If you kill the head, the body will die. Cruise missles with nuke warheads targeted at the leadership will render the Axis powers powerless very quickly. Hitler’s crazy? Poof! No more Hitler, or most of his inner circle for that matter. Take out Tokyo and Osaka and there won’t be anybody calling for a continued war. The Nimitz has the capability of wiping cities from the face of the earth with no warning and no defense, at least as existed in 1941. That would be the key point. Just Boom, and the city is gone. That will demoralize any opponent. Decapitation strikes are the way to go, with Moscow tossed into the mix just to prevent future problems. The only thing we want to show Mr. Stalin is how to become atomized in 1 easy lesson.
I guess we just disagree then.
silenus, are you aware that it took all of the Japanese Emporer’s prestige to get the Japanese military and people to accept the idea of surrender?
BTW, just how well has decapitation worked in Iraq?
Aren’t real world problems fun? 
No question about that. 
A bit of a digression back to the OP, wouldn’t the Tomcats been able to take out the Zeros merely by whooooooshing by them at high speeds and letting the whatever it’s called, air-wake knock them all agoogleymoogley?
Obviously, I have no idea what I’m talking about, so take this as a question, not a suggestion. I just remember hearing things about things – such as that Jet that went down over NYC right after 9/11 due to an earlier flight. Make any sense?
So, if they ran out of bullets and wanted to save on rockets, would the wooshing work?
Good question. Beyond that, lots of people seem to think that you’d need to kill every single Japanese fighter and bomber. This is obviously completely wrong.
First off, I don’t remember the movie well enough. Would it have been possible for the Nimitz to just plain sink the carrier group long before they started to launch fighters? I don’t think the timeline of the movie allowed it, but I’m going to throw that out there in case that was a possibility.
Second, you don’t need to kill every single fighter. These were 1941 Bushido soldiers, not 1945 Kamikazes. Instant death during a sneak attack would probably have sent a whole bunch of planes running for their carriers. Flying along, sneaking up on those fat, unsuspecting Americans, and poof a half dozen planes disappear in flames and something faster than you’ve ever seen rockets through your formation. Two minutes later it plows through your formation from a totally different direction and you lose another couple planes. You’ve still got an hour till Hawaii. You’re screwed. You may decide to plow through, you may decide to scatter, and you may decide to turn for home. Only one of those has the remotest chance of your and your plane surviving to fight for Japan in the future.
Or, to put it shortly, even WWII Japanese pilots aren’t necessarily going to fight to the death.
-Joe
You couldn’t do any of those things. Even if the Nimitz carried nuclear missiles in 1980, they would have been tactical nukes, not strategic nukes. Their destructive power is measurable in a couple of ships, or a few buildings, not a whole city. You could nuke the Emperor’s palace, or the Kremlin, or maybe Hitler’s bunker (if he was even in a bunker in December 1941), but you couldn’t affect things on a city-wide scale.
However, a big advantage Nimitz would have had, in addition to its air wing and ordnance, was its library. A ship that size is like a small city, so it surely would have a library with quite a few books on military history, or if it didn’t, many of its crew would be military history buffs with their own books onboard.
So I’m certain they’d have had books describing where every major element of the Japanese and German fleets were at about that time, and Nimitz could have cruised around the Pacific and systematically destroy the Japanese navy, flotilla by flotilla, at its leisure. Japanese surrender would be beside the point; they would never be able to mount an effective defense, even though after a few months Nimitz would have changed history enough so that she would no longer know where all of Japan’s fleet elements were. There wouldn’t be enough strong assets left to matter.
Not necesarily. Remember, until Doolittle’s raid no foreign power had ever been able to attack the Japanese mainland. If we postulate Nimitz using a subsurface nuke to wipe out the IJN fleet before the Pearl Harbor attack, and then a highly significant military target on mainland Japan vaporizing, when nobody in Japan has a clue as to why the PH attack didn’t happen or what happened to the attack fleet, the realization that Japan was well and truly fucked would have a devistating psychological effect on the Japanese military. The Japanese military of 1945 in our time line, had grown used to massive bombing raids on their homeland.
Everything I’ve read indicates that if the Allies had shown some spine when Germany was marching into places like the Sudatenland, the German Army brass would have not only ordered the army to turn tail, but would have disposed of Hitler rather quickly. If large portions of the Japanese fleet disappeared, a significant military target in Japan went poof, and nobody knows anything for certain, then I think it’s safe to say that if Adolf suddenly turned into a cloud of radioactive gas (along with portions of the German countryside [say where Hitler’s vacation house was]) that the Nazi government would radically rethink it’s position on territorial expansion.
Also keeping as much of the Nimitz’s existence as secret as possible, not even letting Churchill in on it, would reduce the chances of Stalin learning anything, thus encouraging his own paranoia to destroy him.
I’d say that a tac-nuke of 10 kilotons would definitely affect things city-wide! Little Boy was only 13-16 kilotons.
I do agree that the ship’s library would give the best targeting information, though.
Baloney.
Modern (including 1980s-era) nuclear weapons are so much more efficient than the first generation nuclear weapons that even so-called tactical nukes have several times the yield of the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (For example, the crude “gun” weapon used on Hiroshima only fissioned about 1.5% of its uranium before it blew itself apart.)
Here’s a cite from here:
Actually, the difference between strategic nukes and tactical nukes is more in how they are deployed than in any real difference between yields. While the Soviets built and tested weapons into the megaton range, all such a weapon does is make a somewhat bigger hole in the ground. As you increase the yield of a nuke, the destructive range does not increase commensurately.
For this reason, even our strategic nukes are only in the range of tens of kilotons, (with multiple warheads, of course).
The yield on nuclear weapons has decreased over time typically because of better accuracy on the navigation systems, and also, as stated, the usefulness of mirv systems. You’ll create more destruction with 10 low yield highly accurate MIRVs than you would with one or two high yield relatively inaccurate weapons.
Nuclear weapons have never really been so small as to be designed to take out a few buildings - but they’re less destructive than popular culture typically portrays them. Still, most if not all of the nukes on a Nimitz in that time period would have several times larger yield than the hiroshima bomb - which is largely regarded as having effectively destroyed the city. A 40 KT warhead in the middle of Tokyo would’ve definitely rendered the city unpleasant, even if the surrounding areas were left somewhat intact (the firestorms created by the blast/heat wave would’ve probably caused more damage to the outlying areas than the bomb itself).
The Japanese refusal to surrender was after a long, drawn out war where they thought they could just keep fighting and eventually wear the Americans down. They were in the siege mentality for years, and so surrender came hard. However, a sudden destruction of a significant portion of the navy, and largely destroying several major cities (a Nimitz carrier would’ve carried enough nukes to put several on several cities, at least) would’ve been such a shock, early in the war, that it’s unlikely Japan would even consider fighting on at that point. They’d be completely shell shocked.
How accurate were 1980’s era cruise missles without today’s GPS technology? Could the Imperial Palace or Berchestgarden even be targetted specifically?
You could get close enough. We are talking nukes here.
Memo: Change aphorism to read “Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and nuclear weapons.”
Tomahawk missiles used TERCOM (a terrain radar generated a map of the surrounding territory, and compared it to a database stored on the missile, assisted by inertial guidance systems) prior to GPS, and it was fairly accurate. A CEP (circle error probable - meaning that 50% of the munitions are expected to land in that circle) of about 150 feet. More than sufficiently accurate for a tactical nuke.
Which is probably better than what a WWII bomber could do.
An ubernifty Norden bombsight page can be found here.
Using the SABS bombsight, 617 Squadron were hitting targets with an accuracy much smaller than 100 feet - including the bombs that did for the Tirpitz, and breached the Dortmund-Ems Canal.
Of course, dropping 5 and 10 ton supersonic penetrating bombs gives you a different margin of error. Barnes Wallis preferred near misses, to undermine and collapse targets. Several bridges just vanished into massive underground caverns created by near-misses, but some were actually hit directly. I hear that the US are reinvestigating the concept of the deep pentrator, to deal with underground facilities. Grand Slams broke through feet of reinforced concrete to destroy the UBoat pens in Le Havre. And the bombs were never actually dropped from full operational height. Barnes Wallis was a man ahead of his time.
Si