How likely was it for the Cold War to go hot?

How likely was it that the Cold War goes hot?


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75% plus. 50% for the Cuban Missile Crisis and 25% for the possibility of error or miscalculation.

Even if we attribute low percentages to single events, over the course of 44 years of Cold war, they sum up. Imagine rolling a 100-sided dice for each year. In most years, you have to roll "100" for hot war. In 1962, it might be 70-100. In 1983 90-100. But we were in the end lucky to get through without hitting the mark at all.
 
Even if we attribute low percentages to single events, over the course of 44 years of Cold war, they sum up. Imagine rolling a 100-sided dice for each year. In most years, you have to roll "100" for hot war. In 1962, it might be 70-100. In 1983 90-100. But we were in the end lucky to get through without hitting the mark at all.

The nuclear Cold War lasted roughly 40 years. One could apply a basic probability analysis to each year to calculate an overall likelihood of a catastrophe. For instance, if the odds in each year were an even 5% purely from error or miscalculation, the probability of an event over the course of the 40 years would be (1-(.95^40)). That little calculation results in an 87.1% chance of things going hot.

If you drop that probability per year to 1%, you still get a 33.1% chance of something bad happening. Even a .5% chance gives you 18.2%. An absurdly low .1% chance of error per year still gives you a still not insignificant 3.9%.

But, as I noted, Cuba was probably a 50-50 proposition all by itself.

All in all, we were damn lucky.
 
I put very, very close to 100%. There were far too many ways for things to go horribly wrong. Once, because of some faulty circuitry, nuclear-armed F-106s were very nearly scrambled because of a bear.
 
I put very, very close to 100%. There were far too many ways for things to go horribly wrong. Once, because of some faulty circuitry, nuclear-armed F-106s were very nearly scrambled because of a bear.

So our timeline is literally one in a million? I don't believe that. The USSR or USA wouldn't just push the big red button unless:

a. They made sure it wasn't faulty equipment.
b. A nuke actually hit their land.
 
So our timeline is literally one in a million? I don't believe that. The USSR or USA wouldn't just push the big red button unless:

a. They made sure it wasn't faulty equipment.
b. A nuke actually hit their land.

The problem is that with land based missiles, the operative fact was always use them or lose them, which is why the "launch on warning" concept arose. It is really easy to construct a faulty equipment scenario that takes longer than 20 minutes to sort out. By then, the birds would be in the air, as the time from launch to impact was about 30 minutes and you needed about 5 for a Presidential order to make its way through the chain of command...

The decision making time was shockingly narrow. Assuming a massive ICBM launch detection, here's a little timeline

T=0 -- NORAD picks up faulty signs of a massive ICBM launch from within the USSR
T+5 -- Notice of said faulty launch reaches POTUS, who we are presuming is already awake
T+7 -- Bagman is summoned, opens the football and awaits a POTUS decision. Note: we are now T-23 from presumed impact and probably T-16-17 from the time a launch order could work its way through the chain of command, including a signoff from the SecDef under the two-man rule
T+10 -- Emergency plan to relocate POTUS to either an E-4 at Andrews or Mount Weather needs to be implemented, with a similar protocol for SecDef. We are now 14 to 15 minutes from the time when a launch order can be effectively implemented.
T+16/17 POTUS arrives Andrews (I've gone with the airborne NEACP/E-4 approach). POTUS now has about 13 minutes to get airborne (less, really, because Andrews and DC are presumably targets) and around 8 or 9 minutes to give the launch order.

This assumes everything goes well and that the false warning has yet to be detected. Upon arriving at Andrews, the time for a decision is essentially at hand. I find it very easy to see this going bad, with the faulty warning not being picked up before a decision is made in an atmosphere of shock, haste and panic. Note that a false detected sub launch off the US coast would shorten this timeframe considerably...
 
The question/poll migh better be divided into "hot nuclear" and "hot conventional" as this is assuming a strictly NATO vs Warsaw Pact situation, not proxies from Vietnam to Syria to Angola...

Nuclear Hot, 30-40% depending on how threatened either side felt and who was running the shows, respectively. Mind, that's the high end 'average' - thinking such as Cuban Missile Crisis amongst many other situations (some that no doubt have yet to be declassified).

Conventional Hot.... I'd say peak at 70-80% briefly and only in the decade following WW2 mostly, though certainly with other 'optimal' conditions later which could have drawn vast warmongering. Once that began, the Nuclear Option might have gotten a slight bump, but I feel it was always more a Last Resort issue.
 
It depends what you want to call hot. Basically it did go "hot" in that the americans sphere fought the soviets sphere on many seperate occasions. But if you mean an all out war nuclear or otherwise between the USA and the ussr I would say slightly less than 50%. But the Cold War really redefined warfare in that you usually had no need to launch a full out invasion on another nation, especially one with superpower status. It could be again, considered really a hot war just fought with satellites instead of superpower to superpower
 
Though I assume that none of the leaders in that time period was prone to simply Launch a First-strike (Not Even Nixon on a Bad Day), Most assumed that there was a possibility that the other Side might eventually do that.

BTW, the decision-Making Times are Even more nightmarish if you consider submarine-based nukes or the distances in Europe.

...but most of us learnt to stop worrying and love the bomb.
 
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