conventional war after MAD?

ok so as a result of some POD in the 1970is SSSR and USA go to al out war in the early 1980is

MAD goes as planed, tousands of megatons are exchanged
generaly this is where all calculations stop, thats basicaly it, evrione is considered as good as a statistic, most people go on to hipotesise living conditions and civil survival rates worldvide

but both superpowers still have a humongus arsenal of conventional weapons and a huge army equiped and trained for exactly this situation

so what hapens next

asuming the war is not somehow declared ower once the bombs fall, how would things develop strategicaly and tactically in the next several years
 
Well, the Soviets had superiority in conventional warfare. Their troops were also more prepared for this situation. But life on the planet will cease entirely in a few months, so don't expect a very interesting war.
 

CalBear

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If you have no one to operate the equipment, it is of little use. Machines need fuel, once the sources have been slagged, they do not run very well. Troops need food, if the distribution network is shattered, they die.

You are talking MAD. Mutual. Assured. Destruction. A full exchange would, at best, push the entire Northern Hemisphere back to the mid-19th century, likely back to the mid-16th, and this is in the fortunate areas. There is a small, but still possible (figure 20%) chance that any MAD exchange would include the use of biological weapons (chemical weapons are more or less a given), including engineered bio-weapons. If that happened, a 98% death rate is NOT out of the question, especially if some clever Soviet or Chinese or American scientist figures out a way to combine a flu bug with Smallpox.
 
It'll be sort of hard to pull this off. MAny of the places which were primed for ground zeros were conventional bases. Airfields, armor depots, logisitcal hubs, naval bases, radar stations, headquarters... basically, every command and control base and major military location in Europe, Siberia, and North America is going to recieve some sort of pasting from nuclear weapons (ignoring side effects from nearby targeting of cities). Europe in particular is so (relativly) crowded with targets on both sides that, after the first shots are fired, neither side will have much to fight on with.
 
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