If you grew up when I did, then the USSR and the USA both had many, many nukes, and it was a given that if one was deployed against the other, then civilization as we knew it would end because both sides would lob everything at each other. MAD all the way. Being American, I didn’t hear much about the other countries with nuclear weapons.
Now, a few months ago, I recall someone speculating that, based on public words (always iffy), Russia seemed to be considering the idea that limited nuclear war was possible. Don’t remember who or where - just random poster on the Internet. Certainly not something to take to the bank. Didn’t think much of it at the time. But then today, I saw Daily Mail (I know) article about Russia saying Norway was now a target for nuclear response if nuclear war broke out between Russia and US, because there are marines there. I admit, my first thought was “what, like they weren’t already”? I kinda thought New Zealand’s refusal over nuclear subs wouldn’t save them, either. I get it as a political gesture, but I can’t see that it’d be actually useful in “they won’t nuke us” sort of way. But that’s because I’m still thinking in MAD terms.
So, in terms of limited nuclear war - do you think it’ll ever get widely promoted as a possibility, even just by sabre-rattlers? I’m not so much talking about it actually happening (though that’s worth discussing), so much as shift in the perception of the public regarding nuclear weapons. Where they go from “civilization-enders” to merely terribly powerful weapons. Ones that theoretically could be used in a “regular” war. Particularly as more countries acquire nuclear weapons. Will that mindset proliferate?
Personally, I can’t really see that happening. To me, nuclear war will always be the Big Bad Wolf, the great terror, the end of the world as we know it, at least if Russia or US or Russia (with their great numbers of nuclear weapons) are participating. But is that reality or just my own blind-spot?
MacArthur wanted to use nukes in Korea. Tactical battlefield nukes are a useful weapon, especially if you are in danged of being overrun by Soviet tanks. Trump wants to use nukes against illegal Mexicans.*
I expect someday, maybe not soon, but someday, there will be a war, or even a minor skirmish, where someone will be tempted to use nukes. Maybe between Pakistan and India. Maybe North Korea and the south. Someone will take the chance. And when the world *doesn’t *end that day, the next time they’ll be even more ready to use them.
We survived our first nuclear war. One day someone will believe we can survive the second one, and they’ll take the chance. One simple little tactical nuke on the enemy encampment. No more. OK, maybe another. But that’s it! And they’ll probably be correct.
I remember some discussion about using nuclear bunker-busters to destroy either Taliban caves in Afghanistan or Iran’s underground nuclear facilities. That’s as close to “regular war” as I can imagine.
There is a distinct danger of ‘mirror imaging’ whereby the West thinks that the rest of the world thinks the same way the West does, with regard to nukes and MAD.
Mao Zedong once said something to the effect that a nuclear war for China might be tolerable since due to China’s huge population, even if 800 million Chinese people died, the remaining hundreds of millions would still carry on and reproduce back up again. Now, Mao’s gone and the current CCP doesn’t act the same as him, but I could certainly see China using the threat of nukes as coercion against Taiwan (“Reunify before 2025 or be nuked!”) or India and Pakistan going nuclear - India thinking that it too could sustain a population loss of half a billion and still plug on.
You cannot hope to have a population of several hundred million without modern agriculture, transport, electric grid and industry. Expecting those to still exist even after a limited nuclear war is fantasy.
A limited nuclear war could be as limited as a nuke hitting a CVN, Incirlik, Ramstein, or Washington DC. Even if they nuke all of those, hundreds of millions of Americans would survive, with modern agriculture, transport, electric grid and industry. I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of it, but it’s not like we’d all die just because DC got turned into a crater.
ETA: what you’re describing sounds more like full-fledged nuclear war, with many major cities destroyed
A “limited nuclear war” can really be limited. India and Pakistan lobbing a limited number of nukes in Kashmir isn’t going to affect either country’s agriculture or electrical grid. It’s not a fantasy. You could probably even nuke Delhi and the rest of the country would probably get along fine. It’s a big country. Same with rural Pakistan.
Assuming no one will ever use a nuke is the true fantasy. Individually, they’re not magic weapons that level countries and end life as we know it. They make big booms. That’s it. Things, roads, electrical grids, can be repaired and rebuilt.
A full scale war between the USA and the USSR, with tens of thousands of nukes? Yep, that could be world-ending. Five nukes in Kashmir? Nuking Seoul? Very bad for the people under the explosions, but the rest would live on. North Korea is already a mess. You think nuking Pyongyang is going to affect someone in the country? They might not even notice.
And that’s a big part of why non-proliferation has been a cornerstone of US foreign policy for the last 60 years. It probably won’t be Russia or the US who uses one next, it will be North Korea, or someone similar. Someone who has a few nukes, and some people they really hate, and who figures the US and Russia won’t want to escalate to the full-on MAD situation over just a few nukes.
Except that a nuclear response to North Korea wouldn’t be a full-on MAD escalation, since if North Korea used a nuke, all of the major nuclear powers would be united against them. It’s not like the US would respond to Kim nuking Seoul by nuking Moscow.
Of course, even in that situation, we still probably wouldn’t nuke Pyongyang, because we wouldn’t need to. We could easily flatten North Korea with conventional weapons, very quickly.
As said by others, the OP’s idea that world-ending wargasm is the only way is not historically correct.
The Soviet Union believed very deeply that WMD warfare, including tactical nuclear warfare, was totally fightable. And totally winnable. Yes, they bought into MAD at the full-up wargasm level.
But they emphatically rejected the idea that the first nuke they or the US pitched into a battle necessarily led directly and inevitably to full-on MAD warfare. There were plenty of documents released by the Soviet military think tanks, war college journals, etc. documenting their POV.
One of the most worrying things they talked about was delegating tactical nuclear release authority very, very far down the chain of command. To the point that had we/they ever really tried WWIII across West Germany it’s a virtual certainty some Soviet unit getting bogged down would have fired nuclear artillery or short range missiles to break the infantry / armor stalemate. In the first 48 hours of the war.
The only country that has every used the word “unthinkable” except ironically is the US. Many US strategists over the years has said that’s our biggest weakness when it comes to nuclear thinking. We must banish “unthinkable” from our vocabulary in order to think about it. Even if the conclusion that thinking leads us to is something close to MAD: no use short of world-ending use and only in the face of imminent strategic government-ending defeat.
And as Horatius says just above, the entire reason the US has been so big on non-proliferation is the understanding that most countries think of these was weapons of war.
The next combat use of nukes is probably within my life time. And I’m in my late 50s. I don’t see that as a good thing. But it won’t be the end of the world as we know it.
The only reason I can see that we’d “need” to use nuclear weapons in response is deterrence - prove if you’re nuked, you nuke back. Won’t be needed against NK (flattened anyway, by conventional weapons as you say), but against those powers remaining. Maybe one nuke and conventional war thereafter. Though then there’s the argument (internationally, not within US) about proportional response and the number of innocents killed. Though if NK is nuking, then they’ll have at the very least gone after SK. And likely Japan, too. So it’s not like all they would have done was one little nuke to the US that didn’t kill that many, and were exterminated in response.
Another vote for it’s your blind spot. As LSLGuy points out the Soviet Union had doctrinal usages that didn’t see a full exchange. The US did before MAD became the driving doctrinal plan.
Even after the implementation of MAD there were developments of tactical weapons and lower yield, enhanced radiation warheads (aka “neutron bombs”). The US still hasn’t adopted a no first use policy; you don’t bother to say you’re willing to use nukes preemptively, or design less damaging ones, if you think any use is guaranteed global destruction.
There’s also another reason to not just see things from a height of the Cold War perspective. The US and Russia both cut stockpiles significantly since the USSR came apart. The trend later in the Cold War was already towards smaller warheads on more accurate delivery systems. There’s simply less nuclear firepower stored in the US and Russia than there used to be.
I don’t see how a nuclear exchange between peers doesn’t devolve into a death spiral, especially with the fog of war. You start with troops and bases then move onto transportation hubs and cities in fairly short order.
If it’s a tactical exchange relatively far from home, then it could be done.
Suppose that in a US-China war, China nukes an American aircraft carrier, and the US retaliates by nuking a Chinese naval fleet. Maybe China would nuke Guam next. But it’s still a far cry from nuking the continental United States itself, or the United States nuking Beijing.
Well, firstly you display remarkable ignorance about India and Pakistan. Lobbing even a few nukes in Kashmir is going to be disastrous for Pakistan especially, as that entails at the very least the destruction of Mangla Dam (at Mangla, also home of the Pakistani I Corps), which is the main source of water for N Punjab (aka Pakistan’s bread basket) and electricity for Jehlum, Sialkot, Wazirabad, Gujaranwala and Gujarat (aka Pakistan’s industrial heartland). Further North, next to Muzaffarabad (capital of Azad Kashmir) you have the Neelum-Jehlum Hydropower plant, giving electricity to most of the North.
Food producing and Industrial regions take a hit, the country is well and truly fucked.
You also seem to be laboring under a delusion that somehow an exchange will stop at a few warheads, when the history of strategic warfare suggest its not going to be the case. Pakistan is not going to stop at Delhi, and India is not going to be satisfied with Islamabad. For India, Delhi (their largest metro area) is not an equivalent loss to Islamabad (Pakistan’s 10 largest city), and they cannot be sure there won’t be further attacks, better to hit hard now. For Pakistan, there is not guarantee that India won’t stop at Islamabad, better to hit hard and limit the enemy’s retaliation ability.
[QUOTE=LSLGuy]
(snip)The Soviet Union believed very deeply that WMD warfare, including tactical nuclear warfare, was totally fightable. And totally winnable. Yes, they bought into MAD at the full-up wargasm level.
But they emphatically rejected the idea that the first nuke they or the US pitched into a battle necessarily led directly and inevitably to full-on MAD warfare. There were plenty of documents released by the Soviet military think tanks, war college journals, etc. documenting their POV.
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Yeah, I think that was a case of different historical experiences. I don’t think the USSR wanted to fight a nuclear war (I would say the US was; and is, way more gung ho on that score), its just that they had, in recent memory a genocidal war imposed on them, so for them a mass casualty war was not theoretical, it was within the memory and experience of most of the leaders. They thought that if you had to have a genocidal war, might as well be prepared to fight it. On the other hand, the US has traditionally be the imposer in genocidal warfare (against Native Americans), so would see little point in preparing for such a conflict.
[QUOTE=LSLGuy]
One of the most worrying things they talked about was delegating tactical nuclear release authority very, very far down the chain of command. To the point that had we/they ever really tried WWIII across West Germany it’s a virtual certainty some Soviet unit getting bogged down would have fired nuclear artillery or short range missiles to break the infantry / armor stalemate. In the first 48 hours of the war.
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The problem with that scenario is the problem with all nuclear weapons, especially tactical ones. The usage of even a tactical nuclear weapon has strategic implications. To optimize the effect of tactical nukes, you need to delegate release authority to local commander (say at Corps level) since the situation on the ground changes rapidly (Moscow will still be there in the hour it takes political HQ to approve a strike, but that Armoured brigade you wanted to hit might have already broken through by then or dispersed). So, most nations have-on paper at least, plans to delegate authority to sub-commanders.
However, knowing the strategic implications of the use of nuclear weapons,do you really think that when the time really comes, the political leadership will be willing to delegate? As opposed to "you may not release nukes without express permission, I don’t care what the prewar plan said".
Thanks.
Don’t have time to watch until the end before leaving for work, but may do so later. So far, I’m only 5 minutes into the “action” but it’s interesting. I’m American and have not actually watched the news (I prefer to read it) in years, so there’s certain difference in style. We get voice overs instead of talking heads in the studio. No one has yet been called in for an interview (not even the “foreign policy experts” or professors that would have no idea what was going on but be asked about implications anyway when they can’t get ahold of people actually involved) and they haven’t shown any maps, presumably believing the audience will know where all these places are.
Also, and this could be because of the accents, they sound flat/unemotional to an unexpected degree to me. More like a recording than a person. It doesn’t sound like it’s “live” or happening now or like they are just getting info to me. But, as I said, likely because it’s just different than what I’m used to.