WI: The Cold War goes Hot

Blue cat

Workable Goblin said:
As has been discussed numerous times in many previous threads, this assertion falls down when you look at what the Soviets actually had in the way of delivery systems and start considering reliability and weapons failures as a factor. The Soviets (and the United States) had an actually pretty limited number of platforms capable of hitting Australia or New Zealand, and those platforms were also some of their most powerful weapons against the other side's homelands (in terms of having high throw weight, numerous decoys, etc.) Moreover, these weapons were not in any way 100% reliable--missiles could fail, warheads could fizzle, busses could malfunction, and so on, to say nothing of the effects of enemy action like sinking SSBNs. Finally, the size of Australia means that multiple missiles would be required to hit more than one or two targets, just because MIRVs can't actually disperse that far and most Australian targets are quite far from each other.

When you add all this up, it quickly becomes apparent that striking Australia would be more trouble than it could possibly be worth, even if you're "thinking ahead" to try to take out potentially hostile future countries. Every missile dedicated to Australia means a half a dozen or more warheads removed from hitting the United States, which means that you're taking some targets in the United States itself off the board or increasing the probability that they will survive the exchange. New Zealand is even worse, of course. You would need far, far more very heavy long-range missiles than the Soviets built to make it worthwhile to strike the ANZAC nations.

(And they could forget about hitting the Southern Cone altogether; even the R-36M with a 16 000 km range couldn't reach that far from Soviet borders, and they only had about 40 of those with huge 20 MT warheads, definitely not worth wasting on Buenos Aires or Santiago even if it could)
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When the Soviet FOBS missiles were in service I speculated that attacking a few key targets in the southern hemisphere might have been one of their roles. Post FOBS maybe an older SSBN might have been made available for this type of task. One can speculate endlessly I suppose about this type of topic. (If anyone can point me towards any Russian sources re this I would be interested.) I will agree that a stereotypical "MAD" style attack against targets in the Southern Hemisphere seemed very unlikely to me for a variety of speculative reasons.
 
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Rickshaw

Blue cat said:
I suppose I might agree to disagree with Mr Ball if we ever discussed this topic, although I am willing to have an open mind. Although I never had the pleasure of meeting him in person I suspect I read much of his relevant work in the late cold war era. I suppose the phrase "relatively unscathed" may also be open to interpretation.
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Professor Ball would simply agree that you have the right to disagree. He was the preminant nuclear war strategist downunder, having learnt all about it from his research he had done for "A Suitable Piece of Real Estate". Interestingly he had never really been a peacenik, he was just a rigidydidge Australian who didn't like what his government had done WRT to US bases. However, he was often dishonest because he'd get a pet Congressman to read into the Congressional Record what he believed was true and then he'd quote the Congressman as proof of what he was claiming at the time. Congressmen appear to be readily believable whereas he wasn't for many Cold War Warriors. "Relatively unscathed" means that we weren't in for full blown destruction as many here seem to believe. Australia was simply too remote for the Russians to bother with it. They had far more important targets in Western Europe or the USA to waste their warheads on.
 

Blue cat

Rickshaw said:
Professor Ball would simply agree that you have the right to disagree. He was the preminant nuclear war strategist downunder, having learnt all about it from his research he had done for "A Suitable Piece of Real Estate". Interestingly he had never really been a peacenik, he was just a rigidydidge Australian who didn't like what his government had done WRT to US bases. However, he was often dishonest because he'd get a pet Congressman to read into the Congressional Record what he believed was true and then he'd quote the Congressman as proof of what he was claiming at the time. Congressmen appear to be readily believable whereas he wasn't for many Cold War Warriors. "Relatively unscathed" means that we weren't in for full blown destruction as many here seem to believe. Australia was simply too remote for the Russians to bother with it. They had far more important targets in Western Europe or the USA to waste their warheads on.
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I am inclined to agree that Australia was unlikely to suffer full blown destruction.

Thanks for your comments.
 
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marktaha

Banned
Rickshaw said:
Turret-tops? Not sure why he referred to me as a "tankie"? Never served in Armour. Was an infantryman, first and foremost. Tried sitting in a Leopard AS1 drivers hatch once. I was too tall to fit.

Targets downunder were few and far between. North-West Cape? Pine Gap? Perhaps. Both over several thousand kilometres from a major population centre. Dockyards? Possibly. Airbases? Possibly but a bit down the priority list because there was nothing in them, most of the time.

When I was a child, we used to joke about the Weapons Research Establishment, down the road (about 40 kilometres down the road) was a potential target. Woomera was also, supposedly another. I grew up there, my father had a security pass numbered "2" as a project manager - No.1 was owned by his boss. However, neither would be very high on anybody's list. Again, both were quite distant from anywhere (and truth be known both were quite run down by 1983).

Take a continent the size of the USA, empty it of the overwhelming majority of people (in 1983, it's population was about 10-14 million people) and scatter a small number of cities across it's surface - with most of them on the coast. And you'd have Australia in 1983. If you like Kangaroos, Wallabies, Wombats, poisonous snakes, spiders, Octupi and Crocodiles, it's a nice place to visit.
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Tankie is an old term for pro- Moscow Communists.
 

Questerr

Monk78 said:
Which targets will soviets use for SS20 , which ones for SS12 and which ones will be delegated to the obsolete SCUD B?
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I mean, I don’t know if anyone here is a missile targeting expert, but as a well read amateur, I’d say the SS20 will go for high value strategic targets within intermediate range, the SS12 would go for less high priority targets and probably get some double targeting with the SS20’s for the stuff the Soviets really want to kill. The Scuds and also Scarabs would go for shorter range targets, probably things like airfields in West Germany and the Low Countries.
 

farmerted555

Questerr said:
I mean, I don’t know if anyone here is a missile targeting expert, but as a well read amateur, I’d say the SS20 will go for high value strategic targets within intermediate range, the SS12 would go for less high priority targets and probably get some double targeting with the SS20’s for the stuff the Soviets really want to kill. The Scuds and also Scarabs would go for shorter range targets, probably things like airfields in West Germany and the Low Countries.
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What about FROG-7s or nuclear artillery?
 

Monk78

Questerr said:
I mean, I don’t know if anyone here is a missile targeting expert, but as a well read amateur, I’d say the SS20 will go for high value strategic targets within intermediate range, the SS12 would go for less high priority targets and probably get some double targeting with the SS20’s for the stuff the Soviets really want to kill. The Scuds and also Scarabs would go for shorter range targets, probably things like airfields in West Germany and the Low Countries.
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Ss20 could go for tactical targets too? esp airfields in Uk Belgium Italy japan turkey etc
 

Monk78

Were soviets also prepared to do EMP air bursts over NATO bases to fry their electronics or only the west had that capability?
 

pjmidd

People are forgetting that if its a full on launch everything with lots of ground bursts , Australia is going to freeze ( relatively ) . All the stuff that gets into the stratosphere and reflects sunlight will cover the globe not just the Northern Hemisphere ( Krakatoa for instance caused a 0.5C drop in the Northern Hemisphere despite being in the Southern Hemisphere )
 
Resurgam

Resurgam

Rickshaw said:
Australia was simply too remote for the Russians to bother with it. They had far more important targets in Western Europe or the USA to waste their warheads on.
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I think there are two different ideas here, that "Australia would be screwed in WWIII" = "Australia is heavily nuked."

I absolutely agree that there were far more important targets in western Europe and North American for the Soviets to worry about. But when I'm saying it's probably screwed I'm talking more about the secondary and tertiary effects of nuclear war - the economic, social, and environmental. Perhaps, as you constantly argue, Australia would be just fine. But with the global supply chain and networks being wiped out, there are going to be huge problems for the Aussies. Were you really that self-sufficient, or that easy to make so? You said in this thread "we supplied the beef to the world"... but now no one's buying it, and even they wanted to they can't get it. Meanwhile, all those people now need jobs. Those effects are going to add up.

Could they have dealt with it? Don't know, I'm not Australia. Don't know what if anything Canberra planned for such a doomsday scenario. But I think you're insistent "we'll be fine" is probably too optimistic. The problems that would confront the country would be all but insurmountable for any nation.
 

Questerr

Monk78 said:
Was NATO nonVSTOL fighters designed to have a “ rough field capability “ ?
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Some of them. The Alpha Jet, A-10, and a few others had rough field capability, but Able Archer would have been a “bolt from the blue”. Those aircraft would have been highly unlikely to have been dispersed from their main fields.
 

Pete55

Resurgam said:
The aforementioned The Day After pointed this out:
FARMER: And what do we do with all this radioactive dirt?
GOV'T GUY: UHHHHHH...
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Funny note, I was talking a a couple officials/professionals about this the other day (I'm not going to give details on who they were) but they noted a couple of things.

-First off, the goal is to minimize risk. Of course you cannot eliminate all radioactivity, but if one were to push the top 6" of topsoil from a field into a giant pile, and cover said pile, the soil left behind would be usable, if obviously sub optimal, for farming.

-The issue then is (A) getting instructions out to the public, (B) potential issues with EMP effects, (C) medium term issues with fuel and the like.

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Their analysis, and they do this for a living, was that most rural areas would adapt surprisingly well, although surprisingly well still means that 10-15% of the population dies off in the first year or so.

The most dangerous items they noted for said rural areas were (A) short term radioactive fallout, specifically those not instructed in how to deal with it, (B) issues with modern farming from failures of supply, and (C) mass refugee floods from urban areas.

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I tend to think that we underestimate the effects of nuclear war on a personal level, but overestimate it on a societal or survival level. People are damned good at surviving horrible stuff.

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Oh, and Mormons cheat, by the way. A religion that has most of its members store a year+ of food and that tends to have a higher then average rural population is absolutely cheating the game. :)
 
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