Operation Unthinkable + fission bombs : who wins?

Great Debates
1

Scenario. Churchill and Truman quietly agree to dispose of Soviet Russia by starting World War II - part II, the nuclear sequel. The Soviet Union did not have a working nuke until 1949, but outnumbered the Allied forces 4:1 in men and 2:1 in tanks.

So the basic operation plan would have been : remain on a war footing. Put every possible resource into production of more fission bombs - I read they expected to be able to produce about 1-2 bombs a month for Operation Downfall. If there was a 6 month buildup period, theoretically the allies could have gotten their hands on a dozen or so fission bombs.

Would this have been enough? Basically, the battle plan would have been to use several of the fission bombs “strategically” - hit Moscow, 1946 or 1947, before the development of those cold war bomb shelters, when the Soviet government used a lot of paper pushers to organize that command economy, and they must have been in central locations, surrounded by mountains of paper used in war planning.

That’s what you have to destroy to win - destroy all that paper and the people who know how to push it, and Soviet logistics grind to a halt.

Was this feasible? Could a B-29 bombing run plausibly run the gauntlet of Soviet air defense and even have the range to reach Moscow and other major soviet areas where the military and logistic planning was done?

For that matter, even if you kill their logistics, would 6 or so 15-25 kiloton devices be enough to stop the unfathomable armada of Soviet troops and tanks…

Anyways, it’s sort of an interesting hypothetical scenario. It would have been a bloodbath - if wartime production of fission bombs followed the same rough principles that American production of other materials followed, within a year or 2, there would have been dozens of devices completed every month. The Soviets would have spread out their divisions as much as possible to reduce their vulnerability. The radioactive ash clouds would have contaminated huge chunks of the battlefield, giving the survivors fatal doses of radiation on both sides.

The allied plan boils down to : put all your divisions on line, in defense redoubts and have mobile elements to deal with flanking maneuvers. Defend against the Soviet attack. Use “close nuke support” to kill the attacking soviet forces where they are concentrated. Nuke the rest of Russia, a few bombings a month, til they surrender.

I’m not sure what the Soviets could have done. Even if they managed to push through the Allied divisions and occupy Europe, if America can send a continual stream of B-29s loaded with nukes to hit targets at will, and it can block the Soviets from reaching the bases in England and Alaska these bombers are launching from with the U.S. Navy, which had an unbeatable advantage over the Soviet forces then and now, then…

It is the logical thing to do if you have a fission bomb, know you have one massive enemy remaining, and know that if you wait, that enemy will also obtain them. I wonder if the operation would have been approved if you could somehow give American planners in 1945 knowledge of the future.

2

Actually, knowing the future, the US and England would had done the same; ignore the plan.

One of the main reasons why the plan was dismissed was that you are missing that almost half of Europe was under Russian occupation at the end of the war. It would had been a nightmare to bomb though the people and countries that you wanted to help.

Unless you wanted to turn into the monster that you were fighting against in WWII, ignoring that plan was the best choice.

3

It’d be easier to smuggle some nukes into Moscow during the celebratory postwar peace.

4

If the bomb is intercepted, than the Soviet stockpile goes from zero to one bombs. A pretty huge risk.

Plus the bombs are considerably less effective if they’re exploded on the ground or in a building vs the airburst explosions that were used against Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

5

Well, get it within a half mile of Stalin and hope for a decapitation attack and subsequent disarray.

Fantasy, I know, just contemplating potential postwar scenarios, if anything including the unthinkable is on the table.

6

The Allied zones of Germany were something like 1,200 miles from Moscow, and, unlike the Japanese, the Soviet Union had a functioning defense force. I’m quite sure the U.S. and U.K. could have put a few nukes on some secondary targets, but Stalin or whoever survived him would have done exactly what they did during the War and put people and industries further behind the border.

7

What about launching the attacks from Finland, though? The Finns had no love for the Soviets. It’s less than 600 miles from Helsinki to Moscow.

8

It’s important to note that B-29s were shot down both by enemy fighters and anti-aircraft fire. The reason they were so effective against Japan is that, by 1945, the Japanese couldn’t do much to protect their airspace. Even assuming the Finns would have given permission, it’s still a 600 mile flight over Soviet airspace. If the planes weren’t shot down over Leningrad, they still would’ve been easily tracked targets all the time they were in the air.

9

Even assuming a few bombers got through, I doubt the damage done by a handful of nukes would come close to the devastation wrought on the Red Army during the first few months of Operation Barbarossa, and the Soviets managed to bounce back from that.

By the late 40’s, SAC had plans, planes and bombs to destroy the top 70 Soviet cities. That certainly would’ve crippled the USSR. But I don’t think even with an all out effort, the kind of capability necessary to tilt a war in 1946 in the US’s favour would’ve been possible.

Indeed, in the event of a 1946 war, I suspect the US would’ve decided its small stockpile of nukes was too valuable to risk actually trying to use and reserved them so that not dropping them could be used as a barginning chip in whatever negotiations ended the war.

10

B-29s flying out of East Anglia certainly had the range to hit Moscow in their normal combat radius (~1600 miles), and at their “extreme” combat range (~1900 miles) had the range to hit Nizhny Novgorod (Gorky at the time), and almost as far as Stalingrad or Saratov. If they flew out of Western Germany instead of England, they’d get a few hundred more miles. I suppose they could have flown out of Iran and S. Korea, which would have opened up most of the factories east of the Urals as targets, with the exception of Abakan and Krasnoyarsk. And at least early on, the Soviets would have been relatively unprepared for this kind of thing. Baku and the Caucasus oil fields would be vulnerable from southern Italy, India and the Middle East.

I suspect that the nukes would be reserved for strategic targets which were extremely hard to destroy through conventional bombing, chokepoints that would cripple Soviet logistics- primarily railroad targets, or possibly cities that were concentrations of multiple facilities that could all be wiped out with one nuke (like… say the refineries in Baku).

There’s no reason that they couldn’t have bombed the beejezus out of most of the USSR the conventional way, with a few nukes thrown in for spice.

The real decisive factor would be whether or not the USAAF could successfully interdict the Soviet logistical train fast enough and drastically enough to render their forces impotent due to lack of food, ammo, fuel, etc…

11

According to Command and Control, Los Alamos wasted a couple years when they didn’t have enough funding or the push to make reliable, field storable and deployable devices. So if you could change things up and have a goal of “kill Russia, 1948”, that would do it, right? If you adjusted your timetable until you have several hundred bombs and attack the second Russia detonates their very first one, this would win. (after Russia detonates their first nuke, you cannot wait any longer because it just a matter of time they will be able to nuke you back. So you eliminate them)

12

What if I add the hypothetical twist that B-36’s became available a year or two early, like in 47? or even in 46?

13

I didn’t realize that Strategic Air Command was ready to kill millions of people pre-1949, when Russia got their first bomb. I may check to make certain that was actually the case.

The thing is, it’s a monstrous action. Stalin may have killed 20 million people and sent a number of dissidents to the gulag, but you would have to kill a lot more people than that to stop the Red Army. You would basically have to turn Soviet Russia into a radioactive wasteland to “win”. If you contrast that with what actually happened, where nobody nuked anybody, some saber rattling was done but most citizens of russia lived ok lives in a 2nd world country…well…

You wouldn’t do anybody any favors by this plan.

14

I don’t think anyone is arguing that it isn’t a horrible monstrous plan. I was just in this for the logistical/feasibility aspect of this hypothetical.

15

The whole point of pre-MAD SAC was basically to do just that. Make up for the deficiencies in Western conventional forces by delivering a “Sunday Punch” early in a hypothetical war by destroying the top-umpteen USSR industrial cities. So at least the US military planners of the time thought it was possible.

16

First flight of the B-36 was in 1946, FWIW, and it was introduced in 1948. I suspect that had there been a pressing need to actually bomb an enemy, they’d have sped that up.

And, the B-36 could carry 86,000 lbs of conventional bombs for slightly farther than a B-29, or, carry 10,000 lbs of bombs 4300 miles. It really was a staggeringly huge bomber.

They could have literally hit any point in the Soviet Union at that range from their existing bases in England or in the Marianas (I used Saipan as my radius point)

17

Um, but Russia wasn’t at war with America or UK… You would destroy any idea of international law, that a war of aggression was a crime, in return you would get global dominance. The nuking of Russia would possibly make the Chinese revolution untenable, the two greatest communist countries would have been rendered ineffective or even defunct. This would leave America in an even stronger position. If we take the dictum that absolute power corrupts absolutely, we could expect this untrammeled and unrivalled power to lead to great corruption and tyranny on the part of the US. With no competition or counterveiling power, with hubris the oligarchs of the US would extract so much wealth from the globe as to provoke a sense that nothing is to be lost by revolting, and a global war would result, the only end game of which would be a global holocaust or destruction of Washington and it’s associated power centres and elites.

18

This is an interesting point? Did planners really believe it was possible, or did they look at what they had against what they Soviets had and decide this was the best option available, with the best chance of success? I’d like to know some degree of confidence they actually had in the strategy.