PC: Able Archer leads to limited Nuclear exchange followed by conventional warfare?

While working on how WWIII will develop in my TL while basing it off of Able Archer, I have been pondering about the possibility of a nuclear exchange upon NATO countries followed up by an invasion by the Warsaw Pact (similar to a certain situation in Giobastia's Able Archer TL). And before you bring up the Threads/Protect and Survive type responses, the type of exchange I have in mind is a limited one in scope (admittedly because doing a typical close to full-scale one would kill the story of my TL so...).

Anyway, the nuclear aspects go like this; the Soviet leadership is convinced that Regean and company intend to attack them through a "ruse" of sorts and decide to settle the whole thing with a couple nukes upon key NATO cities and positions followed up by mostly conventional attacks upon the non-nuked areas. And of course this will bring up the NATO counterattack nuclear wise upon WarPac areas, provided if some nuclear silos aren't affected in the process. Then hell breaks lose, and you get the picture.

So is this doable or is there more that needs to be adjusted to make this plausible?
 
I would say no. As soon as a nuke is seen headed for a city, you can expect a full response, especially if that is how hostilities initiate. How can you trust your arch-nuclear-armed-enemy to stop once he's killed several million people? You might get away with a single tit-for-tat a la Hackett's The Third World War after conventional fighting, but a no-warning launch will not result in a limited response.
 
I would say no. As soon as a nuke is seen headed for a city, you can expect a full response, especially if that is how hostilities initiate. How can you trust your arch-nuclear-armed-enemy to stop once he's killed several million people? You might get away with a single tit-for-tat a la Hackett's The Third World War after conventional fighting, but a no-warning launch will not result in a limited response.
Yeah, I kind of figured the same way too; might as well make it a full scale exchange.
 
Yeah, I think you could get a proportionate response, as in WW3, particularly since one or two weapons don't represent a disarming strike, giving the other side time to think. But the real problem is that a proportionate response is your best-case result, and it's one that leaves you no better off. Hence a) what's the point? and b) what do you do next?
 
Russia was reluctant to A-bomb Europe - during the Cold War - out of fears that fall-out would blow east and kill too many million Warsaw Pact people.
 

CalBear

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Limited strike scenarios are almost impossible, especially in an Able Archer world. The only even low possibility limited exchange scenarios involve tactical weapons used against purely military formations once they have deployed. The ones that are sometimes seen in novels, where one side crosses the threshold and strikes a single city, with the other side responding with a single strike in kind, are patently ridiculous, and are, more importantly, not backed up by the limited amount of open source information on the subject. Cities start dying and escalation to at least a full first strike/counter-force event is a virtual certainty. Since even a counter-force strike would include the destruction of several major population centers. In 1983, just on the West Coast of the U.S. this would include: San Diego (Miramar NAS/San Diego Naval Base), San Francisco Bay Area (Alameda NAS, Concord Naval Weapons Station, Moffett Field/Onazuka AFB, Livermore National Labs), Sacramento (Beale AFB, Mather AFB, McClellan AFB) Seattle (Naval Station Bremerton, Naval Submarine Base Bangor WA, Paine AFB, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Whidbey Island NAS), Spokane (Fairchild AFB). Just those sites (and it is far from inclusive) would result in the deaths of a minimum of a million people, likely two.

A counter-force strike would cripple every combatant. Any further aggression would be answered with nukes. You can do, with some difficulty, a conventional WW III based around Able Archer that ends in a draw (any NATO/WP non nuclear war would, by its very nature end in a draw, with the best either side can hope for is control of the rest of Germany).
 
One of the most "realistic" scenarios for nuclear use without ending up with the world in ashes and cockroaches taking over was nuke use at sea. Nuclear torpedoes, mines, anti-ship missiles, and SAMs used at sea pretty much exclude collateral damage. yes, you risk contamination of fishing grounds, there is fallout, but it is about as pure of a "military" use as you can get. Now whether or not you'd actually be able to confine nukes to naval use is very debatable, however I would agree that this is the best shot at keeping nukes "limited".
 
One of the most "realistic" scenarios for nuclear use without ending up with the world in ashes and cockroaches taking over was nuke use at sea. Nuclear torpedoes, mines, anti-ship missiles, and SAMs used at sea pretty much exclude collateral damage. yes, you risk contamination of fishing grounds, there is fallout, but it is about as pure of a "military" use as you can get. Now whether or not you'd actually be able to confine nukes to naval use is very debatable, however I would agree that this is the best shot at keeping nukes "limited".

problem is that killing an American carrier means 5,000 dead each time.... that is a lot of men pretty quickly if we assume that the Soviets get 10 or so of the carriers at sea that are within range and that can be found. Toss in another 1,000 or so each time a carrier is killed (likely a couple of escorts are killed too) and we are looking at 60,000 dead.... more than we lost in Vietnam or Korea. Throw in the losses in submarines (probably around 30-40) and the numbers get high quickly. Similar numbers on the Soviet side of course, and then of course there are the various NATO ships likely to be killed. It doesn't take long for numbers to climb even when nuclear weapons are restricted to open water.

This of course doesn't cover the sheer vital necessity of Allied naval power in keeping the flow of shipping going across the Atlantic and Pacific. It seems inevitable that strikes would be directed at bases that support those navies, as well as bases that support Soviet Long Range Naval aviation, their missile forces and the like, and similar targeting aimed at vital Allied bases. Other targets include the SOSUS land stations in Iceland and the UK.

Allied subs are going to go after the Soviet boomers too and once those start getting killed the Soviets are going to get jumpy
 
1) What CalBear said
2) I could see a limited nuclear war (somebody apologizes really fast, say), but I can't see one where conventional fighting continues. Once nukes have flown, you make peace FAST or the whole world goes up. If you keep fighting, the nukes keep flying.
 
Sounds vaguely like the scenario from General Sir John Hackett's The Third World War. I've not read it myself so can't comment on the quality of the book but it apparently involves a limited nuclear exchange.
 
Shake up a big bottle of soda. Now try to open it without it exploding everywhere. Trying to contain a nuclear war into something limited is even harder.
 
Sounds vaguely like the scenario from General Sir John Hackett's The Third World War. I've not read it myself so can't comment on the quality of the book but it apparently involves a limited nuclear exchange.
If I remember correctly, after an extended conventional phase, the Soviets try to split NATO by destroying Birmingham. The US and UK reply by obliterating Minsk. By hitting a Belorussian target, the lesser constituent Soviet Republics go up in arms and split from Russia which leads to a quick end to the war. For one, who can say how realistic a single city exchange is, and two, the OP said he wanted to start the war with a limited exchange, which is a whole other animal.
 
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It's just absurd. If the lesser Soviet Republics are capable of rising up and dismembering the USSR during a war like this, why didn't they do it without a war? The implication is that Soviet citizens from these Republics were loyal for the most part, and now are suddenly disillusioned--because an enemy power they've always been told hates them all and wants to kill all of them strikes at Minsk?

Western authors were full of all sorts of wish fulfillment fantasies regarding the Soviet Union "collapsing once we deliver a good kick to the rotting structure!" as Hitler put it. It is true that something much like that did happen once the Soviet Premier demonstrated he was going to dismantle and abandon the whole socialist premise of Bolshevism. And when this did happen--it wasn't the peripheral republics sloughing off that killed the USSR, it was Great Russians in Moscow who tore it down, just as they'd torn down the Tsar before them.

Even if Hackett's scenario were not ASB and the USSR started to come apart at the seams for the same reasons he so quaintly alleges, what is to stop stubborn Great Russian loyalists from the Politburo on down to the missile sites from resolving on a Sampson option, to make the West pay for their act of fatal destruction? Apparently in the real world, at least when the West's violence if that it was it was was diffused in a matrix of domestic Russian politics, something like compassion or at least a desire not to seal their own personal dooms restrained sufficient numbers of Soviet die-hards from dying that hard.

Perhaps then a limited war is possible, if one side is willing to give up and surrender!

But no one in the West dared to predict that the Soviet Union would allow its Russian citizens to pull the plug on it like that. Get overwhelmed in a drawn-out uprising that would allow plenty of time to threaten Armageddon yes; see the common people defying the tanks, shrug and change uniforms--no, we did not see that coming.
 
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