How many soldiers would survive in the event of an 80s war turned nuclear?

Sometime in the 1980s a full scale conventional war breaks out between NATO and the Warsaw Pact that eventually turns into a full nuclear exchange after a few days/weeks.

How much of NATO/Warsaw Pact’s military forces would survive the nuclear onslaught both in Europe and worldwide?

What would they do now that their countries are charnel houses and a significant number of their fellow soldiers are dead/dying?
 
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Able Archer 83 along with the Soviet Missile Alarm Incident would suit this post well. I'm waiting for somebody to give out a really good answer.
 
On one hand, troops that are not close enough to a detonation to avoid instant death or LD50 or greater radiation exposure are better equipped than civilians to survive. They have training, even units without NBC trained specialists with them have some training and probably some radiation detection equipment. They know how to decontaminate, what to avoid. To some extent they have some supplies, and they are armed and trained in the use of weapons. If a unit has NBC folks with them, if they have even a small medical detachment so much the better. This is short term, long term they are better off but as supplies run short they have the same issues about food and water as everyone else. There will be a particular issue for troops which are not local or close to it. A large number of the troops may not speak the language of where they are when the nukes light off. For US, Canadian, and British troops in Europe there is water between them and home - in theory both WP and NATO troops can walk home. The further away from home the greater the stress on any troops. If your home is in Bonn, for example, and Bonn has been nuked, you will accept your family is dead. If you are from Little Rock, Arkansas and when the world explodes you are in Norway with the Marines, every day is going to start and end with "where is my family, are they alive or dead, they need be to be there with them". That will eat at you - a certainty your family has perished (hopefully instantly) is bad, a constant uncertainty and fear about their status is much much worse. Suicides will be a major issue, especially with troops who can't try and go home.

Longer term a lot will depend on where a unit ends up, and how large the unit is and what assets they have. There are several possibilities. A unit can become a warlord band. They can settle down with locals with protection as part of the community and potentially a seed for some recovery. A unit can break apart and individuals assimilate in to the local population losing any identity.

Obviously troops in or around obvious nuclear targets will be devastated, I expect things like armor units in the field will be targets. Essentially troops in the field away from military or civilian targets have the best chance of riding out the mushroom clouds.
 
Nobody knows for sure. The possibilities, both in terms of individual formations/units and overall armed forces range from “mauled and traumatized but still combat capable” too “everyone’s dead”.
 
Nobody knows for sure. The possibilities, both in terms of individual formations/units and overall armed forces range from “mauled and traumatized but still combat capable” too “everyone’s dead”.
Yep..

That being said I would be surprised if both sides didn't have at least a moderate number of fairly intact units of battalion size or larger left in the European theatre after the initial exchange (or exchanges ?)

I'm thinking some units behind the lines may not be located by the enemy prior to the intital strikes, some weapons won't launch for what ever reason etc.

I'm thinking some newly mobilized units being trained in Canada and the U.S. (or perhaps deployed for internal security duties) might survive if they were "out in the field" vs in or near bases during the exchange or exchanges ? Presumably the same would be true for the USSR ?

I'm also thinking at the strategic level both sides might undertake a period of consolidation of their remaining forces while trying to identify targets for a second round. Or the surviving commanders / leaders on both sides might decide enough is enough and look to establish some form of cease fire.

Who knows what might have happened.
 
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I had to study this...

...On the civil side as an Emergency Planning Officer. Many of my colleagues were ex-forces and wondered how civilians could survive - I managed to get some of them to think sensibly. Consider that a great uncle and a grandfather were in a battalion that had only 60 effective the morning after attacking German trenches in 1916 at High Wood, you'll get an idea how badly a military formation can be mauled and still remain a military unit. We reckoned between 9% and 67% of the general population would survive a nuclear attack - 9% according to CND, 67% if we got even a few weeks to inform the population - and we tested our ideas in a fairly ruthless paper exercise, one weekend. Even at Great War casualty levels, you get survival.
 
IMHO the question is what happens after the nukes stop falling. While those who survive the initial fighting can live off of scavenged/stored food & supplies for a while, food production will be hosed - except for the Amish, everyone uses machinery for farming which needs petroleum. Transportation links are going to be in bad shape, so even if county A produces excess food county B a hundred miles away may not get it. Anything that needs cold storage, likely gone which includes a lot of medications - BTW if you have a chronic condition and can't do well without your meds, say goodbye slowly. No matter what, you're going to see a biphasic survival curve. Once the immediate dead, the irradiated and wounded have been subtracted you'll have a slow decline due to issues that are relatively local, including localized epidemics (lack of transport will help contain these). After a period of time you'll see another sharp drop as famine takes hold, and more disease. Eventually this will flatten out - how long an equilibrium takes will depend on the amount of damage in an area, and how organized things are. The more infrrastructure damaged, the more radioactive contamination, the less organization/government the worse things are.

IMHO military units will survive the first downslope better than civilians, longer term perhaps better perhaps not.
 
If you can believe a drunk former staff officer of Soviet Force in East Germany in the late 80s, they had an optimistic estimate of 90% losses by the time they would reach the shores of the Channel.
 
If you can believe a drunk former staff officer of Soviet Force in East Germany in the late 80s, they had an optimistic estimate of 90% losses by the time they would reach the shores of the Channel.
Assuming France doesn’t turn the USSR’s largest cities into charnel houses.
 

Marc

Donor
It's been done.

Read Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow.

A superb writer, and that is an excellent story by her.
Brackett by the way was a major screenwriter, particularly for Westerns, she penned the now quasi-legendary "Rio Bravo", worked with Faulkner (!) on a screenplay, and was probably far more influential in the first Star Wars trilogy than Lucas was willing to credit.
 
I wonder what the alternate targets were for the French nukes. Given the small numbers they were all city busters/counter value to keep the USSR from invading/nuking because of the cost. If the USA gets in the game the French nukes would just make the rubble bounce, so I wonder if they had an alternate set substituting some smaller places for Moscow, Leningrad, etc. I think, but do not know, that the British had target packages integrated with US plans for coordinated effort, while of course retaining packages for unilateral British strikes. My impression is the French nuclear target packages were not integrated with SIOP options at all.
 
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