DBWI: How could we have avoided nuclear war?

Yeah, yeah, I know, this has been looked at a million times and shot down just as often, but I found something that makes it look like The Grand Finale might not have been as unavoidable.

Basically I was scavenging for tinned food in an old school in the village near me, and I happened upon a history textbook, one about the leadup to the Bombing of Cuba. From what I could tell, 'Butcher Jack' Kennedy might have actually been a little more diplomatic with the Soviets before launching those planes, had he or a few different people made different choices. I can't remember much from it, bloody bandit grabbed it for making fires, but the general idea stuck with me.

Sure, even if we didn't blow everything up back then, it didn't mean we couldn't have done the same five or ten years later, but still though, we might just have lasted long enough to settle things with the Communists without doing what we did. How could the world have lasted through the tensions after 1945, without destroying itself?

Try to hurry up with replies, my bandwidth ration for the month is nearly finished.

Here in the USA, things are pretty well-rebuilt. Some Memorials and such, and Newark and Providence wouldn't be the major cities they are today, but the United States fought in self defense, not out of a desire to burn the world.

The USA took about eighteen nuclear strikes, but you Russians, well, I'm not surprised at your plight today.

Even though your Stalinist Dickheads fired first, and your leadership created the whole Crisis, I do agree that Kennedy was too weak a man for the Presidency.

But it's been fifty years, and I should be more polite to a Russian whose grandparents simply lived under a Stalinist dictatorship.

Without World War III, the US would not have had Presidents Lyndon Johnson (1962-1965), Nelson Rockefeller (1965-1969) and Richard Hughes (1969-1977).

And if Nixon did not die of cancer in 1967, he might have been elected President.

But credit goes to Hughes for moving the nation's capital to Newark and for getting the country out of the recession that he inherited from Rockefeller.

Maybe you could hit Patton with a car? He caused a lot of trouble and tension, and I'm pretty sure he was a major cause. His attitude poisoned the whole US military.
Might be ASB luck, but it should do for a PoD.... the man was basically nuts, anyway. (who designs a better kind of sword in the age of machine guns and tanks?)

Blue Max said:

Here in the USA, things are pretty well-rebuilt. Some Memorials and such, and Newark and Providence wouldn't be the major cities they are today, but the United States fought in self defense, not out of a desire to burn the world.

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Maybe if you went for a tit-for-tat response, instead of going insane and launching everything, then Europe might not be the hellhole it is now (its bad enough here in Ireland. Imagine what it's like in England, France, what used to be the Germanys, all mostly dead and under the control of whatever tinpot wins over enough crazies to hold an old town).

Even though your Stalinist Dickheads fired first, and your leadership created the whole Crisis, I do agree that Kennedy was too weak a man for the Presidency.

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Stalinism died with Stalin. I'd like to think that Khrushchev, had that whole mess been avoided, might've opened up the Soviet Union to work something out with the west.

Saphroneth said:

Maybe you could hit Patton with a car? He caused a lot of trouble and tension, and I'm pretty sure he was a major cause. His attitude poisoned the whole US military.
Might be ASB luck, but it should do for a PoD.... the man was basically nuts, anyway. (who designs a better kind of sword in the age of machine guns and tanks?)

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He served in World War One, and was wounded sometime late in the war (though everything the Americans did in the war could've qualified as 'late in the war'). Maybe we could've gotten rid of him then? Spares Eisenhower the trouble of dealing with him in the Second War, though now I think about it, 'Ike' could've actually became a Republican, as it was said he joined the Democracts to get away from Patton!

Drunkrobot said:

Maybe if you went for a tit-for-tat response, instead of going insane and launching everything, then Europe might not be the hellhole it is now (its bad enough here in Ireland. Imagine what it's like in England, France, what used to be the Germanys, all mostly dead and under the control of whatever tinpot wins over enough crazies to hold an old town).

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Let's see, the Soviet Union is launching their entire nuclear arsenal, and so we have how long to work out the math problem? Instead of throwing everything we had at them, we should fire only 20 ICBMs at them--and that's supposed to reduce the megatonnage that hit Ireland?

Or maybe this is earlier in the situation, where the Soviet Union has launched nuclear weapons from Cuba. They shot down our U-2 Over Cuba, they fired the first shots, and they used nuclear weapons first, and they went strategic on their nuclear weapons. Tit for Tat only applies if they have any interest in NOT ESCALATING the conflict.

Restraint was our Post-War policy. How many times have major political figures questioned the wisdom of supporting Stalin over Hitler? The rise of "Reformed Nazism" against Slavs is disgusting and our Presidents, thank god, have never given in to that impulse.

If we lacked restraint we'd be colonizing a New America and wiping out any trace of the Russian people.

Drunkrobot said:

Stalinism died with Stalin. I'd like to think that Khrushchev, had that whole mess been avoided, might've opened up the Soviet Union to work something out with the west.

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Most accounts of Khrushchev focus on his legacy, the terrible 'deathlands' centered around Muscovy, Lake Lagoda, the Dnieper River and the Volga Bend.

To what degree Khrushchev ordered the peoples of the Soviet Union to rebuild gulags and use forced labor in the chaotic days after the war is unclear. But few things are more Stalinist than simply working your people to death, or launching gigantic purges against anyone who could be to "blame" for the hardship, or the strange orders issued in his name up to three months after the attacks.

No one knows when Khrushchev died, or when he was overthrown, or even if he lived in exile. But I would claim that his "November Policies" are on his head--and they were as Stalinist as a seven minute trial.

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OOC: It's 50 YEARS after the nuclear war. Don't you think that the damage in something like Ireland would have largely been fixed by now?

As a citizen living in New China, my country would certainly not be where it is today. As the saying goes China "Sat atop the mountain and watched the tigers fight".Though we did have our own problems when many of the central leadership perished when the few nuclear weapons struck Beijing, my grandparents recalled the brief but bloody period of confusion in the weeks after the attack. Though in the end the war left the USSR practically destroyed and Siberia open for the taking.

Now come to think about it, we would not have the East-Asian Economic Union that I currently work for. Perhaps China and Japan would still be at each others throats over what happened in the Second World War, had the Third not occurred, can you imagine that ?

Blue Max said:

Or maybe this is earlier in the situation, where the Soviet Union has launched nuclear weapons from Cuba. They shot down our U-2 Over Cuba, they fired the first shots, and they used nuclear weapons first, and they went strategic on their nuclear weapons. Tit for Tat only applies if they have any interest in NOT ESCALATING the conflict.

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Maybe if we didn't park every nuclear missile we had on the Iron Curtain, then maybe they wouldn't have wanted to risk sending missiles to Cuba anyway.

OOC: It's 50 YEARS after the nuclear war. Don't you think that the damage in something like Ireland would have largely been fixed by now?

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OOC: We might be having different ideas of just how bad the war actually was. I was imagining that Europe (which is closer to the USSR and contains much of the conventional forces NATO could muster) would be bombed much harder than the US, if for nothing else than the fact that the US is harder to hit. Then when you throw in Chemical and Bioweapons, you're looking at a man-made Black Death. As for Ireland, while it doesn't contain much that would justify sending a nuclear bomb, it could be expected to get flooded by refuges from Great Britain, that could only intensify the Troubles (I'm in N. Ireland). Imagine the IRA with Nerve Gas I'd think that even if the US is able to keep together, then it wouldn't want to send anything to what has now become a bottomless pit of strife, if it even has any strength beyond protecting the Americas.

Drunkrobot said:

Maybe if we didn't park every nuclear missile we had on the Iron Curtain, then maybe they wouldn't have wanted to risk sending missiles to Cuba anyway.

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First of all, why aren't you damning Khrushchev for his stupidity?

He's a Stalinist Asshole who managed to turn his Industrial State into a Pre-Hunting and Gathering Forage Society. The architect of a communist state dismantled class and social distinctions via nuclear explosive. Now I might be taking some liberties with Communism, and I'm not sure "Sell sex for food" is in the communist manifesto, but that's the house Nik-i-Dik created.

As for Europe: We tried to get along, we really did. You keep blaming the United States for starting a nuclear war--but we neither started the war, nor the nuclear parts of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Some blame needs to go to JFK for allowing Castro to survive the Bay of Pigs, but the nation of Neville Chamberlain is not going to play that card against us.

Drunkrobot said:

OOC: We might be having different ideas of just how bad the war actually was. I was imagining that Europe (which is closer to the USSR and contains much of the conventional forces NATO could muster) would be bombed much harder than the US, if for nothing else than the fact that the US is harder to hit. Then when you throw in Chemical and Bioweapons, you're looking at a man-made Black Death. As for Ireland, while it doesn't contain much that would justify sending a nuclear bomb, it could be expected to get flooded by refuges from Great Britain, that could only intensify the Troubles (I'm in N. Ireland). Imagine the IRA with Nerve Gas I'd think that even if the US is able to keep together, then it wouldn't want to send anything to what has now become a bottomless pit of strife, if it even has any strength beyond protecting the Americas.

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Western Europe would have the USA to eventually rebuild it.

One problem is that your character's PoV is very bizarre. The Soviet Union could only do so much damage to Ireland and Europe in this situation by attacking first--and if that's the case, then the charge is that the USA is tardy and too slow to use its nuclear weapons.

A lot of these concerns, like the Soviet Union has launched biological and chemical attacks against the UK, would mean that they've decided to use those deliberately and have prepared such payloads well in advance.

If the Soviets really fired from under attack, they'd probably not have those sorts of weapons in use. I'm not sure that Soviet Bioweapons would be in place at this point, and Soviet Chemical strikes would have been gone a month after the attack at worst.

In any case, I think the Soviet attack would largely be nuclear, not Bio or Chem. In the death throes of their country, they could have hit population targets or economic targets, but they'd be bringing it upon themselves by their actions.

Blue Max said:

Western Europe would have the USA to eventually rebuild it.

One problem is that your character's PoV is very bizarre. The Soviet Union could only do so much damage to Ireland and Europe in this situation by attacking first--and if that's the case, then the charge is that the USA is tardy and too slow to use its nuclear weapons.

A lot of these concerns, like the Soviet Union has launched biological and chemical attacks against the UK, would mean that they've decided to use those deliberately and have prepared such payloads well in advance.

If the Soviets really fired from under attack, they'd probably not have those sorts of weapons in use. I'm not sure that Soviet Bioweapons would be in place at this point, and Soviet Chemical strikes would have been gone a month after the attack at worst.

In any case, I think the Soviet attack would largely be nuclear, not Bio or Chem. In the death throes of their country, they could have hit population targets or economic targets, but they'd be bringing it upon themselves by their actions.

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OOC: This is the timeline of events I had imagined:

Talks between the superpowers breaks down.
Kennedy orders the bombing and invasion of Cuba (this gets him the name 'Butcher Jack', as this event is marked as the one that leads to war).
The Soviet Union and Cuba strike the US in response, though try to limit the number of nukes launched, only enough to deter the Americans to stop.
The US goes all out and launches everything at the Soviets.
The Soviets then go all out in response, along with an invasion of Western Europe that eventually is bogged down with both sides resorting to NBC weapons.

Defense of the Mainland being the priority, and both the West and East Coasts hit hard by missiles from Cuba and Siberia, America cuts its losses in Europe, which basically becomes the Middle East, only far, far worse. With the land being fought over now being irradiated and gassed, the land war stops indefinitely somewhere in West Germany, though what is left of the Soviet Union funds terrorist movements in France and the UK, which in turn are just given enough money by the US to keep ticking over (let's not beat around the bush, it was and is America's foreign policy to cripple all empires except its own). My character is thus justifiably bitter and likely mentally unstable to imagine anything, really.

Of course, I didn't want to set off an anti-america circejerk, neither did I want anybody to conform to that exact timeline, but that's what I imagined my characters PoV would be.

Drunkrobot said:

OOC: This is the timeline of events I had imagined:

Talks between the superpowers breaks down.
Kennedy orders the bombing and invasion of Cuba (this gets him the name 'Butcher Jack', as this event is marked as the one that leads to war).
The Soviet Union and Cuba strike the US in response, though try to limit the number of nukes launched, only enough to deter the Americans to stop.
The US goes all out and launches everything at the Soviets.
The Soviets then go all out in response, along with an invasion of Western Europe that eventually is bogged down with both sides resorting to NBC weapons.

Defense of the Mainland being the priority, and both the West and East Coasts hit hard by missiles from Cuba and Siberia, America cuts its losses in Europe, which basically becomes the Middle East, only far, far worse. With the land being fought over now being irradiated and gassed, the land war stops indefinitely somewhere in West Germany, though what is left of the Soviet Union funds terrorist movements in France and the UK, which in turn are just given enough money by the US to keep ticking over (let's not beat around the bush, it was and is America's foreign policy to cripple all empires except its own). My character is thus justifiably bitter and likely mentally unstable to imagine anything, really.

Of course, I didn't want to set off an anti-america circejerk, but that's what I imagined my characters PoV would be.

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OOC:

I was thinking something like this:

-Khrushchev secretly places nuclear weapons in Cuba.
-Khrushchev lies about this for about 1 month before they are discovered.
-JFK discovers the Missiles via a Spy Plan Recon
-JFK announces a Quarantine of Cuba
-Intense Global Scrutiny as the Cuban Missile Crisis Begins
-A U-2 Spy plane is shot down. JFK had considered a reprisial if this happened, and OTL, it did...

[POD]

-JFK decides to take out the Missile Silos via Conventional Bombing.
-Under Fidel Castro's instructions, the missiles launch against the USA.
-The USA reflexively moves to high readiness as nuclear hits against the Gulf Coast begin.
-High Readiness means incidents across Europe and at Sea.
-The Soviet Union decides to fire its nuclear arsenal as it believes a nuclear war is imminent and lacks much second-strike ability. This isn't a measured strike, the Soviet Union only has 20 ICBMs and so it's now or never. This decison means unload the whole military package against Europe and taking out the Missiles in Turkey and Italy that inspired Khrushchev to place weapons in Cuba.
-The USA sees the Soviet Nuclear Launch, has no idea at the targets, but decides to fire everything. Everything is vastly more than the Soviet Union has.

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The problem with your scenario is that the Soviet Union has no way to make the USA stop via launching. The Soviets lack the launch vehicles to cripple the United States. Hitting Washington and Omaha might take out the leadership to organize a nuclear counterstroke, but it doesn't stop the nuclear counterstrike.

Furthermore, the Soviets will eat nuclear weapons if they to invade Western Europe in a nuclear war. That won't bog down, because the USA has vastly more nuclear weapons than the Soviet Union does. It will turn Germany into a Hellscape, but this is nuclear war--no one expects anything less.

Europe might get trashed, but the Soviets are completely to blame and there's no way they'd make a measured effort as you suggest.

There's no necessity for TTL's PoD to be set during the Crisis. Like how it was posted earlier, Patton not dying in 1945 is established as not happening, who knows how far back the PoD(s) could be set back, and still leading to a Cuban Missile Crisis between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Maybe Korolev is never arrested, he builds up a rocketry empire during World War II, the Soviets get a head-start in Ballistic Missiles, and the ICBM force is larger than OTL 1962? In fact, who says it has to be 1962, maybe Kennedy is never killed, gets a second term, and the world ends nearing the end of the 60's?

Let's try to keep this focused on in-character discussion, although I feel awkward having an argument over who caused a war that never happened!

Don said:

As a citizen living in New China, my country would certainly not be where it is today. As the saying goes China "Sat atop the mountain and watched the tigers fight".Though we did have our own problems when many of the central leadership perished when the few nuclear weapons struck Beijing, my grandparents recalled the brief but bloody period of confusion in the weeks after the attack. Though in the end the war left the USSR practically destroyed and Siberia open for the taking.

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Siberia did declare its independence after the Yakutians kicked out (or rather ethnic cleansed) the Russians. Israel also deserves a lot of credit for rescuing the surviving Jewish population and flying them into the country.

Golda Meir successfully courted the Russian Jewish community when she succeeded Ben Gurion as Prime Minister. She was Prime Minister for 15 years, and I doubt she would have been PM if there was no nuclear war.

Of course, Israel would probably not have signed peace treaties with Jordan and Lebanon

I could imagine avoiding the nuke war, perhaps, if Adlai Stevenson somehow was re-nominated by the Dems and then elected in 1960. He was ahead of his time in advocating for a less militarized approach to foreign policy.

Another possibility may seem ironic, but how about Dick Nixon as President? Unlike Kennedy, he did not have to prove how tough he was. Everyone already knew he was opposed to the Reds. He might have been able to compromise with Moscow and not lose face. And with Cabot Lodge as VP, he would have had plenty of good advice on foreign policy.

Don said:

As a citizen living in New China, my country would certainly not be where it is today. As the saying goes China "Sat atop the mountain and watched the tigers fight".Though we did have our own problems when many of the central leadership perished when the few nuclear weapons struck Beijing, my grandparents recalled the brief but bloody period of confusion in the weeks after the attack. Though in the end the war left the USSR practically destroyed and Siberia open for the taking.

Now come to think about it, we would not have the East-Asian Economic Union that I currently work for. Perhaps China and Japan would still be at each others throats over what happened in the Second World War, had the Third not occurred, can you imagine that ?

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OC:

Dude had the US and USSR gone all out China would have gotten more than a "few" nukes. The US and Russia would have hit China to just make sure it didn't become a threat.

free115 said:

OC:

Dude had the US and USSR gone all out China would have gotten more than a "few" nukes. The US and Russia would have hit China to just make sure it didn't become a threat.

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OOC: Still fairly early in the Sino-Soviet Split to warrant a Soviet nuclear attack, especially given the fact they needed every bomb against the Soviets. In OTL, Kennedy was against bombing the Red Chinese, as recorded in one of the tapes, its unlikely given his stance and the situation for him to authorizing a nuclear war in East Asia not against the USSR.