WI: Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles in the '80s

Do you have sources for this? Given the number of nuclear facilities located in/near major populated areas, it sounds like a wet dream.

City-avoiding nuclear war is standard doctrine, discussed in such sources as Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War, Fred Kaplan's The Wizards of Armageddon, and Lawrence Freedman's The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. The idea of a protracted exchange, lasting months, was a later and less widely-accepted development, but can be seen in such sources as J. W. Russell's study Concepts for Protracted War.

I'm not saying it would work, mind you. But it was an idea that was out there, and which did strongly influence policy.
 
Sixth Fleet

Just a note that USN routinely operated 2 CV's in the MED on 9 month cruises. Those ships were considered strategic assets and would have carried a largish portion of the flexible response for Southern Europe in the event of war.
 

Delta Force

Banned
City-avoiding nuclear war is standard doctrine, discussed in such sources as Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War, Fred Kaplan's The Wizards of Armageddon, and Lawrence Freedman's The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. The idea of a protracted exchange, lasting months, was a later and less widely-accepted development, but can be seen in such sources as J. W. Russell's study Concepts for Protracted War.

I'm not saying it would work, mind you. But it was an idea that was out there, and which did strongly influence policy.

I'm pretty sure the Soviet strategy was use it or lose it, and since they didn't want to lose it they were going to use it all the moment war erupted in Europe.
 
I'm pretty sure the Soviet strategy was use it or lose it, and since they didn't want to lose it they were going to use it all the moment war erupted in Europe.

I don't think we really know what the Soviet strategy was. I suspect it varied over time. Certainly there's enough in the public record to support whatever position an analyst finds convenient.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Just a note that USN routinely operated 2 CV's in the MED on 9 month cruises. Those ships were considered strategic assets and would have carried a largish portion of the flexible response for Southern Europe in the event of war.
At the point where you have dozens of hundred-kiloton range nukes being fired in saturation patterns at targets in the Med, I think you're past the point of flexible response.
 
Just a word on MIRV dispersal. Your average big ballistic could throw its warheads in an oblong pattern about 350 km long and 150 km wide along the axis of the launch. So 3 missiles might put 20-30 warheads in an area 450km by 350km, but I don't know if this would be enough to destroy a CBG.
 
The Soviets in the 1970s were experimenting with the SS-NX-13 SLBM with a range of 350 to 400 miles, and a maneuvering warhead with terminal guidance with a yield of 500 KT to 1 MT. The weapon only was operational on the Golf-class SSB K-102 according to Wikipedia, though it was planned to carry it on the Yankee class SSBNs. Each tube on a Yankee counted against SALT numbers, and the Soviet Navy wanted each tube on its Yankee-class boomers loaded with SS-N-6 for strategic strikes. One can also assume that the Yankee skippers weren't too happy about getting in that close to a carrier group anyway, given the expected ASW activity and at least one SSN, probably two, in direct support of the carrier. The Yankees also had to be specially modified to carry the targeting and fire-control equipment, and each boomer so modified would taken off of strategic deterrent patrols and assigned to anti-carrier duty. And in any conventional war, let alone any tactical nuclear situation, the Yankees were noisy, and would've had a short lifespan.
 
I don't think we really know what the Soviet strategy was. I suspect it varied over time. Certainly there's enough in the public record to support whatever position an analyst finds convenient.

Actually, we know quite a bit and it's quite transparent that the Soviets never bought into the idea of limited nuclear war. For them, if there was going to be a nuclear exchange it was always going to go all the way so there was no point in holding back. They did develop some plans involving limited nuclear war, mainly tactical use in support of the ground forces (see below), but from everything I have heard Soviet generals never took the idea of a limited nuclear conflict seriously.

It's interesting to note that there was a big shift in Soviet nuclear thinking around the middle of the Cold War, but it resolved more around how soon nuclear weapons would be introduced into the conflict then how widespread the conflict would be. During the 50's and 60's, the Soviet military figured that nukes were just Very Big Bombs and that the war would start with a total nuclear exchange from the outset. They did not believe that the nuclear exchange by itself would be decisive and that the war would continue as a conventional conflict once the warheads were exhausted. Hence, a lot of their warplans involved the Soviet's using their nuclear warheads with the goal of facilitating the following ground war as much as hitting strategic targets.

Over the course of the 60's, however, the realization apparently set in among the Soviet military that a total nuclear exchange was not something that could be so easily brushed off. As a result, the 70's and 80's saw the development of a number of war plans which generally tried to keep a purely conventional conflict and avoid the nuclear stage altogether. You can see this in the Soviets promise to "no first-use" although their definition of that term does not consider a pre-emptive strike to be "first-use".

Some of the old thinking did persist though, hence the existence of the infamous "Seven Days to the River Rhine" plan.

Something I do need to emphasize though: although the Soviets did ultimately wind-up drawing a unofficial line between conventional war and nuclear war, they always regarded it as entirely artificial one. As far as Soviet doctrine was officially concerned, there was no such thing as "conventional war", "limited nuclear war", and "total nuclear war". There was either war or there was peace. Nothing more, nothing less.
 
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Saphroneth

Banned
Just a word on MIRV dispersal. Your average big ballistic could throw its warheads in an oblong pattern about 350 km long and 150 km wide along the axis of the launch. So 3 missiles might put 20-30 warheads in an area 450km by 350km, but I don't know if this would be enough to destroy a CBG.

Okay, that's an area of effect much larger than I was thinking of and consequently much less dense. If there's some minimum dispersal when a MIRV dispersal takes place, then each missile "counts" for fewer warheads when working out pattern density though the pattern size is correspondingly uprated.
So you can much more definitively cover the areas the carrier could be, the question now becomes "but will you be able to be dense enough to hit the carrier WITHIN that area".
 
There's a document somewhere at the National Security Archive's site where they discuss Soviet nuclear strategy. It was Marshal Grechko, who was Defense Minister in the late '60s and early '70s, who advocated "Nuclear from the start." Opposition to that from both political leaders and the military, who wanted a second-strike capability instead. What good was Western Europe under Soviet occupation if it was all slag? That was the thinking in the 1970s after Grechko died, and Soviet planning began to shift to a long (conventional) strategy, but ready to go nuclear if NATO did so or if they saw NATO preparing to go nuclear and they decided to preempt. The plans in the East German archives that had 200 or so warheads used on West Germany were based on a preemption of NATO, not the opening shots of the war. One thing the document points out: even if the Soviets managed to preempt NATO, guess where the fallout goes? Yep. Right across Eastern Europe and to the Western USSR. And that's without any retaliation. Soviet military leaders preferred to fight conventionally, but were ready to go nuclear if necessary.
 
I think wide dispersal was a must to reduce or eliminate warhead fratricide, which is why the US looked at 'dense pack' missile silos as an ICBM basing option in the 80s. Incoming warheads would have to be spaced out in time because if they all arrived close together they would take each other out.

Another factor to remember is that while there are a lot of big ballistic missiles they aren't unlimited and have a very heavy target load. Throwing 3 or more missiles at perhaps 7-10 CBGs and perhaps more at other key naval threats like SAGs and Marine MEUs would eat up maybe 50-60 MIRV missiles that the Soviets had available. I doubt this is the best employment for their maybe less than 1000 MIRV missiles.
 

Delta Force

Banned
The ships don't have to be sunk by the nuclear blast. They are quite likely to suffer damage that will reduce or eliminate mission effectiveness, and might also suffer lethal levels of radioactive contamination from the base surge of contaminated water and fallout.
 
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