If nuclear weapons were not invented at any point in the 20th century for one reason or another, what do you think would have happened differently? Obviously, WW2 ends much differently, perhaps in a bloody and protracted invasion of Japan.
Without deterrence and the eventual establishment of “mutually-assured destruction,” would the US and Soviet Union have gone to war? I can’t see either side realistically thinking they can invade and conquer the other, so maybe it still would have played out in a series of proxy wars (much like it did in actuality). The space race was also closely related to nuclear weapons development – would space exploration have happened at the same relatively fast pace without that factor? Without the huge financial drain of trying to keep up in the arms race, would the Soviet Union have squeaked by for another decade or so?
We wouldn’t have had to try to invade/conquer each other to fight a major war in Europe. I expect that would have happened. Soviet doctrine at the time was in love with the use of chemical weapons to support conventional operations. I expect there would have been nerve agent scattered liberally across Central Europe wreaking even more havoc on the civilian populations. There’s a lot of possible forks from there depending on how the fight went.
This requires a bit too much speculation and opinion for GQ. Let’s try IMHO for now. If it ends up turning into a debate the mods there can move it to GD.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
DinoR, can you refer me to some literature on this? I haven’t ready anything like this, but, I haven’t really been too interested in their military policy quite so much as their political.
I think it’s very possible the space race would have happened anyway. The benefits of GPS and spy satellites would still be obvious to both sides, and would have required much the same launch technology to achieve.
Well, nuclear deterrence is widely regarded as significantly cheaper than conventional deterrence by the world’s militaries. So a non-nuclear Svoiet Union would have had to spend more money on struggling to maintain a huge conventional military.
The cynic in me wants to say that without nuclear deterrence, the US would have killed 2 million noncombatants by strategic bombing in the Korean War. But I have to caveat that we actually did that, according to Matthew White, author of The Great Big Book of Horrible Things.
In general, I am forced to conclude that nuclear weapons have probably warded off the horrors of another large-scale total war, even though I hate the things.
I think there would have been another war in Europe. There were many issues left unsettled at the conclusion of WWII, and athough everyone was worn out and beat down by warfare at that point, by about 1980, those old conflicts would begin to rankle with a new generation not directly related to the WWII participants. Conventional weapons would have become much more sophisticated, as all the time and effort put forward into developing the world’s nuclear capacity would have instead been turned toward conventional weapons development. It’s difficult to speculate what those weapons might have looked like, but there is certainly a possibility of chemical warfare playing a part.
The Communist Bloc would not have imploded. The necessity to keep the armaments buildup racing along through a third 20th century major war would have kept their economies hot and nationalism down.
I’d speculate that there would have been a renewed interest in colonizing the third world, as the major powers sought control of raw materials. Insurrections in those countries would have been common and would have bled troops and resources away from the European theatre and the main conflict may have moved from the European continent to somewhere in the 3rd World.
There would have been a continuous, overt, Soviet presence in Cuba. Cuban Missile Crisis obviously wouldn’t have happened, although the US and Cuba might have had numerous spats over escalation of conventional weaponry on the island.
I’ll take a step back from my memories of all the chemical warfare training their capability and doctrine tormented me with. They did view chemical as WMD and knew we did. Neither side wanted a strategic nuclear exchange if things got out of hand. Everything I ever saw at the time, showed a preference for not using chemical weapons if things were going well. Sliming the battlefield slows your own guys if they can be successful without it’s use. It also showed a preference for avoiding escalations that resulted in strategic nuclear exchanges. It’s hard to fully separate the types of WMD from the dance that was happening.
All the assessments were from the US side since they weren’t talking. In a quick look I don’t see that Russia has been more much more open on that issue. Their capability was huge and in some periods well integrated. We believed their was usage in Afghanistan, Laos, and Cambodia although the evidence wasn’t strong. They assisted some allies acquire chemical capability. Doctrine for employment, if they chose to, was pretty robust.
The declassified NIE 11-14-81 (Warsaw Pact Forces opposite NATO, June 1981) (pdf) talked about a “substantial risk” of chemical weapon usage.
By SIE 11/17-2-84/L (The Soviet Offensive Chemical Warfare Threat to NATO, May 1985) they found a general reduction in likelihood and preparation. They assessed it wasn’t a widespread integral part of their doctrine. That paper does include some references to things that had changed in military publications and and training requirements for leaders since the mid 70s. Whether that’s just a change in assessment or an assessment of a changing approach is a harder question.
First, FOIA rocks! That’s two formerly Top Secret documents a google search away. There’s some good reading there if you are really interested based on my quick skim. They do show my quick comment overstates things quite a bit I certainly had to train against the “substantial risk” early in my career. There’s details about their doctrinal employment that drove decision making during training exercises I was in. Whether they would have in the hypothetical is probably a pretty detailed study though.
The impact of the increased buildup on the Soviet economy is interesting. If we lived so long.
The US kept troops in forward positions in West Germany to be triggers. They would not hold back the Soviets for very long, but their presence meant that any invasion of West Germany would automatically be an attack on the United States, with known nuclear consequences. Without nuclear weapons trigger forces would not be very useful, and there would be the need for substantially greater levels of US forces in Europe. That would cost us money, and I’m not sure of the impact on the rebuilding of the West. They might seem far more of an occupying force than the troops we did have.
My guess is that in the 1950s America would have become militarized to a degree that makes our 1950s look pacifist by comparison. In real life there was a draft but it was a comparatively small random sampling; try a 1950s in which mandatory military training began in high school, and virtually every able-bodied male of the 18-21 year-old cohort did either a year of boot camp or an equivalent program integrated into college curricula.
That’s two formerly Top Secret documents a google search away. There’s some good reading there if you are really interested based on my quick skim. They do show my quick comment overstates things quite a bit I certainly had to train against the “substantial risk” early in my career. There’s details about their doctrinal employment that drove decision making during training exercises I was in. Whether they would have in the hypothetical is probably a pretty detailed study though.