Modern Global Nuclear War?

you should not be concerned about nuclear war if it ever happens nothing human will survive their isn't a shelter that could protect anyone from the extremes that ww3 would produce. think of it this way every day you have a gun held to your head their is always the chance the gun will go off and shot you but if it does it wont matter anymore cause you will be dead your left with only 2 options because nothing you can do can prevent the bullet from entering your skull

option 1 pretend that everything you ever knew wont be destroyed at any time

option 2 futility try to stop ww3 by spending your time worrying about it until nuclear detonation kill you.
 
Yea I doubt it'll happen. Literally no one wants a nuclear war because what's the point if everything is just gonna get destroyed?
 
Vergil said:
Yea I doubt it'll happen. Literally no one wants a nuclear war because what's the point if everything is just gonna get destroyed?
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Unfortunately, the generals don't always recognize when escalation is going one step too far. Imagine things progressing from proxy wars, small scale skirmishes, civilian targets, carpet bombing, use of MOABs, tactical nukes. And the generals are definitely afraid of inaction being seen as a sign of weakness. And sometimes the political leaders are the ones making the bad calls.

And then you have malfunctions, misinterpretation of signals, false alarms, miscommunications, and accidents. We almost had an accidental nuclear war from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident. Since then we have installed direct phone lines between opposing military command centers to clear things up before a button gets pressed. In my opinion as long as we have enemies and nuclear weapons, we have the possibility of using them in a big, bad way.

Disarmament is naive, however, and ignores some of the fringe benefits of having nuclear arsenals: defense against asteroids / aliens, possible interstellar propulsion fuel, and the fact that MAD has prevented so many wars from starting in the first place. If it were not for nuclear weapons, we might be at WW6 by now.
 
Vergil said:
Yea I doubt it'll happen. Literally no one wants a nuclear war because what's the point if everything is just gonna get destroyed?
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*shrugs*

Curtis_LeMay_%28USAF%29.jpg

- Curtis LeMay (they die all)
>>My solution to the problem would be to tell [the North Vietnamese Communists] frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces.<<

After he retired, in 1965, he maintained that “we’d have been a hell of a lot better off if we’d got World War III started in those days.” During the crisis itself, LeMay’s advice to Kennedy was unequivocal. “The Russian bear has always been eager to stick his paw in Latin American waters,” he said. “Now we’ve got him in a trap, let’s take his leg off right up to his testicles. On second thought, let’s take off his testicles, too.”
(...)
It’s clear that LeMay’s character played a large part in his eagerness for war, whether it was conventional or nuclear. But, Rhodes points out, LeMay was also following orders. American nuclear policy during the Cold War was self-consciously contradictory: politicians knew that nuclear war could never be allowed to happen, but they ordered the military to prepare for it anyway. LeMay’s job wasn’t to avoid nuclear war but to win it

http://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/waiting-for-world-war-iii

Thomas_S_Power.jpg

- Thomas S. (Nuclear) Power

When RAND proposed a counterforce strategy, which would require SAC to restrain itself from striking Soviet cities at the beginning of a war, Power countered with:

“Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!” ​
 
Vergil said:
*shrugs*
Sorry to rain on your smug parade but theres a reason it's not up to one military official to launch our nukes.
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If it was then North Korea would've gotten nuked way back in the 60s. MacArthur was extremely adamant over nuking North Korea to end the war. He was so adamant about it that he insulted the president at the time on national television and lost his job because of it.

On the other hand, given what a cesspit North Korea is now, maybe MacArthur was right, we should've dropped a nuke on Pyongyang and ended the war. It would've caused death but it would've caused a lot less death than the Kim regime has.
 
Vergil said:
*shrugs*
Sorry to rain on your smug parade but theres a reason it's not up to one military official to launch our nukes.
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*shrugs again*
Sure, I was just saying, we can be happy that not one person had the controll. However, incompetence might have been bigger probleme.


I have read about many situations from the 50s and 60s where they ... had a relative slack ... handle with nuclear weapons and certain basic safety procedures and controlls only came in to action later. Like it took years before they actually decided that it was a good idea to actually lock away the nuclear weapons they had stationed in Germany in hangars. I can not say if what I have read is true or not, but it would honestly not surprise me. It seems that, technically speaking, it was possible for a German pilot to mount nuclear weapons on his plane, and, fly off with it. Untill someone decided, hey, that's pretty dangerous, let us have some basic security there and a couple of guards.

Imagine how frustrating and ... sad it sounds, to start a whole nuclear war only due to ... Incompetence and not even because of politics or tensions. And history seems to be FULL(!) of even worse examples. Makes you sometimes wonder, how humanity actually survived the whole cold war ... I mean seriously now! Look at how many nuclear weapons are today in use, either on planes, submarines, some silos. What ever. And yet, even in nuclear reactors, accidents happen. At least 2 of which can be only described as real disasters. And yet ... we never experienced a mistake that has, at least, lead to a nuclear war. So far.

A real life Fallout narration might start of with ... Stupidity, stupidity never changes.
 
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Well screw you then :), and I thought we had a cool and interesting discussion going.
Ragemage said:
It would've caused death but it would've caused a lot less death than the Kim regime has.
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The problem at that time though, when Mc Arthur actually made that proposal, was the involvement of China and a possible Soviet reaction. No one knew what actually might have happend at that point. However, I understand why Lemay actually thought, that it was better to strike against everyone, as long the US had the nuclear advantage. But you have to remember one thing here, even if it would have not meant the end of the world, it would have caused the death of millions of people, if not even billions of mostly civilians. And that, is, or well should be, no light hearted decision. As Mc Namara once said, with nuclear weapons, you can make mistakes only once, those weapons have the potential to destroy nations. Another part of the problem was that they never knew how many nuclear wareheads the Sovietunion actually really had. Only today do we have accurate numbers that show how much of a real advantage the US actually really had during the 50s and 60s.
 
Nuking North Korea would be stupid for a multitude of reasons. It would be a nightmare for our relations with any country in the region, the fallout could potentially damage our allies/interests in Asia and it's overkill to the max. We could wipe out North Korea easily without resorting to the Nuclear option and then give it to one of our close allies that we basically control like Japan or S. Korea.
 
Ragemage said:
On the other hand, given what a cesspit North Korea is now, maybe MacArthur was right, we should've dropped a nuke on Pyongyang and ended the war. It would've caused death but it would've caused a lot less death than the Kim regime has.
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On the other hand, maybe nuking North Korea would have set a precedent that would have been followed in every war involving a nuclear power: Fight conventional until you get pushed back enough, and then drop a few hydrogen bombs on the enemy and try to regain your lost (irradiated) ground.

What would the world be like today if the U.S. dropped some H-bombs on North Korea and North Vietnam (and maybe Cuba and Iran), the USSR dropped some on Afghanistan (and maybe Yugoslavia), China dropped some on Taiwan (and maybe India), France had dropped some on Algeria, and Apartheid South Africa had dropped some on Zimbabwe and Botswana?
 
No no, you guys are right. Somehow it completely slipped my mind that the Korean War was basically smack dab in the middle of the Cold War, back when everyone and their grandma either had a giant nuclear arsenal or were trying to make a giant nuclear arsenal. Dropping a nuke on North Korea when they were allied with China and Russia at the time would've resulted in Fallout 1. Just forget I said anything about how dropping a bomb on NK would be positive back then.
 
Not impossible, just a very huge gamble from a 1950s point of view. You have to remember the historical context here. The Soviets managed to build their first nuclear device, in 1949, and it came to most as a shock. The common belief, based on the Mannhattan project and the US intelligence report, was, that the Soviets wouldn't be capable of engineering their own bomb before the mid 50s, at the very least. And then, it happend. And to make it even worse, it was an exact copy of the US implossion design, just a couple years later, the Soviets already improved on it with the boost-design, increasing the effectivness. They have never been too far behind the US weapon designs. What they lacked though, was a nuclear industry capable of creating large numbers of wareheads. And this didn't really happen before late 1960s.
But all of that of course still ignores the ethical considerations. Like I said, we do talk about the death of millions of civilians here, in basically seconds. Even if humanity survives, which was relatively certain in the 50s, you have to ask your self, what would future generations say about such a president.
 
Crni Vuk said:
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I agree with what you're saying here with the exception of the bomb killing millions. MacArthur wasn't talking about carpet bombing North Korea, he specifically wanted to bomb the capital only, and even then just the palace where the Kims resided. Even if it was a bomb similar to the hydrogen bomb dropped on Nagasaki and they didn't focus on just the capital building but instead the whole capital, it would kill thousands, but certainly not millions. You'd have to be completely insane to want to carpet bomb a nation.

EDIT: Just looked into it more, apparently MacArthur was much more interested in nuking China than he was nuking North Korea, thus why his plug got pulled. The point still stands though that if someone were to drop a 60s-style atom bomb on Pyongyang back then it would've killed thousands, but absolutely not millions.
 
Yeah, but the war most probably wouldn't have stoped there, particularly as at that point the Chinese pretty much took over the whole show. Kim and his goons had nothing to say at that point. When Mc Arthur demanded the Bomb, he did so, because they had the North Koreans by their balls ... and lost it all, due to the Chinese involvement, remember US divisions moved as far as to the Yalu! The Border between North Korea and China. At that point Pjongjang was already a smoking hole. So if anything, they would had to drop the bombs on the Chinese, and that, definetly would have caused SOME reaction by the Soviets.
Realistically, there have been two cases for using a nuclear weapon in the Korean war, which have been also the two instances where they actually considered a use. During the North Korean surprise attack where they almost conquered all of Korea, with only a small fortified enclave in the South. And later, after the Chinese involvement, which pushed the US and their Allies out of North Korea.
 
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Well... yeah, you got me. Fair enough point. Though at the same time did the Soviets and/or China have nearly as big of a nuclear arsenal as the US back then? Enough to where they would be willing to nuke us back if we did in fact nuke China? That's one thing I'm curious about. I know Russia probably had a few nukes but I don't know about China.
 
Ragemage said:
Well... yeah, you got me. Fair enough point. Though at the same time did the Soviets and/or China have nearly as big of a nuclear arsenal as the US back then? Enough to where they would be willing to nuke us back if we did in fact nuke China? That's one thing I'm curious about. I know Russia probably had a few nukes but I don't know about China.
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Honestly we probably could have gotton away with it but it wasn't a risk anyone was willing to take.
 
China didn't had nuclear weapons in the 1950s. Russia had some, but not nearly as many as the US. The thing is, a nuclear war during the 1950s wouldn't have killed Russia, a lot of casualties, without a doubt, particularly for later generations. But even with the US and their advantage in their nuclear arsenal, it was questionable if it would have won them a world war.

The two strike capability and the concept of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) was not really in effect before the mid/late 1960s, that was when Mc Namara, Kennedy, Johnson etc. came into office. It was clear that any world war, with or without nuclear weapons, during the 50s would have been for the most part a conventional war, with ground troops and conventional tactics. As far as I know, the common sentiment in the US military was, that even a full use of nuclear weapons on the Soviet territory, would not ensure a clear military win. What they used as information, I don't know. But they probably got some ideas from previous nuclear weapons and their effects (Hiroshima, Nagasaki) and the fighting between the Soviets and the Germans. Even with all the devestation of the nuclear attacks it was expected that the Soviet military could keep their production and it would take them just a few months to recover. So, to ensure victory, the US still had to deploy a considerable amount of ground troops and fighting the Soviets directly. We should not forget that the method of delivering nuclear attacks, was still by planes during the 1950s. Which posed a considerable threat for civilian and unprotected targets, like large cities, but relatively little threat for the military body as whole. Even one or two planes reaching New York, Washington or Moscow would lead to a catastrophe, for the population.
 
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