WI South secedes in 1964

What if in response to the civil rights act, the south secedes from the union. Since there are some nukes in the South, the US can't simply go invade because the south has nukes. So would this end up in a new CSA that survives?
 
LBJ simply sends the Army in to collect the governor and state legislators of each state that declared succession. Entire thing blows over within 48 hours. As for the nukes themselves, they're controlled by the US armed forces, not the national guard or anything. IE: forces from all over the US. I'd be extraordinarily surprised if the states in questions managed to get their hands on a single nuke, let alone enough for a proper deterrence.
 

shiftygiant

Gone Fishin'
This term gets thrown around a lot, and as much as I rally against the overuse of it, I want to clarify that this is Alien Space Bats of the highest form.

The South will not seceded over the Civil Rights Act. No sane politician in the South during this period will seriously propose the reformation of the Confederacy, and no sane state would ever get so carried away that they would try independence. Even if someone got carried away, the core component of the Lost Cause mentality was recognizing that the South was doomed to fail, and Lost Causers new that the South was as doomed to failure in 1964 as they were in 1861.

George Wallace, Storm Thurmond, Robert Byrd, Richard Russell, and the rest of the Southern Bloc are not going to respond with secession when they can fight it through legislative and political means. Secession is insane. It is madness. It is so out of character for every single one of these people who would be involved that you might as well ask if they would arrange to put golf balls at the white house.

The bottom line is a flat no. The South will not seceded, and the CSA will not reform over the Civil Rights Act. But lets assume that somehow, just somehow, this happens.

What next? The nukes don't belong to those states, they belong to the Federal Government. The men in the bases did not swear an oath to the CSA, they did so to the USA. So what happens? The conspirators of this secession are immediately ousted and arrested by the Federal Government. Martial Law is declared in these states, with the Army and National Guard patrolling the streets and enforcing curfews. The US takes back control within a fortnight at the latest. The Civil Rights Act gets passed.

But this won't happen. This won't happen simply because no one who was representing their state in the House, Senate, or as a Governor, was stupid enough to suggest that they seceded from the people who literally pay their bills and could crush any unilateral and armed uprising like a roach beneath a boot, over a legislative Act that they could resist more effectively in their roles in the House, Senate, and Governorship's. Even if this was post-Civil Rights Act, it's still madness to propose this, and even more nonsensical. They failed in their opposition to an Act they didn't like, but they can still further opposes it and screw with Johnson's Civil-Rights Agenda through other means that does not end with them in from of a judge, reputation ruined and facing charges of Treason.
 
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What if in response to the civil rights act, the south secedes from the union. Since there are some nukes in the South, the US can't simply go invade because the south has nukes. So would this end up in a new CSA that survives?

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What if in response to the civil rights act, the south secedes from the union. Since there are some nukes in the South, the US can't simply go invade because the south has nukes. So would this end up in a new CSA that survives?

Oh look, more loonish asb about a new confederacy.
 
I have a U.S. News & World Report from the aftermath of Sputnik in 1957. It said the U.S. Army had designated certain groups of forces as "task forces" to be sent to up to 8 different southern states to take over should any massive resistance to federal authority be attempted.
 
One of the major outcomes of the US civil war was that the "United States" a name not a description - that is, you see people before 1861 saying "the United States are..." While after it is "the United States is..."

Essentially, this means the strong identification with an individual state over the wider nation prevalent in the first half of the nineteenth century is dead and buried by the second half of the twentieth - especially with those two little scuffles between 1914 and 1945. This in turn kills secession, and even more than that kills the idea that because federal bases are in a state the people in that base will hand it over to traitorous state actors.
 
Lets say an attempt is made to grab the nukes...
It wont end well, those things are protected by people from around the country. So the attempt will almost definatly fail, the milatary would rather see those nukes destroyed then end up in enemy hands.

The civil war will probally be short, the people of the south are not stupid and remember how the last go went. The black community is going to stand with the union. Over all its probally going to last a couple weeks, once its over there will be treason charges and segergation will become completly discredited.
 
No go

As emphasized above, nobody not in the USAF Strategic Command would get near those nukes except as carried out by them in body bags. eAir National Guard would never have come close.

US controlled nuclear weapons in the Sixties existed for three reasons. One, deterring the Soviets in general. Two, in 1969, deterring the USSR from its planned limited nuclear strike and invasion of China. Three, dropping bombs all over NATO and here at home. Thankfully, none of them ever clicked past the safety buttons (the closest calls were on the East Coast and on Greenland, the latter within a hair's breath of causing to assume the illegal flight was shot down as a preliminary to a Soviet strike, hence suggesting we needed to launch on that warning).

Granted, the hilarious (in retrospect) "tapes mistakes" put us more clearly into a launch on "warning" condition, once two minutes away until someone said, "oops." But that's another story.
 
LBJ gets his wish of being considered one of the greatest presidents in history, better than Roosevelt and almost on part with Lincoln.
 
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