Uh... what?
The area West of the Mississippi did not start to get heavily settled until after the introduction of railroads.
I am fully aware of that. But the original 13 colonies are already a massive chunk of land and albeit communication via sea was possible and certainly faster than on land, it is an impressive feat to establish a democracy on such a geographical scale!
Before the aforementioned inventions helped matters, the USA had (as organized states) even spread to the Mississipi (Missouri since 1819 being beyond the river, which hardly matters as the river itself is the main mean of communication and traffic) and the elections worked as good or bad as they do still.
However, with the possibility to communicate via radio and maybe even arpanet and travel by plane (however limited), a working United States are nothing near impossible after a few years.
The mentality of the people of the United States in the 1800's was also very different from the mentality of the people of the United States in the 1980's.
Hmmm, yes, the Americans in the 1800s were still heading towards a Civil War due to unresolved basic issues in the outlook of their nation -including the possibility to secede.
The US in the 1980's was not, in fact, the most patriotic country in the world... otherwise Reagan would have been able to be alot more open with what he was doing. Patriotism and nationalism are pretty much the same thing and the stuff happening in the Third World at the time strikes me as much more patriotic then what Americans did.
Coming from the 1980s world's least patriotic country, I would put that up to debate. Of course, the US-Americans never had a monopoly on patriotism. I would argue, still, that the 1980s USA had no larger secessionist movements (unlike Great Britain, France and Spain, e.g.) and still held a general belief, that being an American is rather a good than a bad thing. And, besides Reagan won in a landslide on a (among other things) pronouncedly patriotic and hardliner platform.
Note that an all-out Soviet strike would be weighted towards counter-force, but there will plenty of counter-value strikes. In the other threads (and this one) I have also noted a underestimation of the fallout problems in terms of food production. The heavy metals and longer-lived radioactive particles are going too demolish the fertility of American agricultural regions for DECADES... what crops that would manage to grow in such conditions would be unsafe to eat because of the output of Alpha and Beta particles.
If the destruction of national infrastructure does not do the United States in, the scarcity of (safe-to-eat) food will.
Your statement "
weighted towards counter-force" is a very important one. A lot of entries in this thread seem to imply either a 100% counter-value or -force strategy. A mixture is a certainty, apart from the general overlap between both.
Thanks for pointing out the fallout-problem again. I would really like to know
how unhealthy living off American land would be these decades later because that is a matter the few Germans have to deal with, too.
I think that we can safely say that no one has 'won' in the traditional sense of the word.
Exactly, there are just different levels of post-apocalyptic scenarios. Apart from that...Tic Tac Toe.
That assumes that people 2014 even remember Reagan.
I am certain they will, and long afterwards. Just as people remembered Gilgamesh, Agamemmnon, the fall of Atlantis, Siegfried, Etzel and King Arthur. However, I doubt that the scenario Macragge made up kills of Civilization down to a level that continuous historical writing ceases. People in the Southern hemisphere can do that, too. The details of the Three-Day-War may be hard to reconstruct, though, afterwards.
in a building that perhaps was a school, and there was a TV set playing a tape of an educational program, and none of those young people knew what the hell was going on.
He, that could be OTL 2011.
There is a strong possibility that things could have ended up like that. The devolution of the human species down to the prime thought of day-to-day survival first, foremost and only.
People living under conditions of day-to-day-survival were the people who painted caves in a miraculous way, created tiny sculpures of fat women and had probably a rich tradition of educational oral storytelling.
But if you have reached a level of "devolution" far worse, there is a strong possibility that you belong to the people who do not even survive.
Of course there will be plenty of Caspar-Hauser-figures wandering the wastelands. But, sadly as it is, they won't matter in the long run. They will be shadows to be gone.
What will matter afterwards are the people who lived in a community with skilled leadership and with a huge stroke of luck so a good deal of them could make it through until they could say "this is still pretty bad, and we lost a lot of good and Dear people, but the worst is behind us". These may be few people. But centuries later, these will be the people who are remembered as the forefathers of those who then populate these continents.
I recall Macragge out right stating that it was just a rumor flying around. Plus: why would the expedition back to Europe be so worried about Warsaw Pact military remnants if that were the case?
Because they were there. And ivfl is right here.
And who could tell whether they received a message of surrender, believed it, pretended not to hear it, etc. pp. How could they even know it was genuine and not a ruse? It will be a situation similar to the infamous Japanese soldiers staying in the jungles until decades after WW2.
Also...to whom should the Soviets surrender? Who would have the authority?
What is imaginable is that a cease-fire is ... well.... cried out.
I don´t think the Soviets would let the majoritys off there ICBMs be destroyed in their Silos, so I think its possible we had in "the Day after" a partial succesfull US-first-strike, which took out 70-80% of the soviet ICBMs.
My assumption, too, is that the West was first at the trigger - not just on the tactical level as confirmed by Macragge. I conclude that from the level of destruction in the UK. I cannot imagine that an all-out nuclear exchange leads to the Soviets only putting a fraction of the nukes against an enemy actively pursuing nuclear war against the CCCP with an arsenal of several hundred nukes.
And it perfectly makes sense to me to decide that after the first nuke has gone off (and then it was even your side's fault) that the only remaining option is to go all-out on that very second. War is a dragster-race at this point.
Only this (or a phenomenal failure rate) explains that almost all discussions of P&S's war imply this picture: major NATO partners in Europe have received a few dozen hits just below 100, Germany "only" 500 (my assumption), major Neutrals and secondary Capitalist nations (e.g. Australia, Brazil, Sweden) only a handful of explosions if any at all. The Soviets had no chance to employ their nuclear stockpile of ca. 30,000 warheads, and just as well not of their 10,000 strategic warheads. MAD is not a joke, though, so they will still be able to accomplish several thousand nuclear explosions all over Northern America. I always have the guesstimate of 2,000-3,000 in the back of my head. I am sure other have made their assumptions long ago, too.
However, the nature of a successful NATO first strike implies to me that the Soviet Union has been hit by a lot more nukes than the United States, so even with a better civil defence (and Chipperback describes e.g. a better-than-expected level of preparedness in Nebraska, anyways) their chances (or rather their timeframe) of recovery will be worse.
The Soviet Union was the largest country in the world, but OTOH just 10% larger than the US and Canada combined. Oh, and add to that the possibility of a thorough Chinese-Soviet exchange on top of it all.