What if the two leaders approved of a plan to elimnate all nuclear weapons?
What it have worked?
World other nations agree? (Britain, France, China, Israel)
Pretty sure the answer is "no". With the invention of nuclear weapons, the only way to be a great power is to have them.
I don't see any of these countries being willing to not be great powers or willing to trust the others. Especially as all the nuclear capable states have cracked the really difficult problems standing between a dangerous pile of plutonium and an actual nuclear weapon, so even if they disassembled every weapon and every part of the machinery to manufacture those weapons, they'd be at best a couple years away from having nuclear weapons again. There'd need to be a trusted and invasive international inspection mechanism to ensure that everyone stayed disarmed.
Also, Israel say they don't really have nuclear weapons while everyone else takes it as read that they're lying. While that is tolerable now for the world's nuclear powers, if they ever actually disarmed that suddenly becomes troublesome to more than just Israel's neighbours.
The only way I can imagine any sort of nuclear disarmament that held is if there were some sort of world federation.
What kind of push back would have occured in the two nations?
Well, likely the biggest push back would be passive resistance. The Senate doesn't ratify Reagan's treaty, the Soviet bureaucracy ignores Gorbachev's orders, the leaders face former lieutenants trying to push them out of power or just side-line them.
All nukes gone
WP can take western europe within a couple of weeks ?
Can NATO survive w/o nukes against a full blown WP assault
Well, considering that both sides were, even in conventional weapons, well enough armed to inflict damage on each-other that made WW2 look like a walk in the park, both sides will lose heavily from a war.
My bet is that the Soviets can't do much about the UK though (at least without nukes) and their navy can't keep the US penned on their side of the Atlantic indefinitely (likely it would be cleaned off the sea within days, maybe weeks if they're lucky) which ultimately means that even if the Soviets did push NATO back to the Channel coast (not a sure thing) they'll still need to deal US efforts to repeat D-day. Now the Soviets in the 80s had plenty of advantages over Nazi Germany in 1944 but the Soviets still haven't demographically recovered from WW2, have the smaller economy than the US, even if it's not as big a gap as the US/Nazi Germany relative size (especially if we measure the Soviet economy in terms of raw economic output which becomes more important during war) and also problem borders in the Middle East and with China, which are unlikely to remain quiet.
And without fear of Soviet nuclear attack, the US has as long as they like to fight the war and can pretty well do what they like. It's real hard to see this ending well for the Soviets, though the cost of victory could pretty much bankrupt the US.
Also, consider that it will take at least a decade, if not two or three to safely disassemble the stockpiles each side had. There's plenty of time for NATO to bolster their conventional forces and plenty of time for the Soviets to collapse from their own political and economic problems even if this did go through.
The whole reason Gorbachev wanted to talk was because the Soviet economy was in a tailspin. After 1980 a invasion of Europe was impossible. The Mujahideen bankrupted them, imagine the armies of NATO?
The Mujahideen didn't bankrupt them though. Agricultural subsidies were a more difficult financial problem than the Afghan war.
That said, you're correct about your central point. The USSR can't afford a conventional war with NATO. (NATO can't afford a conventional war either, but I reckon they'd be able to win the war before the financial burden became too much. Post-war economic trouble will be quite severe I imagine.)
The entire Politiburo was deathly afraid of SDI. I’m sure some hardliners would never agree but it’s was the consensus that arm control was better than the US having a super shield
On the other hand, with no nuclear weapons at all, the Soviets are faced with enemies with more people, more money and better geography. If it hadn't been for nuclear weapons making it less expensive to compete with the US, I doubt the Cold War would have lasted as long as it did. While working SDI puts the world on a hair trigger to extinction, I can easily imagine the Soviet leadership accepting that as the price of remaining a peer power to the US. After all, what assurance did they have that the US would actually stop developing SDI and disarm its nuclear arsenal? (And of course, the US would be just as sceptical that the Soviets would abide by their side of the treaty.)
And ultimately, I think both sides were right. They couldn't trust each-other, just by nature of being on different sides.
fasquardon