Comment by palmotea
10 hours ago
All that is assuming a limited nuclear exchange is possible, without further nuclear escalation. I find that pretty unbelievable.
> One Soviet war plan that was made available to Western scholars in the 1990s anticipated this invasion of Northern Europe (with conventional forces) starting immediately after the Soviets make a large nuclear strike on Western Europe. Note that tanks crew are basically immune to nuclear fallout provided they are trained to operate in fallout.... This particular plan avoided any attack on Britain or France (and I presume also the US) to make it less likely that Britain and France will choose to use its nukes on the USSR, but hits West Germany, the low countries and NATO airbases in northern Italy really hard to soften them up for the invasion by tanks. In summary, the plan was to grab territory, then dare NATO to take it back or to nuke the USSR in retaliation.
If the USSR nuked non-nuclear NATO, they just assumed their opponents wouldn't retaliate with nukes at all? At a minimum I'd expect the Warsaw Pact countries would have gotten nuked in retaliation. And, IIRC, NATO planners anticipated an attack along these lines, and had nukes lined up to directly target the attacking communist military formations (so those formations wouldn't just be dealing with fallout).
> I heard years ago from some expert that if the US ever decided that China must be suppressed as much as possible by military means, it would be foolish to try to capture the whole country (i.e., it is too big and too populous for the US to try to do what it did to Japan at the end of WWII) so capturing and occupying its ports (which of course the Western powers held collectively for decades in the past) would be the likely military goal.
It's a completely unrealistic goal. If China hasn't been nuked to oblivion, I don't think the US could ever dream to hold its ports against a counterattack (especially given China's rate of modernization and sheer industrial capacity). If China has been nuked to oblivion, the US would almost certainly be wrecked as well, and in no state to send over anyone to hold Chinese ports.
> (which of course the Western powers held collectively for decades in the past)
That was a loooong time ago, when China was basically at a pre-modern technology level and comparatively extremely weak. That's not the case anymore, and China is now arguably the more powerful country (in the ways that matter to such a conflict) than the US.
A nuclear weapon does not do very much to a tank unless it is extremely close. You are better off with a guided munition.
A tank doesn't do much without a significant amount of combat support and logistics backing it up.
It wouldn't be clear of the fallout before it ran out of fuel.
The USSR would evacuate its cities right before the attack. The officers who drafted this war plan would have estimated a large probability that NATO would attack the USSR with nukes -- probably thousands of nukes. Then after waiting for the fallout to subside (e.g., waiting 3 weeks) the people leave their fallout shelters in the countryside and start rebuilding the cities. (Locations a few miles in diameter that were attacked by ground bursts will probably be permanently uninhabitable. Some of these locations would probably have been near city centers, namely, where US war planners believe the USSR's telecommunications nexuses were. Runways usable by Soviet stragic bombers would also be attacked with ground bursts, but of course none of these would be particularly close to city centers.)
Contrary to what many many chatterers on the internet say, "nuked to oblivion" is not a thing. A nuclear strikes with many thousands of strategic nuclear weapons against a country as large as the US, Russia or China temporarily degrades the country's economic and military capacity, then it bounces back. It is difficult to predict how quickly it bounces back, but it will not take multiple decades.
I never claimed it is realistic for the US to hold Chinese ports in 2025. The expert I heard talk about it was talking many years ago -- 15 or 20 years ago. I figure that if it was true of China 15 or 20 years ago, it is true of Russia today.
There has never been a situation in which any nation peppered with thousands of nukes has "bounced back", and nations have been flatly, permanently, toppled when faced with less than that hardship.