AHC: plausible conventional WW III

OK, so the challenge is to -- with a PoD after 1960 -- devise a way to have a conventional WW III between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in which nuclear weapons aren't used at all, or are used on a limited scale only and only for tactical purposes (not strategic ones). Biological and chemical weapons are OK, but preferably as a tactical weapon and not a strategic one.

The point is basically to have a WW III which doesn't end with "nukes fly, everybody dies LOL". :rolleyes:
 
The point is basically to have a WW III which doesn't end with "nukes fly, everybody dies LOL". :rolleyes:

As a side note, how about one with Soviets winning the nuclear exchange? This might be doable in ca. 1981-1983. Mr Reagan and Mrs Thatcher were probably the most unlikely US and UK leaders to press the button. Few years earlier, with nuclear warfighters Carter and Callaghan firmly on helm the Soviet prospects would be, erm, more glowing.

Of course, even occupation of Western Germany, Northern Italy, Austria, Denmark and Benelux countries would not solve but rather accelerate Soviet dissolution...

So, how about a TL in which Soviets win due to sheer balls of using nuclear weapons on massive scale and then lose because they have won?
 
As a side note, how about one with Soviets winning the nuclear exchange? This might be doable in ca. 1981-1983. Mr Reagan and Mrs Thatcher were probably the most unlikely US and UK leaders to press the button. Few years earlier, with nuclear warfighters Carter and Callaghan firmly on helm the Soviet prospects would be, erm, more glowing.

Of course, even occupation of Western Germany, Northern Italy, Austria, Denmark and Benelux countries would not solve but rather accelerate Soviet dissolution...

So, how about a TL in which Soviets win due to sheer balls of using nuclear weapons on massive scale and then lose because they have won?

I think that's what partly made NATO so jittery in the 80's, the fact that a massive Soviet pre-emptive strike might actually lead to the Soviets "winning" the war.

In response to the OP, how about a world were both sides develop effective SDI, limiting Nuke use to the tactical level.
 
Any tactical usage in numbers greater than "at most a tiny handful that end the war by one side deciding to live and surrendering or at least offering negotiations on generous terms" will lead to escalation.

Usage of chemical or biological weapons will certainly lead to full nuclear exchange.

Soviet troops reaching French border will result in French launching at Moscow, yes its completely insane, yes that was their only official policy.

There is zero chance in any imaginable leaders in DC and London sitting it out and allowing Soviets to kill tens of millions of their citizens without retaliating.

Both sides having working SDI will greatly destabilize the situation with both sides being forced to build even more and more MIRVed ICBMs to guarantee them being able to damage other side enough despite the SDI to maintain deterrence and balance of power.


You can have a conventional Word War 3 between NATO and WarPac, ONLY AND ONLY IF one side decides to fold their cards while it is still conventional or after initial and extremely limited use of tactical weapons (that were used only at a desperate/fate changing moment of conventional war)
 

mowque

Banned
As much as you might love the idea of a WW2 but EVEN bigger!..It just isn't going to happen.
 
it could happen you would just have to come up with a way where both leaders felt it was in their best interest to keep the war conventional and that it would be better to loose a conventional war than even win a nuclear one where all you got was a nuclear wasteland
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
or nuclear shield

There is no such thing, and never will be. No defense system can be 100% effective, and if just a small number of nuclear weapons get through, you're toast. In fact, any prposed shield or defense system makes the problem worse, since the obvious response is simply to fire greater numbers of missiles.
 
You'd need something like red storm rising, a war fought for limited gains, and even the Clancy had to tie one hand behind the soviets back and use Deus Ex coup to stop it going nuclear. Ww3 might have started conventional but sooner or later things are gonna go wrong for one side or the other and some idiot panics...
 
You'd need something like red storm rising, a war fought for limited gains, and even the Clancy had to tie one hand behind the soviets back and use Deus Ex coup to stop it going nuclear. Ww3 might have started conventional but sooner or later things are gonna go wrong for one side or the other and some idiot panics...


Then bye bye to the world :):):)
 
OK, so the challenge is to -- with a PoD after 1960 -- devise a way to have a conventional WW III between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in which nuclear weapons aren't used at all, or are used on a limited scale only and only for tactical purposes (not strategic ones). Biological and chemical weapons are OK, but preferably as a tactical weapon and not a strategic one.

The point is basically to have a WW III which doesn't end with "nukes fly, everybody dies LOL". :rolleyes:

Here you go.

Plot summary

By the mid-1980s the Soviet Politburo comes to the consensus that the country's economy is stagnating and its military may not retain superiority over the West for much longer. It would therefore be in the interests to the Soviet Union to invade Western Europe with a short, sharp blow, and then sue for peace from a position of strength. The Politburo deliberates two options involving a sudden barrage of nuclear weapons against Western targets, but realizing the risk of nuclear war they decide to opt for a third strategy involving conventional forces.

The catalyst for conflict comes in July 1985, when an American Marine unit intervenes against a Soviet incursion into Yugoslavia. In response the Warsaw Pact mobilizes and subsequently launches a full scale invasion of Western Europe on the 4th of August 1985 (the anniversary of the start of the First World War). Soviet forces thrust through West Germany towards the Rhine, and also land forces in northern Norway and Turkey. Attacks are also carried out using long range strategic bombing, naval forces and even killer satellites in space.

The Soviet juggernaut quickly loses steam. Stiff resistance by NATO, aided by France and Sweden, eventually foils the Soviet invasion, and Warsaw Pact forces get no further West than the German town of Krefeld in the Ruhr by around August 15. Norway is also invaded, causing Sweden to enter the war when it refuses to allow overflight rights to the Soviet air force. From mid-August the capacity of the Soviet Union to wage war is significantly undermined by desertion of some of its demoralized allies, internal dissent at home and its own forces mutinying. Outside Europe the Americans bomb Cuba, the Chinese invade Vietnam and overthrow its government, Egypt overthrows Libya, Japan seizes the Kurile islands, and the Soviet Navy and merchant fleet is permanently neutralized.

To prove to the world that they are still a force to be reckoned with, the Soviets launch a nuclear missile strike against Birmingham, England. The West retaliates with a similar strike on Minsk, which accelerates the collapse of Soviet control in its satellite states. A coup d'etat led by Ukrainian nationalists overthrows the Soviet Politburo, which leads decisively down the path to the end of the threat posed by the Soviet Union.

The ruins of Birmingham and Minsk are eventually turned into war memorials fronted by immense causeways, with the memorials respectively called Peace City West and Peace City East.

Alternative ending

In The Untold Story a separate chapter is devoted to an alternative, more pessimistic scenario, written in the form of radio transcripts and newspaper editorials. NATO forces are unable to defend West Germany, and after the Netherlands falls, the West sues for peace. Despite not being occupied, Britain is forced to accept a set of conditions which allows the Soviet Union to effectively control its military, economy and political institutions. This chapter is not included in the Macmillan edition.

Literary significance & criticism

Hackett had two objectives in mind—to demonstrate the necessity for Western Europe to have a strong and co-ordinated conventional military, and to suggest that it could be plausible that nuclear weapons may not be used in the next world war. Indeed, the (limited) use of atomic warfare comes as a result of one side's conventional forces becoming weak and vulnerable.

Some reviewers at time, such as Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the New York Times, thought that Sir John Hackett's scenario was too optimistic. Western forces do not suffer any critical setbacks caused by poor decisions or bad luck. [1] The effects of the third world war and enlightened policies leads to many proxy conflicts being neatly resolved, from Ireland to Venezuela to Palestine. Stylistically the book was also criticized by Lehmann-Haupt for being too dry and swift in illustrating major incidents in the story.

The Third World War: August 1985

The book is an update to his 1978 novel The Third World War, August 1985. The book was written with the hindsight of knowing about what were, at the time, recent geopolitical and technological developments. Hackett wove in more contemporary themes including the rise of Solidarity in Poland, and the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War. There is also some material based on the proposed militarization of space, in particular the consequences of both sides using antisatellite weapons in the war. Hackett avoided highlighting or rewriting events from his previous book that were unlikely to eventuate, such as Egypt co-operating with the Soviet Union or Iran fighting as an ally of the United States. Unlike the earlier novel, The Untold Story elaborates more on Soviet planning and doctrine, with narrated accounts from their soldiers and generals alike about the experience of battle and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

Basically, you need two things:

1) NATO conventional forces strong enough and reasonably confident they can stop the Soviets without using at least tactical nukes;
2) Warsaw Pact leaders sane enough to realize that the of nuclear weapons will inevitably result in an escalation leading up to a strategic nuclear exchange. They must also be reasonably sure they can reach their strategic objectives (let's say reaching the Rhine) without using nuclear weapons.

The closest we got to fulfilling these conditions was in the early 1980s.

Unlike others in this thread, I don't think the use of chemical weapons would lead to nuclear counter-strike. Both sides had chemical weapons and could retaliate to chemical attack in kind. Biological weapons were still too unpredictable and uncontrollable to be of any use in a lightning war in Western Europe.

Pretty much. In the 1980s, a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union would obliterate the planet, and the few survivors would envy the dead.

No. It would obliterate North America, Europe, the Soviet Union and most likely also China, Japan and a large part of the Middle East. The southern hemisphere would remain reasonably intact. The Northern Hemisphere would be devastated, obviously, but depending on the circumstances there'd still be countries which survived in a good enough condition (mostly the neutrals).
 
Don't forget nuclear winter, some nuetrals might avoid a nuking, but a year or two of endless winter is gonna do then no good at all
 
I'd suggest WP and NATO fighting totally out of area campaigns, so that even the greatest victory doesn't overrun any home territory. If any nuke power looks like it is going to be conquered the nukes will fly but they all loved a good proxy war.
 
Don't forget nuclear winter, some nuetrals might avoid a nuking, but a year or two of endless winter is gonna do then no good at all

Nuclear winter is a VERY DUBIOUS concept. There would be some cooling due to the dust and ash resulting from many thousands of nuclear explosions, but the idea of a world-wide winter caused by a nuclear war has always been far-fetched. At worst, a nuclear "autumn" would affect the climate of the Northern Hemisphere for a period of several months. There would also be some depletion of the ozone layer.

I am not saying the environmental impact would be small; I am saying that it wouldn't be the apocalyptic mass extinction event instilled in people's minds by the media and movies. In comparison, the dinosaur-killer asteroid's energy was many MILLIONS times greater than the combined energy of all nuclear weapons in arsenals in the 1980s. And still, it has recently been revealed that it took TWO asteroid/comet impacts happening in relatively short time-span to end the dinosaur era.

A nuclear war in the 1980s would of course be a major disaster, but it wouldn't end the human species nor the human civilization. As for the plants and animals, they would survive and maybe even thrive in the now depopulated areas.

I'd suggest WP and NATO fighting totally out of area campaigns, so that even the greatest victory doesn't overrun any home territory. If any nuke power looks like it is going to be conquered the nukes will fly but they all loved a good proxy war.

Not going to happen. WP armies' chief purpose was to invade Western Europe. All plans revolved around this purpose. If a de-facto state of war exists between the two blocs, there is no way the WP is going to miss its opportunity in Central Europe.
 
Not going to happen. WP armies' chief purpose was to invade Western Europe. All plans revolved around this purpose. If a de-facto state of war exists between the two blocs, there is no way the WP is going to miss its opportunity in Central Europe.

If the reaction to an invasion of central Europe is going to get the USSR nuked then there is no benefit to that scenario. Both sides fought proxy wars for traditional gains, I think there proxy wars could be escalated into WW3 without the need to nuke stuff.
 
Nuclear winter is a VERY DUBIOUS concept. There would be some cooling due to the dust and ash resulting from many thousands of nuclear explosions, but the idea of a world-wide winter caused by a nuclear war has always been far-fetched. At worst, a nuclear "autumn" would affect the climate of the Northern Hemisphere for a period of several months. There would also be some depletion of the ozone layer.

I am not saying the environmental impact would be small; I am saying that it wouldn't be the apocalyptic mass extinction event instilled in people's minds by the media and movies. In comparison, the dinosaur-killer asteroid's energy was many MILLIONS times greater than the combined energy of all nuclear weapons in arsenals in the 1980s. And still, it has recently been revealed that it took TWO asteroid/comet impacts happening in relatively short time-span to end the dinosaur era.

A nuclear war in the 1980s would of course be a major disaster, but it wouldn't end the human species nor the human civilization. As for the plants and animals, they would survive and maybe even thrive in the now depopulated areas.
Maybe, maybe not. There was an article in Scientific American a year or so ago which suggested that even a Pakistan-India war might cause a nasty cooling effect, let alone a global thermonuclear exchange.

I think the jury's still out on this.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
The only pitch I've ever read that involved a plausible conventional Third World War was in Ralph Peters' Red Army, where the Soviet generals tackled the question up front and directly.

Basically, the Soviets manage to break through in CENTAG (or is it NORTHAG? It's been awhile since I read it) and get their HQs into several of the main cities within a week or two of the initialization of hostilities (Holy shit, that sounds like a clinical way to say: "The death of a generation.") and put themselves within the West German interior thereby making it politically impossible for the NATO armies to hit tactical targets with nuclear weapons without killing hundreds of thousands of Germans.

Now, the response from some folks would be: "But a week or two would be long enough to launch nuclear attacks, that's ASB lol". A very perceptive thing that Peters points out (and that we too often miss) is that the nuclear weapons are controlled by people and people are unpredictable. And that when the time came they might (surprise of surprises!) have reservations against killing millions of folks. And that's something the Soviets play to their advantage. The book is excellent at explaining all this stuff.
 
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