WI: Cold War turns hot, but not nuclear.

In a WW3 which was the combo of 2nd Korean war and Red Storm rising how many peripheral wars would break out in the absence of superpowers to restrain them? Would South Africa go nuts while attention was diverted, what about India and Pakistan, who would China attack; Taiwan, India or the Soviets? What about South America?
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
In a WW3 which was the combo of 2nd Korean war and Red Storm rising how many peripheral wars would break out in the absence of superpowers to restrain them? Would South Africa go nuts while attention was diverted, what about India and Pakistan, who would China attack; Taiwan, India or the Soviets? What about South America?

Lots.

If we're talking about the early 80s, then yeah, South Africa could go nuts, massively upping the ante in its support for the insurgencies fighting the governments of Mozambique, Angola, and the other states that were hostile to the apartheid regime. Since most of these governments were aligned with the Soviets, the Americans might simply cheer the South Africans on, apartheid or no apartheid.

If the Soviets move into the Middle East, the Israelis are going to go apeshit, and we would quite likely be seeing the IAF tangling with the Soviet Air Force in short order. This, in turn, could bring Iraq and Syria into play against Israel, with the Soviets backing them up. No telling what Egypt might do in such a situaton.

Central America will go up in flames, for obvious reasons.

Not sure about India and Pakistan. India was generally pro-Soviet, but not overly so, while Pakistan was a strong U.S. ally. But their emnity with one another has little to do with the Cold War, and they might see no reason to get involved. Then again, the generally unstable geopolitical situation will loosen things up all over the world. No telling what might happen.

If it's before May of 1982, I wouldn't be surprised if Argentina takes the Falklands while the Royal Navy is otherwise engaged.
 
Lots.

If we're talking about the early 80s, then yeah, South Africa could go nuts, massively upping the ante in its support for the insurgencies fighting the governments of Mozambique, Angola, and the other states that were hostile to the apartheid regime. Since most of these governments were aligned with the Soviets, the Americans might simply cheer the South Africans on, apartheid or no apartheid.

If the Soviets move into the Middle East, the Israelis are going to go apeshit, and we would quite likely be seeing the IAF tangling with the Soviet Air Force in short order. This, in turn, could bring Iraq and Syria into play against Israel, with the Soviets backing them up. No telling what Egypt might do in such a situaton.

Central America will go up in flames, for obvious reasons.

Not sure about India and Pakistan. India was generally pro-Soviet, but not overly so, while Pakistan was a strong U.S. ally. But their emnity with one another has little to do with the Cold War, and they might see no reason to get involved. Then again, the generally unstable geopolitical situation will loosen things up all over the world. No telling what might happen.

If it's before May of 1982, I wouldn't be surprised if Argentina takes the Falklands while the Royal Navy is otherwise engaged.
Maybe this is JUST ME, but this sounds more like the Napoleonic Wars than WW3. ;)
Stupid analogy, sorry.
 
If you think about it World War 2 is just a slightly name changed copy of the Napoleonic war with better special effects.
 
Before the 1980s, the Soviets had such a superiority in men and material that they would have overrun continental Europe in a conventional war. After that, the war would have settled into a bloody stalemate; the Soviets could not launch an invasion of Britain or the U.S due to superior NATO sea and air power. NATO, however, couldn't invade Europe because of superior Soviet land power. The problem is, if the war was in the 1960s, then the U.S had such a vast superiority in bombers an missiles that the logical thing for NATO to do would be to nuke the Soviets back into the Stone Age. It's virtually impossible to keep a US-Soviet war conventional for long.

They had a manpower of Continental Europe? I do agree with you there if you count just West Germany, Great Britain, Benelux, and France. But there is that one country which is just across the Ocean with a population just about equivalent to the Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R may have been able to push hard throughout central Europe but the French more or less said come anywhere near our nation and your armies will be under mushroom clouds
 
It might be possible for the Soviet Union to gain ground in the Middle East and Western Europe, but for what gain?

The risk is simple: Nuclear War and the reduction to at best being a undeveloped fourth world country. Even generously assuming that the Soviet Government would survive a nuclear exchange, this would leave the survivors of the Soviet Union to toil for at least a generation to get things to anywhere near as well as they were before.

So, what gain is worth this risk? With the exclusion of Stalin, the Soviets were generally clever enough to recognize that nothing was. France has nukes and will detonate them if the Reds march past the Rhine. China and Israel are both Nuclear Powers and while they might not use their nuclear arsenals on political posturing, this is most of the potential gains for the Soviet Union--covered by a nuclear umbrella.

A Conventional Third World War is unlikely to be much more than a proxy duel, perhaps for something like Iran--something where both sides would admit defeat before they opt to unlock their nuclear arsenals.

Trying the Fulda Gap, though, would probably push NATO into using tactical nukes to avoid its ground forces from getting savaged, a scenario that will lead to humanity losing thirty years of economic development and perhaps a full century of population growth in five days.

Does this sound like a spectacularly bad idea? That's probably a good appraisal.
 
While it is possible to have non-nuclear WW3, if it was thought likely -or desirous - then we'd have seen different conventional force levels among the combatants, NATO especially, way before the economic and technical NATO upsurge during the 1980s.

Although arguably the idea was to make the risk of WW3 turning into a nuclear show - out of necessity if not design - so horrific, that some NATO nations could 'afford' to spend less on defence under the idea that WW3 = nuclear annihilation = it will either happen or not happen, so who cares whether we fund 3 or 10 tank divisions in peacetime?

Naturally this was less flexible, but the whole idea was a credible deterrence derived from a nuclear response. If either side's bluff had been called and they then backed down from using nukes, taking military defeat and/or occupation over national destruction, then the whole thing unravels.
 
That ends with a nuclear weapon destroying both Manchester and Minsk.

It's Birmingham, not Manchester and yes nuclear weapons end the war, but I'd argue that it still is a conventional WW3. After all WW2 ended with two cities being destroyed by nuclear weapons. ;)
 
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