"Revisiting General Sir John Hackett's 'The Third World War''


Three observations:

(1) In the earlier drafts, there was no nuclear exchange and there was a two years' stalemate at the Rhine!

(2) Why the choice of Birmingham and Minsk for the nuclear exchange?

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This is the oddest explanation for the Nagasaki bombing I have ever seen!

(3) Obviously, one sort of what-if question is "what if a particular what-if book had never been written?" In the case of The Third World War, it seems the book, while widely read by western leaders, did not have the particular influence Hackett had hoped for:

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A blast from the past.
I bought and read this book back in the early 80's. The only thing that sticks in my memory was the bit on 'space warfare' - a Soviet satellite (?) killing the crew of a US space shuttle.
This is the oddest explanation for the Nagasaki bombing I have ever seen!
Marvellous understatement.
 

MaxGerke01

Banned
There is no way a nuclear exchange would have stopped at just two cities in a situation where both sides had nukes. Thats how WW2 ended but for WW3 it would just be the beginning. Also in a tit for tat attack like this I dont think the Soviets would have settled for a British city as they were more than capable of hitting an American city at this time they would probably insist on that...
 
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I'll be pretty blunt and say that Hackett's is probably the worst[1] of the "classic" [mostly] conventional WW3 novels I've read. It's a lobbying document (which means the setup is the way it is), it being the earliest also makes it the most dated (which he couldn't do anything about, but still), and its style has the least actual literary value IMO.

[1]Team Yankee and Red Army are the best in my view, even though their tones are completely different, while Red Storm Rising itself is kind of in the middle between them. And well, there really isn't much in that spectrum after that.
 

MaxGerke01

Banned
The West, in the sense that the USSR collapses internally following the tit-for-tat nuclear exchange of Birmingham / Minsk.
This is also very unrealistic .As decaying as the Soviet Union was at this time it could have withstood the destruction of one mid sized city...
 
This is one of those books that I keep thinking I should read, but never get around to.

I've always found it a hard sell that the nukes stop after a single exchange - if one were the air, the other side would launch everything for fear it was some kind of decapitation strike. On army forces, a low yield, maybe. A city? Yeah, no.

As for the USSR, apparently it just gives up and collapses because the plot says so IIRC from summaries. That... is also hard to see, but when you consider there's an argument Chernobyl played a role in the end of the Union OTL, flattening a city is a whole different level of nuclear problems.
 
This is also very unrealistic .As decaying as the Soviet Union was at this time it could have withstood the destruction of one mid sized city...

The destruction was combined with ongoing internal dissent over the matter of the war and how it was being lost, and if I remember correctly -- my copy is in storage -- some of the SSRs tried secession and negotiating their own cease fires, and then there was a general collapse.

I've always found it a hard sell that the nukes stop after a single exchange - if one were the air, the other side would launch everything for fear it was some kind of decapitation strike. On army forces, a low yield, maybe. A city? Yeah, no.

I think The Sixth Battle did it best, with nuclear release being restricted to a couple of at-sea nuclear weapons used against ships/subs. That would strike me as the least likely to result in escalation.
 
The mini-exchange in the book is included for one reason...to sell books. Judging by how close we came to blowing it all up due to glitches in the system, an actual launch of a city-buster means Doomsday is at hand.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
This is also very unrealistic .As decaying as the Soviet Union was at this time it could have withstood the destruction of one mid sized city...
It really was not the loss of Minsk. While the premise can be debated, that a repressive regime that depends on puppet states for economic survival would implode after an unsuccessful war, the circumstances went way beyond a city in Belarus being destroyed.

The idea of the early "demonstration of conviction" single strike was very common in NATO public source documents at the time, as was a single reply. Actually hitting a city was at the upper end of the concept; the more common conjecture was a "water shot" where a low yield weapon was detonated off a major city (Leningrad and LA seemed to be the most popular victims, although Miami or Sevastopol were also "popular") WHILE the Soviet and American leaders were engaged on the "hot line" (Which AFAIK, was never really a phone connection, but teletype).
 
Escalating to a full exchange might be more realistic but about the only input it's going to allow on a defence debate is "This would suck." If the war stays largely conventional, then there's room to actually discuss conventional arms questions.
 
Hackett's central argument was this: "If you want nuclear peace, prepare for non-nuclear war, but be prepared to pay the price." NATO's conventional forces were at the time, not strong enough to stop a Soviet attack without recourse to tactical nuclear weapons. His argument was that if you want to avoid nuclear war, which would be inevitable if there was a Soviet attack and NATO being unable to stop them, build up conventional forces.

It would be interesting to see how the conventional-only scenario, with the stalemate at the Rhine, would've developed. Were any of his scenarios wargamed? Say, at Sandhurst?
 
It really was not the loss of Minsk. While the premise can be debated, that a repressive regime that depends on puppet states for economic survival would implode after an unsuccessful war, the circumstances went way beyond a city in Belarus being destroyed.

The idea of the early "demonstration of conviction" single strike was very common in NATO public source documents at the time, as was a single reply. Actually hitting a city was at the upper end of the concept; the more common conjecture was a "water shot" where a low yield weapon was detonated off a major city (Leningrad and LA seemed to be the most popular victims, although Miami or Sevastopol were also "popular") WHILE the Soviet and American leaders were engaged on the "hot line" (Which AFAIK, was never really a phone connection, but teletype).
tts
I once made a thread, were I wanted to fill in some blanks of Hacketts book, explain some of the weirder parts and speculate about the future.
Here is my explanation for Birmingham and Minsk.
After the War

1985 -2016



Birmingham




Why Birmingham?

Why a british city? The UK was a nuclear power, it was obvious that it would retaliate. Why not attack Bonn, Rotterdam or Antwerp? Why not a city, where there were at least a small chance, that the western nuclear powers would do nothing. Or just retaliate against military targets in Eastern Europe? In end it turned out, the last possibility was what the soviet leadership feared most.

To the surprise of the West, it turned out, that the standard soviet war plans actually demanded a massive nuclear first-strike with several hundreds “tactical” warheads. A conventional war was just a variant, actually a unwanted variant, because after the opinion of a huge part of the military leadership, only a first-strike would guarantee victory. But other generals and the politicians argued, that it would hardly count as a victory, when Europe would be turned from the Atlantic to Ural to a nuclear wasteland, even if soviet tanks, manned by radiation-poisoned zombies, would still reach the Pyrenees.

The Politburo wanted a “Clausewitz”-war for political means and that what they got. But after the failure of the invasion, the nuclear fraction raised their voice again. They wanted to renew the offensive through a massive first-strike, returning to the original war-plan. The Politburo just wanted a nuclear demonstration, to get a cease-fire. The pro-nuke generals warned, that a nuclear demonstration in Central Europe would give NATO the excuse, to launch from their side a first-strike to destroy the soviet forces in the GDR and the CSSR. Even if as retaliation the NATO forces in West Germany would be destroyed, the lose of their best forces would be a decisive blow for the USSR. It would be impossible to keep control about Easter Europe after that. Good, answered the moderates, then lets make sure, that retaliation don´t hit our forces, but, lets say, just one of our city’s.

It a british city would be destroyed, the British surly would demand the destruction of a soviet city. With a probability of 62 % soviet experts predicted that Minsk would be target. The Politburo saw this as a acceptable sacrifice. No special warning was given to the authorities in Minsk. Why take the chance?



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