Operation drop shot war-best possible USSR performance

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So in an operation dropshot style conflict what is the best the Soviets could hope for-give the US nuclear advantage?

Could they push the Americans out of Eurasia?

Minimum casualties?
 
Nuke them back?

Them who? The CONUS?

The first Soviet ICBM was under initial testing that very year, 1957.
The first submarine launched Soviet missiles were deployed in 1960.
What remains is the long-range strategic bomber force. Now, the Tu-95 had just been introduced in service, I don't know how operational it was in 1957 and in what numbers. Other heavy bombers could reach the CONUS by way of the North Pole, but not without using a small number of subpolar airfields in Siberia, and ISTR that these were on the US laundry list of pre-emptive targets.

Make no mistake, the Soviets could make central Europe, and a number of areas closer to them, places to avoid for decades. But I really doubt they could do the same to the CONUS.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dropshot

looks like a pre-emptive strike on USSR air-force & associated industries. I guess they had not digested the lessons of USSBS. It would not prevent a response against NATO. Land army was always there specialty and it could roll over NATO in a matter of weeks even without nukes.
 
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It doesn't mater when they armor is being incinerated by nuclear weapons when their supply chains are destroyed in nuclear hell fire when their men are dying of radiation sicknesses when their entire country is reduced to a radioactive parking lot conventional force don't matter when you opponent holds the edge in nukes IIRC a US study said a division can be destroyed in 5 minutes in a nuclear battlefield.
 
Basically it comes down to this: What good is your army reaching the English Channel in two weeks if Moscow. Minsk, Kiev, and Leningrad are naught but flattened expanses of melted glass and rubble within 16 hours of the war going hot?
 
d
Use biowapons on CONUS to wreck the starting point of the supply chain. In the end, both titans will be mortally wounded.
Basically it comes down to this: What good is your army reaching the English Channel in two weeks if Moscow. Minsk, Kiev, and Leningrad are naught but flattened expanses of melted glass and rubble within 16 hours of the war going hot?


bet the Nazi thought like that too.
 
The armor will not be incinerated or the cities. Their will be pockets of radiation and a lot of dying people, but they will bounce back, just like WW-II. Do you know what happened to the Prince Eugen after it was nuked....nothing , just radio active for some months.

wallies always seem to underestimate their enemies ability to fight on and bounce back. that is there weakness and undoing.
 
The armor will not be incinerated or the cities. Their will be pockets of radiation and a lot of dying people, but they will bounce back, just like WW-II. Do you know what happened to the Prince Eugen after it was nuked....nothing , just radio active for some months.

wallies always seem to underestimate their enemies ability to fight on and bounce back. that is there weakness and undoing.

Prinze Eugen was over a km from the epicenter of the blast radius comparing a ship to a city is not a fair comparison. As for the nukes well do you know what happens when a 10 megaton nuke goes off in Moscow yeah I don't either Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad and all their industry survived because they were evaced and moved behind the Urals. That won't be happening here. Masses of American bombers will hit every major industrial center with a mix of atomic and HE bombs military bases, marshaling centers, troop concentrations and everything in between will be hit by nukes. The Red Army will do nothing once its logistics are nonexistent when they are being pounded by atomic weapons when communications are lost when every major town in the USSR is left nothing but glass and ash. The Wallies win and they win massively.
 

RousseauX

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So in an operation dropshot style conflict what is the best the Soviets could hope for-give the US nuclear advantage?

Could they push the Americans out of Eurasia?

Minimum casualties?
depends on what you mean by dropshot: dropshot basically assumes 1) no nuclear weapons on rockets and 2) nuclear weapons aren't all that powerful and are basically just Hiroshima level weapons which takes out a couple of soviet industrial centers but no more

so if we assume nuclear weapons are somehow much weaker than OTL it's one thing but if nuclear weapons are basically otl then yeah the war goes nuclear pretty fast and the soviets in the mid-1950s don't have enough nukes to outweigh the US nukes

do the soviets have enough nukes/good enough planes to nuke paris/london? I dunno about that but soviet ground armies are gonna get tactically nuked in this scenario.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Use biowapons on CONUS to wreck the starting point of the supply chain. In the end, both titans will be mortally wounded.
I don't think the soviets had delivery systems to reliably hit CONUS in large numbers in the mid-1950s

they didn't even really have it by the early 60s (hence why they felt the need to put intermediate rockets in cuba)
 
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