic arms reduction treaty limits the US and Russian nuclear missiles to approximately 3000 deployed warheads each. Thats still enough to destroy every city on both sides of more than 100,000 people and have serious long term effects on the Earths climate.

People in South America or Australia / New Zealand might keep some sort of civilization going, but theres not going to be much left of the Northern Hemisphere in an all out US / Russia nuclear exchange.

-deleted-

Some modest corrections to information provided above:

At its peak in 1964 to 1967, the US arsenal had about 30,000 warheads deployable by various means with a peak ICBM force of ~1100 missiles (LGM-30 F/G ‘Minuteman II/III’ and LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’) delivering a total of ~2500 warheads, and a peak fleet ballistic missile (FBM) force (Trident I/II) of ~6000 warheads. US ICBMs were all stored in underground silos. While they were “hardened” (i.e. equipped with systems to survive a seismic event such resulting from a near miss and protected against air burst effects) they were also dispersed and located away from urban areas. SLBMs were deployed on submarines (James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and Ohio class ballistic missile submarines) which trolled large areas in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on “deterrence patrols”.

At its peak between 1986 and 1988 the Soviet arsenal had about 35,000 warheads deployable by various means with a peak ICBM force delivering ~7000 warheads and SLBM force delivering ~3000 warheads. The Soviet ICBM arsenal was deployed in a combination of hardened silos, semi-hardened shelters, rail mobile, and road mobile, and was largely dispersed throughout the central and eastern Soviet Union. Soviet SLBMs were deployed on various submarines (NATO designations Yankee I/II/alt, Delta I/II/III/IV, and Typhoon).

The largest ICBM delivered warhead was the 20 MT warhead on the Soviet R-36M (NATO designation SS-18 ‘Satan’ Mod 3), of which the Soviet Union deployed 30. The largest ICBM delivered warhead in the American arsenal was the 9 MT W-53 warhead delivered by the LGM-25C ‘Titan II’, of which a maximum of 58 were deployed in silos.

The vast majority of warheads were sub-megaton weapons, and in general a disperse of smaller weapons in MRV or MIRV deployment scenarios is more effective than single large devices. Soviet missiles were not nearly as unreliable or inaccurate as portrayed in various fictions (re: Tom Clancy). While they did not demonstrate the standard of accuracy of American weapons, by the late 'Seventies they were sufficiently accurate to target individual installations, which is about as accurate as any nuclear device needs to be. Despite the accuracy, the vaunted disabling first strike which would render an opponent incapable of effective response was impractical from about the late 'Sixties onward; the ability to detect launches from orbit and incoming attack over the horizon, combined with the almost instant readiness of the ICBM fleets gave the expectation of complete parity in a nuclear exchange.

The deterrence theory of Assured Destruction (the “Mutual” was added later by critics like Herman Kahn to make an amusing acronym) was a game theory approach to deterrence that informed US, and to a much lesser degree, Soviet planning but the necessary prerequisites were never satisfied in practice (and arguably never could be in a real world scenario).

The reality of any limited nuclear exchange is that it would likely escalate to a strategic-level warfare with the destruction of both, and other, nations. Immediate deaths would likely be in the tens or hundreds of millions, with upwards of a billion people dying of disease and famine, and likely greater worldwide repercussions as the industrial base and transportation infrastructure upon which the majority of the world’s population depends collapses. Ultimately it would not be unreasonable to anticipate a loss of 2-4 billion people, and a return to pre- or early Industrial era population levels and technology in the near term (20 to 50 years). The hypothesis of atmospheric occlusion (‘nuclear winter’) by dust and soot particles as advanced in the TTAPS Report is somewhat overstated as it makes many simplifying assumptions, but would certainly cause near term impacts on the climate of the Northern Hemisphere. ‘Salting’ of arable land in the continental United States, Europe, and the Ukraine (the breadbaskets of the industrial nations) would likely cause longer term effects on the health and sustenance of surviving populations.

In a conventional European land war it is clear that the US and NATO powers have both technical and numerical superiority over Russian forces. Even back in the 'Seventies and ‘Eighties when the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact forces had a clear numerical advantage of greater than 2:1 (more in some areas) simulations showed that NATO forces would prevail. However, this makes the assumption that Soviet forces would aggressively move into Central and Western Europe in expeditionary fashion. In truth, the Soviet and East Bloc forces never had the logistics to support any extended thrust and it is doubtful they ever would have attempted such. The function of the buildup of Warsaw Pact forces was to buffer any presumed invasion into Soviet territory (of which the Russian have a cultural fear, Russia and the Kievan Rus’ having been invaded repeatedly from time immemorial). Their strategy would almost have certainly been to draw in NATO forces into a long logistical chain and then attack the chain via naval power while waiting for time and weather to isolate forces, as they have also done again and again throughout history, most recently with Napoleon and again Germany in WWII. The NATO logistical chain, heavily dependent upon the industrial capability of the United States in that era, would have been very difficult to maintain over an extended period.

Had the Soviets truly felt in peril of their homeland they would likely have responded with tactical nuclear weapons using SRBM and IRBMs (which they had many) and a resulting exchange that very likely would have escalated as discussed above. While the whole world would not be made uninhabitable it would be a bad day for everyone involved. It is generally not a good idea to prod bears even if they appear slothful and diseased.

Stranger

Previous thread on whether nukes would be enough to cause human extinction if that were the goal. The consensus - no, we don’t have enough to guarantee a 100% casualty rate.

Write a book, man!

Remember, we contracted with Russia for trips to the ISS. Their modern rockets seem to work quite well, so their missiles can’t be far behind.

Also, even if the missiles had a 50% failure rate (for whatever reason: Blowing up on the launch pad, missing by a large enough distance, whatever), 50% of 30,000 (or even of 3,000) is still a heck of a lot of nuclear missiles hitting, enough that anyone who was on the wrong end of that many missiles could hardly be said to be “winning”.

That was really the hidden tragedy of the Cold War; they were actually more afraid of us than we were of them, as a result of historical factors, not least of which was the aftermath of their WWII experience of being invaded and the destruction and desolation that caused.

So they occupied Eastern Europe and garrisoned it with the best troops they had in hopes of deterring a Western invasion, and backed it up with a bunch of fiery rhetoric to hopefully make themselves seem more formidable.

We misunderstood/misinterpreted the signs and assumed they had designs on conquering Western Europe, and spent absurd amounts of money garrisoning huge forces on the borders, and developing extraordinarily capable weapon systems to counter the Soviet threat, which wasn’t ever really a threat.

Sadly, you’re correct, and at least one Cold War military source, as I assume you know, is on record agreeing. Our hair would get mussed. His estimate was ten to twenty million US dead, weighing in statistical uncertainty.

+1 Big Board

Think that Stranger meant 1984-1987 for the U.S., instead of 1964-67, judging by MX being listed as one of the systems used. Minor quibble though, and a great post, as usual. I’m not sure about that the reliability or accuracy of either side’s strategic forces are as high as stated, but I think Chronos is correct that both sides, even after any conceivable friction or inefficiency, still have more than enough to adequately kill each other.

I’m not as positive about the parity between the two powers though, as quoted here,

All that is true if the land-based force will launch on warning of attack, or is confident that its nuclear deterrent could weather the impact of the other side’s first strike. For the U.S., viewing a hypothetical attack from the Soviet Union, in the early 90s, the latter is true: Trident II had a counterforce capability by that time. Whatever the Soviets shot at the U.S., Trident would still be around to utterly annihilate silos, cities, or both. Even Polaris from about 1961 on, through Trident I, had enough capability to completely destroy the Soviet Union as a viable country, even if they lacked the accuracy to ensure destruction of Soviet nuclear forces.

From the Soviet point of view, I’m not so sure. The vast majority of their nuclear weapons were and are land-based. And, depending on how much you believe Tom Clancy, their sub-based deterrent dies in however long it takes a torpedo to hit them from the U.S. attack sub tracking them. Anyway, the silo-based missiles are hardened, but still vulnerable to accurate U.S. nukes. Other means exist for determining the locations of rail-based and truck-based missiles, which would be a lot less hardened than the silo-based ones. In theory, the Soviet Union could not have faith that their land-based deterrent would be able to survive a surprise U.S. first strike. Or that they would be able to communicate with those units.

What does all of this mean? It means that the Soviets may have felt they would not have the luxury of waiting to retaliate until the missiles hit, but rather would have launched soon after receiving warnings from launch detecting satellites, and/or needed a dead-man’s-hand trigger for their strategic weapons. It compresses the time leaders have to make decisions, and makes the Russians more dependent on systems which have been known to fail or give false warnings. We’ve all read about Stanislav Petrov, and how he didn’t give the alarm that the Soviets were being attacked. He only did so because the launch warning was for one missile, and he didn’t think the U.S. would only launch one missile if they wanted to end the world. Make the optical fault such it looked like the Soviets were under attack by thousands of incoming warheads, as NORAD thought was happening to the U.S. in November 1979, and we may not be here now.

Anyway, that was supposed to be a (not so) long-winded way of saying that I don’t think Soviet/Russian decision-makers had the idea that both sides had the complete expectation of parity in a nuclear exchange, and that asymmetry of expectation might have led to rash action.