You'd have to posit a scenario in which events spiral out of the control of the leaders involved. But at that point, there wasn't the system of automatic escalation that was in place at later stages of the cold war.
I've seen plenty of historical analyses that stated Stalin believed it would be easy to force the Allies out of Berlin with the blockade, but when it didn't work, he didn't press the issue because they had nuclear weapons and he did not. The Soviet atomic bomb was exploded later that year.
In the event of any war, the U.S. strategy was to deploy nuclear weapons on the 200 largest Soviet cities in order to decapitate the Soviet war effort, then keep using nuclear weapons as they rolled off the assembly line. There was no strategy for a non-nuclear war, because the U.S. had almost no soldiers in Europe -- the Korean War buildup hadn't happened yet. In the event of war, it'll go nuclear pretty much from Day 1 -- that was the plan, at least.
What the title says. Could the Berlin Blockade and Airlift have escalated into an early WW3, one in which nuclear weapons would probably not have played a major role? Or would one side or the other have inevitably backed down?
Stalin may have been assassinated in OTL, and I'd think his removal would probably lead to a negotiated peace--one that would lead to either an icier cold war or one that might see the Soviets in no position to challenge the United States.
What was Soviet AA like in their cities at this point? I know their AA directed at nuclear bombers was considered very good in the 50s, but had that been deployed by this point?
I'm guessing you'd have to have a situation where, for example, the Soviets shadow American transport planes on the edge of the corridor to intimidate them, there's a mistake, it goes hot, planes get shot down, it escalates...
What was Soviet AA like in their cities at this point? I know their AA directed at nuclear bombers was considered very good in the 50s, but had that been deployed by this point?
Possible?
Sure.
Not likely.
If it had happened it would have been really ugly. Red Army would have punched through the Allied armies in Europe like they weren't there, while the U.S. would have nuked the USSR into a dead zone.
I'm guessing you'd have to have a situation where, for example, the Soviets shadow American transport planes on the edge of the corridor to intimidate them, there's a mistake, it goes hot, planes get shot down, it escalates...
The Soviets actually freaked out at one point when an Il-somethingorother that was taking runs at a British transport plane going into Templehof collided with it.
I think What If? 2 mentions the collision, but I don't know if it makes any attempt to go into butterflies with it.
You know, I suspected you or one of the other military buffs were going to say that. The more I get into AH, the more it seems that everything possible actually happened in OTL, it's just that nothing came of 97% of it.