Hi all,
For the last year or so, I’ve been worldbuilding and planning to write a series of vignettes and a larger (novel-sized) book set in an alternate 1980’s in the midst of a Cold War between the US and Nazi Germany. Look for stories to start coming out in the future set in Der Kalterkrieg, but until then I have a question.
I’ve been deliberately handwaving or simply not addressing much of the WW2 and early Cold War eras because having all of the details of the PODs involved is less important to me than exploring the world created by the setting. A couple of the things I’ve been working on lately are the OOB’s for each side and their general strategic goals and outlooks, up to and including the general strategies they would pursue if the balloon went up on a general WW3.
In this setting, effectively all of Europe outside of the British Isles are either part of the Greater German Reich or allied to it. The same is true of North Africa from Tunisia to the Suez and East Africa as far south as Somalia, alongside Syria and Iraq in the Middle East. The overall alliance is referred to as the Pact of Steel, the Anti-Comintern Alliance, or (by the West) the Nuremberg Pact. It includes a few other countries around the world, but they aren’t important to the question in this thread.
The US leads the Annapolis Treaty Organization, which includes the British Commonwealth nations, the remnants of the Free French in West Africa, the rump Soviet state in Siberia and Central Asia, Iran, the multi-ethnic Republic of the Levant, and the fabulously corrupt but rising power in the Republic of China (among other).
In the event of a full alliance on alliance WW3, there are numerous places recognized as battlegrounds. They range from Britain (where a truly epic BoB would be fought) to Norway, the Suez Canal and Sinai Peninsula, the Iran-Reich border in the Caucusus (and the Iran-Iraq border), and more. The most important though would be Ural Mountain front where the US, Soviets, and Chinese all have forced poised to invade Nazi annexed European Russia.
The question I’m wondering is this:
Notice that every major front there (save the BoB) is hundred to thousands of miles from any of the major players’ capitals. This isn’t like the Inter-German Border where the Warsaw Pact was always “7 days” from NATO headquarters, Bonn, Amsterdam, etc and a few more days baring Force du Frappe interference from Paris. NATO pretty much throughout the OTL Cold War maintained nuclear weapons on a pretty quick tripwire should a conventional fight turn bad in the short timeframe perceived in such a conflict and the Soviets did the same. This resulted in a lot of nuclear “oneupmanship” for lack of a better term, with each side deploying larger and larger numbers of nuclear weapons and highly expecting they would be used within a few days of conventional fighting. Also, no war plans really were built envisioning a fight lasting longer than a few weeks. Everything was designed to be thrown into a “quick” meat grinder that strategists expected would devolve rather abruptly into a cycle of nuclear escalation.
But with the fronts so far from key targets in the Kalterkrieg, do you think this would lead to a different kind of strategic thinking? Would the planners in this world prepare from a longer term fight? Would there be closer holds on tactical nukes and would nuclear planning be on less of a hair-trigger?