African nuclear war

Destroying the South African govt form the air would have been pretty easy.

So you're saying the Soviets would send a gigantic percentage of their strategic bombers to South Africa, risking casualties due to South African air defenses and the sheer distance, because the South Africans use a nuke in Angola?

And do you think the US would let them?

And let's not wank air-power too much. It took six weeks of round-the-clock air strikes to degrade Iraq's military capability for the ground campaign in the 1991 Gulf War. And that's with huge numbers of carrier- and ground-based aircraft in-theater.

The Soviets did not have a carrier fleet and getting their aerial forces to pro-Soviet states like Mozambique, non-UNITA Angola, etc. would take a LOT of time and effort. The build up for Desert Storm took months, after all.
 
@MacCaulay

The South Africans also had a very advanced ICBM program. Is there any chance that in the situation you described they might attempt a strike on Havana?

I think that would anger the entire Americas, including the USA. For one, Florida is close enough to suffer from a miss. Two, there are a lot of Cuban exiles and Cuban-Americans living in the USA. They hate Castro, but do they hate him enough to have their relatives and ancestral homes vaporized?

The South Africans also need to make absolutely certain that the USA knows the strike isn't aimed at the USA.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
White South Africa, ca 1980's; they have nuclear weapons, and they're surrounded by enemies. They use nuclear weapons on various African states, and create absolute mayhem in sub-Saharan Africa.

The more I've thought about it, the more I've figured that there's basically only two years this was possible: 1988 and 1989. The SADF didn't have actual nuclear weapons until then, according to the South African scientists that were running the program.
And according to an interview with a soldier who was in Angola in 1987-88, they had trouble maintaining air superiority after the mid-80s. So about the time South Africa got their ace, it started becoming less and less feasible to use it militarily.

@MacCaulay

The South Africans also had a very advanced ICBM program. Is there any chance that in the situation you described they might attempt a strike on Havana?

I don't think so. With the amount they had, they'd have to be used against actual targets that would make immediate changes to the battlefield in Africa, i.e. Angolan units or Luanda itself.
One idea would be that in the runup to the final Angolan push in 1989, they had two or three brigades lined up on the border to push into SWAT. The South Africans could've taken out most of the Angolan army and made a cordon sanitaire in one fell stroke, but it would've been a Hail Mary play.

Destroying the South African govt form the air would have been pretty easy.

So you're saying the Soviets would send a gigantic percentage of their strategic bombers to South Africa, risking casualties due to South African air defenses and the sheer distance, because the South Africans use a nuke in Angola?

Got to agree with Prankster on that one.
 
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