Would a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union before they had a nuclear arsenal have been effective?
 It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
 Tip Your Landlord Shirt $21.68 |
It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
Would a nuclear strike against USSR before they had nukes have been effective?
If you don't mind losing Europe in two weeks and not getting it back until you've managed to produce enough nukes to cover the USSR and the rest of Europe in radiactive ash, yes.
The USSR was extremely centralized under stalin, though. If you dropped a bomb over him, wouldn't it completely shake the entire government?
He straight up died in the 50s and they survived, if anything it would have strengthened the government under a long-lived, capable dictator like Zhukov and killed off the parasitic party elite.
>stalin stroking out is the same as a mushroom cloud over moscow
bombing Russia would of made them even more unifited against the genocidal capitalist.
Yes.
But you still need the means to deploy it. And deal with the fact you now have a large army of veterans that spent the end of WW2 brofisting with their USSR counterparts as they looted Berlin.
the US would have benefited from having most of Europe buddy with them and made a zero tolerance for expansion policy against the USSR.
Operation Dropshot was the United States Department of Defense code name for a contingency plan for a possible preemptive nuclear and conventional war with the Soviet Union and its allies in order to counter the anticipated Soviet takeover of Western Europe, the Near East and parts of Eastern Asia expected to start around 1957. The plan was prepared in 1949 during the early stages of the Cold War and declassified in 1977. Although the scenario made use of nuclear weapons, they were not expected to play a decisive role.
At the time, the US nuclear arsenal was limited in size, based mostly in the United States, and depended on bombers for delivery. Dropshot included mission profiles that would have used 300 nuclear bombs and 29,000 high-explosive bombs on 200 targets in 100 cities and towns to wipe out 85 percent of the Soviet Union's industrial potential at a single stroke. Between 75 and 100 of the 300 nuclear weapons were targeted to destroy Soviet combat aircraft on the ground.
The scenario was devised prior to the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles and even included the note that the entire plan would be invalidated if rocketry became a cheap and effective means of delivering a nuclear weapon. The documents were later declassified and published as Dropshot: The American Plan for World War III Against Russia in 1957 (Book title, ISBN 080372148X).
Fascinating, thanks
That's pretty neat
In the American side, war planners in the 1960s estimated that there were about 300 potential targets in the Soviet Union (arriving at that number by adding up all the industrial centers, military targets, and cities with at least 100,000 residents). Nuclear strikes at the time weren't guaranteed to be accurate; missiles could land as many as twenty miles off-target, or bombers might miss because of navigation errors, poor visibility, or being chased, or shot down by enemy anti-air and fighters. Planners compensated by stacking three nukes per potential target. A rough calculation gets you to 9,000 nukes 300 targets * 3 nukes per target * 10 to cover the worst-case scenario for Mutually Assured Destruction — at a minimum.
>Would a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union before they had a nuclear arsenal have been effective?
It could have broken up massed Sov military formations and blunted an invasion West.
The question is at what point could the US have pulled of a nuclear strike without the USSR retaliating? They had the tech pretty damn quick after the war, and the US would still have had to build up its own arsenal to use. I don't think there's really a point where a nuclear strike is really feasible, the best you can probably hope for it is being used as a support weapon in a conventional war, not something that can utterly destroy the USSR in a surprise attack.
Why do americans love to wax about how nukes are these super awesome things and they should be used to vaporize, commies, asiatics and nazis to save them from not having two neo liberal figure heads to choose from and the right to kneel for blacks?
>Why do americans
Whenever a post starts with this phrase, you know you're going to read some cringe.