Trinity fails; what next?

[PMN1]

In the absence of nuclear weapons, the "horror" would be chemical or biological attack and a new balance of terror would come to exist between Washington and Mosciw based on a different form of Mutually Assured Destruction.

From my post on the 'No Atomic Weapons' Thread.



Thousands of missiles with chemical or biological warheads?

The SU is supposed to have up to 5% of its ICBM force equiped to carry some very nasty biological weapons indeed.

For starters, super plague and super anthrax resistant to all known treatments and even worse, chimeras of various virus made by adding the genes of one to another to make it even more effective - chimeras of VEE and smallpox, chimeras of ebola and smallpox and chimeras of marburg and smallpox with all of the above also modified to withstand higher than usual levels of radiation.

Plague Wars by Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg has a very good description of the program.

I dont have the book immedialtely to hand but IIRC it says the whole idea of the prgramme was to ensure there would not be any survivors in the countries on the receiving end.

 

[Nicole]

I think that Japan will still surrender to the US, maybe a bit later, as they know that while the US may be bad, having Japan under USSR occupation would be worse.

 

[blysas]

The war would have turned nasty if the bomb blew up in the aremicans faces. This would significantly retard atomic fussion by 5-10 years and the aremican war with Japan would have lasted another year longer.