Quote:
Originally Posted by Skybird
Many people until today seem to think that in case of the cold war having turned hot, there would have been an escalation ladder, from special commandos infiltrating NATO bases, to preparatory air raids, to the huge ground offensive, until finally NATO would have fallen back to nuclear tactical weapons and then the strategic reply would follow by the soviets and then the Americans' big nuclear strike simultaneously being launched.
That is nonsense, it makes no sense at all to have all your conventional forces being mauled - by air power for example - in a conventional war: and when you cannot push the offensive anymore because your conventional forces are battered and broken down - then you launch nuclear strikes. What really would have been happened is the opening with nuclear strikes to reduce the enemy's air and ground forces, and THEN moving one's own conventional forces in. If one got away with the nuclear first strike, which necessarily must have been a decapitation strike not only taking out NATO air power, but its ability to retaliate nuclear as well.
The false ICBM launch alarm from 1983 also showed that Soviet officers after all also were human beings who were not really eager to start turning Earth into a radiating hellhole for a reason that sounded not reasonable.
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I think books like Red Storm Rising, and The Third World War have probably helped in furthering the conventional war opinion, that and the fact that it's hard for people to consider that all the military hardware crammed into East and West Germany would mean squat underneath an exploding TBM.
Sadly for all the excellent novels written during and post Cold War, declassified documents have shown that it was most likely that any war would have opened with a nuclear exchange at a theatre level rather than end with one. Of course, from theatre level it's a short quick jaunt to strategic level and then we're the road warrior.
Alternatively, in the event that it did not open with nuclear weapons, then it would have very quickly gone to low yield weapons used to halt the Soviet advance, likely through Atomic Demolition Munitions, then chemical weapons would have been deployed in order to assist in breaking through NATO positions, NATO would have retaliated with their own chemical weapons, then likely shortly after with theatre nuclear weapons, the Soviets would have been temporarily stunned and then responded swiftly with their own theatre nuclear weapons, the exchanges would have escalated in size and intensity from there, until either a cease-fire is called or the ladder reaches strategic exchanges of nuclear weapons.
I believe most estimates put it at three to four days before any conventional war went nuclear.
The Parallel History Project has a good collection of Cold War Plans and interviews, it's worth checking out:
http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch/
There's also this which is worth a read:
http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/fie...a-austria.html
Mostly though, you notice a gradual change in thinking between the two sides from an offensive to defensive structuring as the 1950s move into the 1970s, as the structure and reliability of Mutually Assured Destruction becomes more robust, it was seen by both sides more and more unlikely that either side could get in a decapitating first strike, the Soviets developed the 'Dead Hand' system while the Americans created an entire system dedicated to the continuity of government, ensuring that even if the President was killed in the opening moves, someone would still be around to give the orders to retaliate.
