"New York for Berlin"?

"Deterrence is inherently a barely believable bluff. Even at the height of the Cold War, when highly resolute presidents, such as Eisenhower and Kennedy, threatened Russia with “massive retaliation” (i.e., all-out nuclear war), would we really have sacrificed New York for Berlin?

"No one knew for sure. Not Eisenhower, not Kennedy, not the Soviets, not anyone. Yet that very uncertainty was enough to stay the hand of any aggressor and keep the peace of the world for 70 years..."

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/...efusal-to-make-nato-pledge-weakens-deterrent/

OK, then--*would* "we" (i.e., Ike or JFK) "really have sacrificed New York for Berlin" if it came to that?

(Yes, this is the context of a criticism of Trump on article 5 but *please*don't focus on that--it belongs in Chat. The point is that in making that criticism Krauthammer *incidentally* raised a good what-if on the 1950's and 1960's, and it's that "what-if" which concerns me here.)
 
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I mean, you had to for MAD to work, didn't you? You just had to hope it would never get to that point, but it wasn't really negotiable. New York for Berlin because otherwise, nothing else would matter, right?
 
I mean, you had to for MAD to work, didn't you? You just had to hope it would never get to that point, but it wasn't really negotiable. New York for Berlin because otherwise, nothing else would matter, right?
Death solves all problems, no?
 
I mean, you had to for MAD to work, didn't you? You just had to hope it would never get to that point, but it wasn't really negotiable. New York for Berlin because otherwise, nothing else would matter, right?

But what if MAD was a colossal bluff? (I'm not saying it was intended as such, only that it could have turned out that way. After all, there was no "doomsday machine" *requiring* "massive retaliation. It still remained in the president's discretion whether to abandon the strategy if deterrence failed and he concluded that a humiliating climb-down was a lesser evil than a thermonuclear war.)
 
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If the US does not respond appropriately, which in the case of a Russian/East Germany takeover of West Berlin in 1961 would not be firing nukes first thing, then NATO is finished. If the US shows it is not willing to risk getting hurt to protect Western Europe then several things happen. First off, NATO as constituted is finished. ANY military alliances the USA has are going to be called in to doubt. There may be a a new "NATO" with only the Europeans in it. The UK and France are going to be building up their own nuclear forces as fast as possible to deter the Russians, and Germany may begin a clandestine program. For sure a fair number of countries that OTL did not spend the time and money to build nukes and delivery systems will do so as not just the US alliance system but any system that puts a nuclear power at risk to protect a country without nukes will be seen as dubious. The basic idea will be if you can possibly afford it, then you have to have your own personal nukes. Sure you might not have a lot, certainly not as many as the USSR, but if you have enough to cost the USSR a few major cities (and with small arsenals the retaliations would be counter value) this could deter them.

All of the above makes for a much more dangerous world, and in both the short and long term is quite bad for the USA. The USSR has gained huge prestige on the world stage, nobody trusts the USA to keep its commitments, and now the USA has lost many overseas bases and to whatever extent NATO forces helped counterbalance the Soviet threat, the USA now has to replace them with American troops, ships, planes. Going forward, will the Soviets really think the USA will go to war over missiles in Cuba? Will the Soviets think that a communist coup in Central America will elicit a firm US response?

IMHO this may very well create a situation analogous to prior to WWII when the UK & France caved in to so many "red line" German actions that Hitler thought he could get away with invading Poland without the UK and France really going to war or only briefly then accepting facts on the ground. The USSR may consider that short of invading North America the USA is not going to do diddlysquat, which leads them to cross a line the USA has decided to defend. One has to ask, in this scenario, how willing would the Europeans be to help the USA should they get in to it with the USSR - as long as nothing is coming down on their heads they will probably watch from the sidelines, hoping the net result would be both great powers end up a lot weaker when the shooting stops.
 
Dean Rusk's account of his meeting with Khrushchev at the latter's Black Sea dacha in 1963:

"'Mr. Rusk, Konrad Adenauer has told me that Germany would not fight a
nuclear war over Berlin. Charles de Gaulle has told me that France would not
fight a nuclear war over Berlin. Harold Macmillan has told me that England
would not fight a nuclear war over Berlin. Why should I believe that you
Americans would fight a nuclear war over Berlin?' That was quite a question,
with Khrushchev staring at me with his little pig eyes. I couldn't call
Kennedy and ask, 'What do I tell the son of a bitch now?' So I stared back at
him and said, 'Mr. Chairman, you will have to take into account the
possibility that we Americans are just goddamn fools.' We glared at each
other, unblinking, and then he changed the subject and gave me three gold
watches to take home to my children..."

https://books.google.com/books?id=RSNkzD77io4C&pg=PA171
 
The threat really becomes much more pertinent once the USSR acquired the means to reliably deliver large numbers of nuclear warheads against the CONUS in the latter part of the 60s, although I will admit it does have some weight in the early-60s. The problem is that "Massive Retaliation" and "MAD" (their really of a similar mold, even if the former assumes a much more one-sided affair then the latter) is simply inferior a "purer" form of deterrence where the enemy is deterred by usable weapons bound to a practical war plan as opposed to overwhelming threats that may ultimately be problematic to carry out.

But what if MAD was a colossal bluff?

Technically, MAD has never official policy. It was really just a thought experiment whose concepts have influenced politicians but in the actual realm of policymaking it's regarded as too inflexible, self-defeating, difficult to take seriously, and even more difficult to enact if push-comes-to-shove.
 
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If the US President and his advisors ever needed to take that question beyond the hypothetical, then it would have already failed.

If the nuclear deterrent did not deter the Soviets from assaulting western Europe, or even West Berlin, then the idea of NATO being under the nuclear umbrella demonstrably failed to deter the USSR.
 
If the US does not respond appropriately, which in the case of a Russian/East Germany takeover of West Berlin in 1961 would not be firing nukes first thing, then NATO is finished. If the US shows it is not willing to risk getting hurt to protect Western Europe then several things happen. First off, NATO as constituted is finished. ANY military alliances the USA has are going to be called in to doubt. There may be a a new "NATO" with only the Europeans in it. The UK and France are going to be building up their own nuclear forces as fast as possible to deter the Russians, and Germany may begin a clandestine program. For sure a fair number of countries that OTL did not spend the time and money to build nukes and delivery systems will do so as not just the US alliance system but any system that puts a nuclear power at risk to protect a country without nukes will be seen as dubious. The basic idea will be if you can possibly afford it, then you have to have your own personal nukes. Sure you might not have a lot, certainly not as many as the USSR, but if you have enough to cost the USSR a few major cities (and with small arsenals the retaliations would be counter value) this could deter them.

All of the above makes for a much more dangerous world, and in both the short and long term is quite bad for the USA. The USSR has gained huge prestige on the world stage, nobody trusts the USA to keep its commitments, and now the USA has lost many overseas bases and to whatever extent NATO forces helped counterbalance the Soviet threat, the USA now has to replace them with American troops, ships, planes. Going forward, will the Soviets really think the USA will go to war over missiles in Cuba? Will the Soviets think that a communist coup in Central America will elicit a firm US response?

IMHO this may very well create a situation analogous to prior to WWII when the UK & France caved in to so many "red line" German actions that Hitler thought he could get away with invading Poland without the UK and France really going to war or only briefly then accepting facts on the ground. The USSR may consider that short of invading North America the USA is not going to do diddlysquat, which leads them to cross a line the USA has decided to defend. One has to ask, in this scenario, how willing would the Europeans be to help the USA should they get in to it with the USSR - as long as nothing is coming down on their heads they will probably watch from the sidelines, hoping the net result would be both great powers end up a lot weaker when the shooting stops.

And a couple of decades later the USSR collapses and everyone breathes a sigh of relief over the fact they didn't commit mass suicide with the push of a big red button.

Not to mention that the substance of your slippery-slope argument isn't really that solid. For instance, there's no reason for European nations to kick out the US military from Europe, whether or not the Soviets have taken over West Berlin. Sure, they would build nukes themselves, as well as larger conventional forces in order to be able to stop Soviet salami tactics, but kicking out the Americans serves no practical purpose.
 
The assumptions that the USSR collapses as OTL, and that Soviet "advances" stop with West Berlin are very likely overly optimistic. Once US nukes are unmasked as only for use in retaliation for a nuclear attack on the US itself (which is what this scenario implies) then the US and Western Europe have to try and match the USSR conventionally beginning in the early 1960s. This means a huge expenditure on these forces, money which is diverted from more useful investments. The result of this is that the US and "western" (I include Japan and Korea here) economies do not grow as much as they did OTL, and probably a measurable amount of the tech advantage the west built up over the Soviets between the 1960s and 1989 does not happen as the consumer market that drove a lot of this is reduced.

One of the big Soviet diplomatic talking points for years was a "neutral" Germany - Soviet forces withdrawn from East Germany NATO from the west. In the wake of an unopposed takeover of Berlin, the West Germans may very well decide that NATO/USA won't fight for Bonn either so the best shot at independence and preventing Soviet forces from trashing West Germany is this neutralization scheme. The French, in this case, very likely go their own way with their "Force de Frappe". The Dutch, Belgians, and Danes if they stay in NATO have small military forces no matter what, and literally very little place to put US forces. Norway decides to work with Sweden and Finland to create a Scandanavian Pact of armed neutrality. At a minimum, European countries are more willing to trade with the USSR absent some of the technology transfer restriction NATO agreed to.

Since the USSR is seen as more muscular or more a winner than the USA, will this embolden the Russians to work with Cuba in Central/South America? Why not, the reality was a lot of US supported governments treated the bulk of their population like crap the Cuban/Soviet model was attractive. Not to see the reality was necessarily better but...

Perception may not be everything, but it means a lot. In the early 1960s the Soviet system/economy was not seen as the creaking mess it was/became. ITTL the USSR is seen on the march forward, the USA in the other direction. I am not saying that throwing nukes around is a good thing, it is not. The reality is, and this has shown true throughout history, that if you start making threats you don't follow through on, the other side pretty soon discounts them. This in turn leads to further "negative" acts by the other side because they anticipate no reaction and eventually a true red line is crossed and bad things happen all the way around.

The USA, NATO, and the "west" in general made the conscious decision that the way to go was to build a nuclear club to deter Soviet aggression rather than build a conventional force that would serve the same purpose. Cost to the western economies was a prime reason, once you have the factories nukes are cheaper than armies, tanks, etc. The USA chose to spread the "nuclear umbrella" over NATO (and ANZUS, and Japan, and Korea) in part to be able to say to most of those countries "you need not build nukes, we got that covered for you". Let the Soviets get away with conventional aggression, without resisting because it might lead to using nukes, and this whole system goes down the tubes. Yes it prevents nukes today, which is a good thing, but what happens next week.

The reality was the USSR operated under a governing philosophy that communism was inevitably going to rule the world, that the USSR was "in charge" of this change and was going to be the center of it. They played (or tried to) play a long game, never pushing so hard that the west would push back militarily in a big way.There was always going to be a next bite - this was not some dynastic spat over a province or two.
 
The real deterrence as a practical matter had nothing to do with trading New York for Berlin. It had to do with the great uncertainty as to what would happen if military action started and the very real possibility that one side or the other would let the nuclear genie out of the bottle with very unpredictable odds of the conflict escalating to strategic weapons.

Had the Soviets invaded West Berlin in 1961 or 1962, the US/NATO response would almost certainly have been to invade East Germany through Helmstedt/Marienborn in an attempt to reach and relieve Berlin. The Soviets launch a counter-invasion of West Germany through the Fulda Gap and you are within days of them being at the Rhine. Both sides could be in a position within days of having to use tactical weapons as a defensive tactic. If the US failed to try to defend Berlin, NATO would have been proven a worthless scheme. But beyond that, West Berlin was, under the Four Powers Agreement, not West German territory. It was an amalgamation of American, French and British occupation zones. For the US to walk away from a Soviet takeover would have crippled US credibility not only in Europe, but globally. For that reason, not responding was unthinkable. In this sense, Rusk was wrong. The danger wasn't in the Americans being goddamn fools, it was in each side taking altogether rational actions that could culminate in disaster. The awful "logic" of the Cold War led to some strange mental places, but the possibility of things spiraling out of control was a fairly effective check on either side acting too provocatively.
 
When you consider nuclear fall-out, nuking New York City makes way more sense than nuking Berlin

Consider that nuking New York means that prevailing westerly winds carry most of the fall-out over the Atlantic ocean where it dissapates, creating comparatively few casualties, so that damage is limited to Manhattan Island and Long Island.

OTOH nuking Berlin means contaminating millions of acres of Europe's best farmland. Fall-out would soon drift across all the major Russian cities and devastate communist populations.

Finally, Berlin was seen as just one stepping stone on the North European Plain that extends all the way from Northern France to well East of Moscow. The NEP has been the traditional invasion route ever since there have been invasions (Indo-Europeans and a wide variety of Central Asian horsemen: Schthians, Mongols, Huns, Turks, Tartars, Persians, Bulgars, Poles, Lithuanians, Vikings, Byzantines, Teutonic Knights, Prussia, Sweden, Germany, France, Russia, etc.).
 

Archibald

Banned
When you consider nuclear fall-out, nuking New York City makes way more sense than nuking Berlin

Consider that nuking New York means that prevailing westerly winds carry most of the fall-out over the Atlantic ocean where it dissapates, creating comparatively few casualties, so that damage is limited to Manhattan Island and Long Island.

OTOH nuking Berlin means contaminating millions of acres of Europe's best farmland. Fall-out would soon drift across all the major Russian cities and devastate communist populations.

Finally, Berlin was seen as just one stepping stone on the North European Plain that extends all the way from Northern France to well East of Moscow. The NEP has been the traditional invasion route ever since there have been invasions (Indo-Europeans and a wide variety of Central Asian horsemen: Schthians, Mongols, Huns, Turks, Tartars, Persians, Bulgars, Poles, Lithuanians, Vikings, Byzantines, Teutonic Knights, Prussia, Sweden, Germany, France, Russia, etc.).

HMMM... I'm not sure N.Y inhabitants would agree with such "pragmatism" and "optimism". :p
 
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