With a POD of the death of Konstantin Chernenko, the Soviets pick someone other than Gorbachev to lead (say Grigory Romanov, for example). Realizing that the Soviet economy is utterly screwed, the Premier sees two options on the table: let the Soviet Union collapse or fight the West in a chance for survival. The Soviets say "If I can't have stable government, no one can." and promptly puts all remaining money into the military. The Soviets go bankrupt as planned and asks Bush for some aid. The Soviets are prepared to reject any terms from the President and are ready for an all-out war against NATO. How do things pan out?
WI/PC: Soviets go out "in a blaze of glory"?
- Thread starter Prussian1871
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So when is the best time for the Soviet Union to start World War III?
Would a Soviet advance into Western Europe be hamstrung by rebeling Warsaw Pact Allies?
If things don't go nuclear then wouldn't USSR fall into civil war?
If the nukes fly what would be the difference bewteen NATO shoots first as Soviets are able to break through Or NATO is winning and the Soviet situation grows dire and it looks like there is no ther other option.
What does Doomsday 1991 look like?
Would a Soviet advance into Western Europe be hamstrung by rebeling Warsaw Pact Allies?
If things don't go nuclear then wouldn't USSR fall into civil war?
If the nukes fly what would be the difference bewteen NATO shoots first as Soviets are able to break through Or NATO is winning and the Soviet situation grows dire and it looks like there is no ther other option.
What does Doomsday 1991 look like?
if nukes fly, it wouldn't matter who fired first, the majority of the populations in all warring countries would be dead. IMO, a coup or something else that causes the WarsawPact and USSR to crumble would be inevitable if nukes aren't fired, if such a war were to happen in 1991 when the USSR is already on the verge of collapse. So it would be basically a race between whether the Soviets would collapse or whether the crazies get to fire their nukes before they're ousted.
Yes a limited nuclear exchange because the non-crazies would be trying to stop it.
How does the west respond to a schizophrenic nuclear attack? If they go all out then the other side just say "Screw it" and we have armageddon.
Match the Soviets nuke for nuke, target for target?
Aid the Russian rebels? Would helping them hurt more than help?
How does the west respond to a schizophrenic nuclear attack? If they go all out then the other side just say "Screw it" and we have armageddon.
Match the Soviets nuke for nuke, target for target?
Aid the Russian rebels? Would helping them hurt more than help?
All of the above I'd tend to think. With the addition of the primary effort being all all out conventional push in Europe. A schizophrenic attack by a destabilized USSR seems like the most likely way to get a primarily conventional war to happen.
Assuming they can avoid nuclear escalation? Mid-to-late 1970s. At that point, NATO conventional forces are at their nadir relative to the Soviet armed forces.
Possibly. Depends on how things play out.
Possibly. Depends on how things play out.
Nothing, really. The amount of nuclear ordinance both sides possess is to vast for either to manage a successful first-strike. Mutually Assured Destruction is going to be how things end up.
Ever see Threads? Like that except more 90s.
Soviet military thought regarded the idea of limited nuclear exchanges as a pipe dream. They believed quite whole heartedly that it was a"if any, all" situation.
They were probably right in that. In any case I can't see this playing out as anything other than "Deranged leader killed or locked up in a madhouse five minutes after revealing the plan". Soviet leadership was not completely loony from top to bottom!
Quite. The last Soviet leader to wield unquestioned power over the Soviet Union was Stalin and after he was gone the General Secretary was merely first among equals. One would have to stock most of the Politburo (and quite possibly even the Central Committee) with Hitler-esque megalomaniacs in order to get the Soviet Union to invade Western Europe on what is basically a lark.
I would argue Brezhnev had more power than you are suggesting. However, Brezhnev, early on, was too cautious to over-exert his authority and later on was too sick. And supporting your conclusion, this is true of much of the Politburo and Central Committee. It was a gerontocracy more interested in a comfortable retirement than anything ambitious. Old people generally dont start wars.
Fascinating scenario.
Your basically describing a Soviet-Troll Rage Quit
Even still, I think we were lucky Yeltsin took over rather than some ultra-nationalist bent on revanchivist war otherwise something like may have happened during the 90s
Your basically describing a Soviet-Troll Rage Quit
Even still, I think we were lucky Yeltsin took over rather than some ultra-nationalist bent on revanchivist war otherwise something like may have happened during the 90s
More to the point this is just crazy. Why would be gained by doing so? Destroying London, Paris and New York is poor compensation for having Moscow, Leningrad and Minsk go up in big mushroom clouds. Almost all these people have friends and family which go up in smoke along with their own lives.
Never underestimate crazy. Castro has been linked to comments suggesting he favored nuclear war both during the Cuban Missile Crisis and during various times afterwards. Better dead than not red? Regardless, there is a special brand of narcissist that cant envision a world without them. Classic murder suicide types and certainly Hitler. Perhaps Castro. But I dont think anyone within arm's reach of the GenSec in 1985 fit that description. And it took years for Stalin and Brezhnev to consolidate power and achieve their level of control. Hard to see it happening.
Even Brezhnev doesn't seem to have ever managed to yank it up to Stalin's level, although not for a want of trying. Had he ever tried to rock the boat too much, I'm betting the Central Committee would have quietly retired him like they did Khrushchev. But like you said, he was to old and conservative to really try and kick something like this off in the 80's.
I don't know about this. Mao Ze Dong espoused a lot of the same rhetoric that Castro did about nuclear war being a natural part of the proletariat revolution along with some uniquely Maoist lines about (stuff about hundreds of millions of Chinese overwhelming the surviving millions of Americans and Russians and similar nonsense) as well and yet he never appears to have brought himself any closer then the Americans or Soviets to pushing the button despite having access to nukes for almost decade.. More recently, North Korea is pretty obviously led by narcissistic loons yet they haven't gone ape with their bombs (yet). Thus far, the historical evidence seems to indicate that even ideologically-motivated world leaders still have some kind of sense of self-preservation.
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I've read/heard this about Castro from several different sources. Die for the cause, martyrdom, narcissism, whatever. YMMV.
Castro was under existential threat from the United States which still essentially considered Cuba its property. It's more a case of better dead than enslaved.
Yeah and Che was an awesome guy.
Supposedly, sometime in the late 70s or early 80s the Kremlin had to walk him through point by point as to why a surprise first strike on the US would be a bad idea. Clearly a guy who had thought things through.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/science/22nuke.html?_r=0
More likely if a hardliner is in power the Soviets go back into a lapse of repressive stagnation, as most experts of the time predicted. Oddball Gorbachev was the cause, not the symptom, of collapse. The USSR's economy wasn't all that bad and Stalinism proved effective before. It sucked, but people were used to shortages. It was only when they saw the outside of the curtain they realized they could have something else.