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Whenever I see discussions on this forum of how the Cold War could have devolved into a world war, they tend to focus on either the immediate aftermath of WWII (Operation Unthinkable, etc.), when nuclear weapons would probably play a relatively minor role, or decades after the fact (the Cuban Missile Crisis, Able Archer, etc.), when such weapons would figure in much more prominently. I’ve seen comparatively little discussion, though, of what WWIII would look like had it broken out in the 1950s. Now, I suspect that there would be a huge difference between a world war that starts in early 1950 and a world war that starts in late 1959, so let’s narrow things down to the middle part of that decade. More specifically, let’s pick 1956 as the year, given that there were several geopolitical crises that year, including the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution (indeed, the two were almost conterminous). So let’s say that one or both set off a chain of events that quickly ends with NATO and the Warsaw Pact going to war.

What does such a war look like? What countries would comprise the two factions, beyond the obvious. My understanding is that the Sino-Soviet split was only have been in its very earliest stages, so is it fair to say that China likely would have entered the war on Moscow’s side? What would have been the relative strength of the two factions in manpower, equipment, and nuclear weapons? What would be the major theaters of such a conflict? And how is such a conflict likely to conclude, and what would be the long-term implications?
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