America Be Watching With The Popcorn: A Sino-Soviet War TL
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McPherson
Banned
McNamara? The war criminal?
THE ANGRY AFTERMATH TO McNAMARA'S CONFESSION
Robert McNamara’s Infamous “Project 100,000”
The list of the man's crimes is incredibly long.
I just got through reading this....well, Asia is now a very different place, and I'm not entirely sure for the better.
One quick thing before I go further: Shenzhen wouldn't have been a Soviet target in 1969 because it was a) a small village then and didn't become a major city until after China's economic boom began in the 1980s and b) it's right next to Hong Kong, which Moscow definitely does not want to hit with a city-buster.
Beyond that, well, you now have a humanitarian crisis of truly unimaginable proportions and, depending on how the fallout lands, caused serious issues for the central USSR, the nations of East Asia or both. You're crippled communism in Asia and made sure the anticolonial movements in Africa, Asia and Central and South America are going to have a LOT harder time owing to supply issues.
One quick thing before I go further: Shenzhen wouldn't have been a Soviet target in 1969 because it was a) a small village then and didn't become a major city until after China's economic boom began in the 1980s and b) it's right next to Hong Kong, which Moscow definitely does not want to hit with a city-buster.
Beyond that, well, you now have a humanitarian crisis of truly unimaginable proportions and, depending on how the fallout lands, caused serious issues for the central USSR, the nations of East Asia or both. You're crippled communism in Asia and made sure the anticolonial movements in Africa, Asia and Central and South America are going to have a LOT harder time owing to supply issues.
But I don’t see a reason why we would do that this time. We didn’t do iotl when the opposition to the war and its leaders was even greater. Don’t see what would change that could cause it to happen this time.
edit: didn’t know about project 100K being a real thing. But my point still stands.
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McPherson
Banned
Maybe McNamara's 100,000 gets the press reportage it deserved at the time and did not really get. Maybe the bombing campaign gets similar treatment? Whatever it takes. But imperialist racist colonialism is just that, and Vietnam fits the definition. And imperialist wars of aggression are in my opinion, war-crimes against peace.
Example of the American mindset.
One could also count up the massacres.
Example of the American mindset.
Military Slang during the Vietnam War
Much of the terminology is racist and derogatory of the Vietnamese people. This denigration of their human dignity and the respect of an "ally" is kind of indicative of the American soldier in-country. Historically, if one wanted to know who the imperialist colonial interloper was, one could stroll down to the local infantry barracks of the occupier and listen to the interloper infantry slang to measure the degree of imperialism present in that infantry.One could also count up the massacres.
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These are more your opinions. That it was an imperialist war and what not. Or that it was a war crime. I’m not gonna debate that with you. It just doesn’t change that the US’s view on the war and its leader won’t be any different if not slightly better off. Nothing will him put under any trial if it didn’t happen in our timeline. Especially since here we won the war.
NO , air bursted cities , as opposed to ground bursted hard targets , mean that there is a minimal amount of fallout. All the bad things in WW3 scenarios are due to people modelling the effects of a largely counterforce strike on silos, bunkers and hardened facilities that need ground bursts to kill. This scenario where all the big bombs are just killing cities with airbursts might cause a few redder sunsets but no real radioactive contamination outside China or the few areas in Russia that got hit. Indeed tactical warheads probably ended up causing more contamination then the big boys.
Thanks for the reply. I was asking because different types of nukes create different radiation profiles. There are dirtier bombs as well as those described in the story.
McPherson
Banned
History has discredited the Southeast Asia "domino theory". What the PRVN fought was a war of national liberation against foreign occupiers.
Unless the fireball touches the ground then the highly irradiated material is only really the bomb/warhead itself. The largest of those used in this story appears to be an SS-8 which had a warhead including casing that weighed around 2 tons. For reference Chernobyl released around 60t of material. So the total amount from all the bombs would appear to be of the order of a Chernobyl sized event. Very detectable but not dangerous to the US. Another comparison would be the largest OTL test , that of the Tsar Bomb, which was a airburst detonation of a 50MT bomb over Mityushikha Bay, it would have released 27t of material ).
Yes, the bombs are dirtier than modern ones ( they are less efficient so are bigger with more radioactive material ) but they were not deliberately made dirty ( the Doomsday Cobalt bombs in Science Fiction have an extra jacket of mainly Cobalt just to be irradiated )
Well, in benevolent hindsight that’s true, but at the time the whole of SEA going communist (leaning to either Moscow or Peking) was perceived as a very real threat. Remember too that the atrocities perpetrated by the communist forces (mostly against the the very people they were “liberating”) were just as horrific as what the “colonial” forces were inflicting. Cambodia is a stark example. That said, the West, and America in particular, has a very poor track record of propping up brutal anti-communist regimes in “defense of freedom”. So nobody is wearing any halos.
ric350
McPherson
Banned
1. What others do, does not justify one's own acts in International Law or in human morality.
2. Colonial imperialist behavior has been justified by many excuses. In the end, it has been about a foreign interloper imposing its rule on a local people to exploit them economically and politically, mostly through military means and political oppression.
3. War by its vary nature is an atrocity. Even the theory of just or "defensive" war accepts that it is a wastage and a form of murder only justified by self defense.
4. Careful examination of national wars of liberation can show that in most cases the national war of liberation was an effort by a local population to throw a colonial imperialist occupier (interlopers) out of their land and assert their own political and economic sovereignty.
5. Examples:
-American revolutionary war.
-Italian unification.
-Mexican revolution against Spain.
-Mexican revolution against France.
-Decolonizations in South America.
-Various Islamic revolutions post WWII in the Middle East and North Africa.
-Decolonization of sub-saharan Africa.
-Decolonization of Indonesian Archipelago.
-Algeria and Vietnam, both extremely prolonged, vicious and bloody.
-and the biggest one and bloodiest one... CHINA.
2. Colonial imperialist behavior has been justified by many excuses. In the end, it has been about a foreign interloper imposing its rule on a local people to exploit them economically and politically, mostly through military means and political oppression.
3. War by its vary nature is an atrocity. Even the theory of just or "defensive" war accepts that it is a wastage and a form of murder only justified by self defense.
4. Careful examination of national wars of liberation can show that in most cases the national war of liberation was an effort by a local population to throw a colonial imperialist occupier (interlopers) out of their land and assert their own political and economic sovereignty.
5. Examples:
-American revolutionary war.
-Italian unification.
-Mexican revolution against Spain.
-Mexican revolution against France.
-Decolonizations in South America.
-Various Islamic revolutions post WWII in the Middle East and North Africa.
-Decolonization of sub-saharan Africa.
-Decolonization of Indonesian Archipelago.
-Algeria and Vietnam, both extremely prolonged, vicious and bloody.
-and the biggest one and bloodiest one... CHINA.
Arguably the defense of the Soviet Union against the Third Reich was greater and more costly, though of course involving fewer people in an absolute sense due to China having the larger population.
McPherson
Banned
The defense of the USSR was a war of self defense. Estimated cost was about 7-9 million military and 15-20 million civilian deaths in The Great Patriotic War. I have used the ratio of 1 in 9 Russians murdered in that war because that seems to be the number the Russians accept as likely. The Russians are not even sure what the true final numbers are.
China threw out Britain, the United States, Russia, Japan and the Chinese collaborationists who cooperated and allied with the "foreign devils". Estimated cost during the Century of Shame? About 50-100 million DEAD from 1845 to 1945. Nobody knows how many more Chinese Mao had murdered post 1945 to consolidate and maintain his rule; but the numbers are believed to be staggering and somewhere in the millions to tens of millions range.
China threw out Britain, the United States, Russia, Japan and the Chinese collaborationists who cooperated and allied with the "foreign devils". Estimated cost during the Century of Shame? About 50-100 million DEAD from 1845 to 1945. Nobody knows how many more Chinese Mao had murdered post 1945 to consolidate and maintain his rule; but the numbers are believed to be staggering and somewhere in the millions to tens of millions range.
marathag
Banned
With fusion devices, the extra jacket would be U-238 for extra yield, and dirtier, than say a jacket of lead, that was 'clean' as then more of the bombs yield came from the fusion secondary than the primary fission 'sparkplug'
This is somewhat off-topic, but the Chinese only really "threw out" the Japanese and that was with copious American, Soviet, and British help. It doesn't fit the narrative of a grand anti-colonial struggle, it was a very windy and traumatic path of nationbuilding by multiple actors, many of whom were themselves the "Chinese collaborationists" you mention.
McPherson
Banned
One last response and then take this to PM. We should not derail the thread further.
Answering The Old Question: Who Lost China? : NPR
No matter how one cuts it, the national war of liberation (Chinese civil war between Mao and Chiang) had as its ultimate goal, Chinese unification under a Chinese central government and the expulsion of foreigners. That especially included the Americans. Proof? The Korean War.