- This topic has 86 replies, 1 voice, and was last updated 8 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
-
What if the USSR and the USA started a nuclear war at the height of the Cuban missile crisis?
-
Well, what were the plans for if that happened?
-
A nuke launch and a nuke launch, followed by furious negotiation, and with their nuke actually hitting anywhere important, probably greenland and some remote siberian outpost.
MAD wasn’t quite a thing yet and both NATO and the warsaw pact tended to see their nuclear arsenals as something in which progressive escalation took place, rather than fire em all of and let god sort us all out.-
Didn’t the USA work on the assumption they could destroy USSRs nuclear Arsenal enough to only suffer acceptable losses themselves in one first strike ?
-
-
-
It’s interesting how much of a fuss was made about nuclear missiles in Cuba, but then submarine-launched nuclear missiles became a thing (and were much more dangerous than some launch sites in Cuba) and nobody cared.
-
It cracks me up more how Americans still paint the USSR as aggressors in the crisis when the Soviets putting missles in Cuba was just a response to the US putting missles in Turkey, both of which were removed after the crisis.
-
this
-
Commies lost. Get over it.
-
no
-
Don’t have to be a commie to see the hypocrisy, you dumb scrote.
-
-
This is more known than you think, especially after "Thirteen Days."
I think we can blank out the missiles we had mentally because they’re ours, so its okay they’re in Russia’s backyard because freedom. -
Soviet archives confirm that Khrushchev’s intention with the missiles in Cuba was to generally advance the Soviet position (especially with regards to W. Berlin) and rectify the overall strategic imbalance (they needed a response after a US crash program of nuclear expansion intensified by Khrushchev’s lies about "cranking missiles out like sausages"). The "it was just a counter to Cuba" argument came during the later stages of the crisis and became popular as a way for the USSR to save face.
Literally looking at the timeline of events (the years-long gap between the deployments), the extant launch capacity, the initial Soviet secrecy and lack of any planning around premature US discovery, the launch distances of Polaris missiles, how late into the crisis the compromise was reached, the asymmetric terms of the resolution, etc., shows this. -
This to be honest and I’m a generally siding with America person
-
-
Submarine woke af nukes were available on both sides equally. While the USA turkey woke af ones, followed by the USSR Cuba woke af ones were seen as an unequal escalation and subsequent de escalation
-
-
Would be pretty one-sided, the gap between US and Soviet military capabilities in 1962 was rather large.
-
What do you mean? Who had a big advantage and why?
-
We had the USSR surrounded on three sides with nuclear bombers and short range missiles, they had only a couple (as in count on your fingers) ineffective first generation ICBMs that had a low chance of even working at all let alone hitting their target and were on exposed pads not silos. It would have been over pretty quickly and they would be reduced to a glowing radioactive crater.
-
But Cuba had far more active missile heads than the USA antipicated so all the south east would be a big crater too
-
worth it
-
-
-
-
conventional military capabilities go out of the window when you have nukes in such a position though
-
And in this case, the USA had overwhelming superiority in Nukes and their delivery methods.
People often forget that the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal only caught up with the USA in the 1980s
-
-
-
The world would be better off because the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would be destroyed.
-
This but about Europe.
-
-
a few million Americans would die in the initial bombings while the USSR would be covered in nuclear hellfire from Turkey and the UK, along with thousands of American bombers nuking Russia 24/7. Europe might be nuked at this point but it’s more than likely the Warsaw Pact would fall into civil war and WW3 would end with NATO occupation of Russia within a week, with more people dead than in both world wars combined.
-
Nothing you said there was a deal breaker, it should have happened
-
-
1-10 million American death, Alaska is destroyed, American government and society should survive after a bit, may require bringing troops home to secure territory
Europe severely damaged, held together by the Americans
Ussr wasteland
China probably caught in the crossfire-
>1-10 million American death
From what? Their three R-7s on exposed pads that would be targeted by American bombers immediately?
-
-
The two super powers would’ve been hurt but the Soviets even more so than the US. The United States by this time have 10 warheads for every soviet warhead.
-
I think the delivery methods would be the descending factor. USA had nuclear powered cruise missles around this time, so I’m gonna say USA and it’s not even close
-
-
Read "The Second Holocaust" (that’s literally the name of the book) by Robert L. O’Connell
-
Just did. Damn. I usually hate that genre but that was very interesting.
-
-
The early 80s when Able Archer happened was very different from 1962. That would have ended civilization as we know it.
-
I would move to Seattle
-
the downside is that you’re moving to seattle
-
-
-
Well full scale nuclear deployment is pretty much an extinction event. The whole surface of the earth becomes uninhabitable and probably the whole ocean as well.
-
Nuclear apocalypse is a meme, especially in regards to 1961 stockpiles
-
Someone always says this. One the fires and explosions are all over, the radiation is going to travel, and spread its contamination throughout the globe.
-
https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-weapon/Residual-radiation-and-fallout
"The total radioactivity of the fission products is extremely large at first, but it falls off at a fairly rapid rate as a result of radioactive decay. Seven hours after a nuclear explosion, residual radioactivity will have decreased to about 10 percent of its amount at 1 hour, and after another 48 hours it will have decreased to 1 percent. (The rule of thumb is that for every sevenfold increase in time after the explosion, the radiation dose rate decreases by a factor of 10.)"-
Did you even read what you linked?
"Early fallout settles to the ground during the first 24 hours; it may contaminate large areas and be an immediate and extreme biological hazard. Delayed fallout, which arrives after the first day, consists of microscopic particles that are dispersed by prevailing winds and settle in low concentrations over possibly extensive portions of Earth’s surface."
Even small amounts of radiation are lethal. And small amounts dispersed over a wide are are also lethal. Small percentages of nuclear explosions translate to an enormous amount of radiation.
-
-
-
-
Not really.
For starters, the radiation effects of nukes is actually short lasting. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were safe to inhabit within 1 week after detonation. The explosions themselves also aren’t really big enough to physically damage the earth at all. The only major environmental catastrophe might be the fires they cause, but even that isn’t guaranteed to be "doomsday", we have country sized wildfires in Siberia going on today…-
What you missed apparently between 1945 and the present was the development of far more powerful bombs than the ones used on Japan. The hydrogen bomb is many orders of magnitude more destructive than the first nuclear weapons.
-
Crazy thing about the tsar bomb was that it was at half power. Guy who designed it got (very reasonable) cold feet and disabled the outer shell/final stage which cut yield about in half.
-
-
>he doesn’t know about the salted nukes
ignorance is bliss huh-
The cobalt bomb was a meme and even its inventor pointed out its worthlessness as a weapon.
-
He said it was dumb because of the sheer devastation it would bring
Have you ever heard of the fulda gap? Look into it, there were plans to nuke the shit out of it with salted bombs to cut off the Russian armor advance from reinforcements
-
-
-
-
https://i.4cdn.org/his/1632380133291.webm
Not in 1961, hell even if the USSR launched a pre-emptive strike only a few American cities would be hit + Alaska. After so North America would be pretty safe and untouched as the real bombings would take place in Europe and China
-
If this is true then why did America panic so much when the USSR was putting missiles in Cuba?
-
The Soviet deployment to Cuba was a significant increase in their intercontinental strike capacity. Outside of that, they had maybe 20 silos and some submarines, nowhere near enough to pose an equal deterrent to US nuclear forces. ICBMs were expensive to build, so part of the Cuban deployment was cheaply and quickly balancing out the US bomber fleet and European missile bases.
That aside, everything the USSR did caused the USA to panic. There was even crying over the number of cruisers the Soviets were building.
Not to mention the assumption that the USA had perfect knowledge of the USSR and could act on this knowledge, which was repeatedly shown to be false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_1975_ship_reclassification#The_%22cruiser_gap%22-
>Not to mention the assumption that the USA had perfect knowledge of the USSR
I thought the USSR had a reputation for being this secretive, mysterious state?
>Outside of that, they had maybe 20 silos and some submarines, nowhere near enough to pose an equal deterrent to US nuclear forces.
The Arms Race really bonked shit up with America. Was there ever any point when it looked like the USSR could BTFO America?-
>I thought the USSR had a reputation for being this secretive, mysterious state?
The assumption thatIf this is true then why did America panic so much when the USSR was putting missiles in Cuba?
made in that post. American actions and reactions by themselves aren’t evidence of the reality of a situation, let alone possible outcomes.
-
>Was there ever any point when it looked like the USSR could BTFO America?
In the 70s oh yeah. The US military was broken down and barely functional post-Vietnam and there had been a massive Soviet military build-up under Brezhnev. Their nuclear arsensal was pretty terrifying by that point.-
The conventional US military yes but we had plenty of nuclear weapons. By the mid 1960s a full nuclear war between NATO and WARPAC would have been a nightmare, regardless of how "conventional" forces stacked up.
-
-
-
-
-
The soviets were planning on striking every major American city with multiple atomic bombs, with missiles from the Soviet Union and bomber wings flying over the artic. I guess you could describe every major city being destroyed as pretty safe, it reminds me of that line from Doctor Stangelove talking about a pre-emptive strike by the Americans, "You’ve got one scenario where you have 20-30 million people killed and another scenario where you have 150 million people killed". Something like that.
-
>The soviets were planning on striking every major American city with multiple atomic bombs, with missiles from the Soviet Union and bomber wings flying over the artic
And then they wouldn’t because we would have decimated all their major population centers with the nuclear bombers and short range missiles we had them surrounded with.-
Are you not familiar with the principle of mutually assured destruction? You give the order to attack before the enemy’s bombs even start landing, that way even if your nation is in ruins, you know the enemy will have the same outcome.
Large population centers being destroyed is irrelevant to the deployment of missiles and bombers.-
MAD didn’t exist then
-
Lol, why did you decide to post about something you know nothing about? Or like, at least look it up first or something.
>The concept of MAD had been discussed in the literature for nearly a century before the invention of nuclear weapons. One of the earliest references comes from the English author Wilkie Collins, writing at the time of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870: "I begin to believe in only one civilizing influence—the discovery one of these days of a destructive agent so terrible that War shall mean annihilation and men’s fears will force them to keep the peace."-
The concept existed, but the reality of it did not. The USA had "assured destruction" capability against the Warsaw Pact. The USSR did not have "assured destruction" capability against HATO and wouldn’t get it until the late 1960s.
-
Well soviet nuclear weapons production does way up in the 1960s, you don’t need thousands of nukes to destroy a country like America. The soviets had plenty to target every major military installation and population center.
-
>you don’t need thousands of nukes to destroy a country like America
if not America what the fuck country do you need thousands of nukes to destroy?
there are so many major cities so far apart from each other, the country is huge, there’s a significant rural population that wouldn’t get hit, etc -
The thing about nuclear weapons is you don’t need to expose an entire country to an explosion, since the consequences of those explosions will be far-reaching.
I don’t think you quite understand how society works. So I’ll give it a try here.
In the 1960s there are 5 cities with over a million people in the US in 1960, and you could hit every city with a population over 100,000 with only 100 nuclear weapons. So now some massive percentage of the population in already dead or dying, something like half. And the remaining people are in isolated rural areas. These rural areas are now completely cut off from the outside world and no longer have access to global markets and supply chains. So now their only option to avoid starvation is essentially to try subsistence farming without access to modern farming equipment, fertilizers, or basics necessities like antibiotics and water purification, which is going to be a particular problem since the water supply in most areas is now going to have increased radioactive particles. This is an extremely precarious position and may simply result in total collapse.
If turning a nation from a modern industrial economy to a bunch of villages of isolated subsistence farmers living a medieval existence isn’t a destruction of a country, I don’t know what is. -
Exactly how many of those missiles would land successfully, though? And you make the assumption that areas outside of those major cities are all completely rural or backwards. You think a place with 50000 people is rural? Or even places with 5000 people don’t have modern farming equipment? Not to mention all of the military bases etc outside of major cities, the known ones probably getting missiles sent to them (and that’s a missile not hitting a city) and the unknown ones being UNKNOWN.
Beyond that my big issue was your phrase "country like America," which seems to imply there are countries which would fair better than the US against <1000 nukes. If the US isn’t the best-suited country in the world to deal with being nuked I don’t know which is. -
I really cannot fathom how you could try and argue that the simultaneous destruction of every major city in a country wouldn’t result in the country being ‘destroyed’. I mean I don’t even know what to say to try and describe to you the damage this would cause.
And maybe you’ve misunderstood one point here, rural areas won’t have access to modern farming equipment because modern farm equipment relies on fuel, and parts made in factories using materials harvested from all over the world. And if cannot access the world say, due to every major port being an irradiated ruin, you cannot have access to modern equipment. Incidentally I don’t think that would even be the biggest problem for the nation of subsistence farmers, water and fertilizer are probably going to be a more immediate issue.
Maybe just stop and think about the sheer numbers of people that are about to die and how that affects a society, maybe that will help you understand. -
>Exactly how many of those missiles would land successfully, though?
https://www.criticalpast.com/video/65675023366_Missile-Atlas-52D_Chain-Smoke_takes-off_missile-parts
https://www.criticalpast.com/video/65675023370_Missile-Atlas-57F_Crash-Truck_explodes-during-flight_damaged-missile-part
https://www.criticalpast.com/video/65675023348_Atlas-missile-27E_Vandenberg-Air-Force-Base_missile-launch_blow-up_huge-explosion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2n6UaLbgsokek this was pretty much the state of ICBMs in the early 60s
Guess. (^:
Actually after the CMC, several Congressmen voiced their distrust about the ICBM arsenal’s reliability so that Robert McNamara decided to carry out a demonstration launch of an Atlas missile from a silo, live warhead replaced with a dummy unit, into the Pacific Ocean. The serial numbers of all on-duty Atlas missiles were written down on pieces of paper, which were placed in a jar and one drawn at random. They picked Missile 65E, stationed in Kansas at Walker AFB.
But there was widespread protest over this both from Congressmen and the governor of Kansas as the Atlas would fly over populated areas and potentially land on something if it failed (quite likely), since on-duty missiles didn’t have a range safety destruct system. If it did succeed it would also possibly drop its jettisonable booster engines on someone’s kids while they were walking to school in the morning. McNamara then relented and agreed to send the missile to Vandenberg AFB for the launch, but there was still protest over the idea of provoking Moscow right on the heels of the CMC, and if the demonstration failed it would just embarrass the US.
In the end, Atlas 65E was launched in April 1963 by a General Dynamics team as an R&D test and it performed excellently throughout powered flight, the dummy warhead landing within a dozen or so yards of the target point in the South Pacific.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
>Well full scale nuclear deployment is pretty much an extinction event. The whole surface of the earth becomes uninhabitable and probably the whole ocean as well.
Look up the 7/10 Rule you dumb scrote. Radionuclides rapidly decay within hours and radiation recede to the point where it’s safe to walk into the blast zone of a nuclear bomb within a few days of detonation. It’s radioactive dust getting into the top soil and and the water supply you need to worry about in the long-term.
Likewise nuclear winter is a stupid meme. Nuclear weapons don’t magically cause the pulverized remains of buildings from settling, the problem is when the toxic dust settles and causes long-term health problems and can easily take years to completely remove (cleanup of the World Trade Center after 9/11 lasted for years, with the last damaged building only being torn down in 2011).
-
yeah there was a lot of bullshit circulated by leftist scrotebrains like those Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists scrotes (note how their stupid "minutes to midnight" clock would always advance when a Republican was president)
-
What do you think I’m talking about? Its uninhabitable because everything that grows on the surface starts to die.
-
-
-
VGH we wovld be in a Posadist Vtopia right now
-
Doesn’t feel nice to have immediate threat at the border right USA?
-
The missile crisis was a huge fuck up for Kennedy. He *needed* something like the moon landing to boost his popularity or it would have been over for him.
-
Kennedy’s Moonshot speech was announced a month before the crisis.
-
My bad, I’m not actually a burger. The Bay of Pigs was also a pretty big fuck up
-
-
-
-
Nuclear weapons were inaccurate pieces of shit back then and there weren’t that many of them. Even if you’re firing from Cuba to L.A, there’s a huge possibility that you’d hit 150km from the city. There weren’t enough missiles in Cuba to really coat the east coast, so the US would take minimal damage. Maybe 5 million dead, maybe.
It’s only in the last ten years that nuclear weapons have become as effective as they’re shown in the movies, and only with the US arsenal. The russian missiles are still inaccurate. Firing an ICBM across the world at a city is like firing a small mortar 10km and trying to hit a 10m2 target.
-
>Maybe 5 million dead, maybe.
That’s still freaking huge. And America was what, about 150 million people in the 60s?
-
-
Soviet military brass actually thought they were the ones about to get sodomized by NATO superiority. Soviet army staff was always pissed at Khrushchev playing brinkmanship in Berlin and then in Cuba; the "missile gap" was real for the Soviets and they were absolutely horrified at the prospect of war with the Americans because they calculated that they’d come out losing
-
Back then there were only ineffective first generation ballistic missiles fueled with liquid oxygen that needed half an hour to prepare for launch and would more than likely explode in the air or miss their target by a long distance.
-
I’m calling bullshit on this one. What about all the missile and nuclear bomb testing they were doing? What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Your statement just seems too inconsistent with what reality was anon.
-
https://www.criticalpast.com/video/65675023366_Missile-Atlas-52D_Chain-Smoke_takes-off_missile-parts
https://www.criticalpast.com/video/65675023370_Missile-Atlas-57F_Crash-Truck_explodes-during-flight_damaged-missile-part
https://www.criticalpast.com/video/65675023348_Atlas-missile-27E_Vandenberg-Air-Force-Base_missile-launch_blow-up_huge-explosion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2n6UaLbgsokek this was pretty much the state of ICBMs in the early 60s
-
-
>During a 1982 meeting with Soviet officials, Castro told them they needed to get tougher on the United States. He proposed preemptive nuclear strikes along the southern US, but quickly abandoned the idea when he was presented with a map showing that the fallout from the nuclear strikes would blow down over Cuba.[39]
-
From what I’ve read, Castro seems like a real Warhawk who was kept restrained by the Soviets a lot of the time. iirc he was also all for war in 1962, but Moscow told him to sit down.
-
>but Moscow told him to sit down.
Kek
Moscow be like: "Get back in the background where you belong Castro"
-
-
-
why do these threads never touch the secondory effects of a nuclear war, like climate change or spread of fallout?
-
The world would be a much much better place.
-
most of you think we had a good idea about the danger of fallout from the start don’t you?
-
God, could you imagine how bright the future would be if every American city was blown up in the early 60’s before all the damage was done?
Americans would take their country back and so would the Russians, they’d probably thank eachother afterwards for ridding themselves of their demanding governments. -
The question really depends on if the war goes nuclear and stays "limited" or "tactical" or if it goes bad for one side and goes full scale.
Tactical nuclear bombs, artillery shells and rockets for the battlefield are one thing but if the war gets to the point of both sides lobbing SLBMs and ICBMs at major cities then shit is going to go bad really fast.
>"Chicago was just wiped out?"
>"Yes Sir"
>"Oh well, fuck it. Launch enough megatonnage at Ukraine to reverse the flow of the Volga"
-
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.