Comment by greedo

This is counter to both SIOP and what we've found out in the Warsaw Pact archives and from researchers who have been able to interview former Soviet officers and officials.

Just a back of the napkin calculation showed how silly the idea of any conventional forces surviving a full scale nuclear war. The US had around 5K warheads on ICBMs and SLBMs at the peak of the Cold War. This doesn't even count any nuclear bombs or missiles carried by bombers. Now look at a map and count the Russian cities with a population of over 150k. In 1962 (Cuban Missile Crisis), there were roughly 100 cities in the USSR at that size threshold. In a nuclear exchange, all of them are gone. Multiple times over. And most of those cities housed military forces either in them or nearby. So those are all targeted too. Every seaport, every airport, every dam, every major bridge, all targeted. The idea was to make "the rubble bounce." After a full exchange, neither the US nor the Soviets would have had anything left for a conventional conflict, with the exception of a few units that escaped the blast radius. But there would be no transport for these units, so they'd just die of starvation and disease.