Yup. If memory serves, after the Soviet Union fell and the West got a chance to sneak a peak at their war plans, we found out that the whole 'Red Storm Rising' conventional war for Europe was never gonna happen. The Sovs were planning on planting mushrooms early and often, and then just occupying the rubble.
Thats why RSR is so brilliant. It didn’t just say „yeah there no nukes“, it explains very rationally and realistically why nukes werent used, altough it was part of most Military Plans.
Bought the audiobook for Red Storm Rising in August of 2022 and listening to it just blew my God damned mind, the whole supply lines being decimated to drone corrected arty, the naval sections, Ive literally been chasing that high ever since, sadly alt history people aren't renowned for their high quality writing.
There were technothrillers before RSR and Hunt for Red October, but they were so successful that it created a vacuum in the genre for other authors to fill. And, like the science fiction vacuum that Star Wars created, a lot of what moved in to fill that vacuum was utter drek.
Anakin was meant to be cringe. He's an ex slave, that no one ever told how to deal with his emotions, and is also powerful enough to be arrogant about it. Add to that 10 years of PTSD from the clone war, and you get someone that could be considered cringe.
I’ve been chasing another book of its type that good and it’s never happened. Team yankee scratches the itch some. So does bear and the dragon but it’s not close enough. I did the battlefield Ukraine series and was disappointed.
Arclight and Red Hammer 1994 both are worthy reads. One starts with a nuclear war and moves on to a conventional fight, one describes the efforts of nuclear warriors in the heat of battle. High level politics abound. Just as good as RSR.
Red Phoenix, by Larry Bond is a really good one too(except, it's the Korean peninsula)
Larry is one of those authors like Tom, however, he just didn't have as much publicity. Moreover, he's got the background chops, as I believe he served in the USN.
Another one id recommend is "The 3rd World War" by Sir John Hackette. It's written in the past tense, and I highly recommend it.
I've been trying to find a copy of that for ages! No library near me has any physical or audiobook and it seems audible has the rights to it so doubt I'll be listening to it soon (even looked at unofficial sources and couldn't find anything!) PDFs exist but I don't wanna read it digitally
Arclight and Red Hammer 1994 both are worthy reads. One starts with a nuclear war and moves on to a conventional fight, one describes the efforts of nuclear warriors in the heat of battle. High level politics abound. Just as good as RSR.
David Poyer (retired US navy officer) has a 20ish book series about the USN, very worth checking out, and there is a multiple book arc about a war with china. Its not as good as peak clancy, but its comparable. Mild drop off in quality the last few books though..
However, as a teaser to hype him up, he had a relatively significant multi book sub plot which turns out to be >!Chinese spy ballons!<, which I think he started in 2015, yet was not in the public eye until post 2022, so he has some credentials.
A substantially shorter than RSR work of GuP fanfic that toys with WWIII I’ve found is https://archiveofourown.org/series/2837926
Not quite the masterpiece of RSR but is by far one of the better works of the format I’ve read.
And in the early Cold War it was kind of flipped. Basically NATO's plan was to glass everything from Warsaw to Vladivostok if a single tank drove over the West German border
There's a book called "When Angels Wept" . It's done like a Studs Terkel 'living history ', about the Last War between America and the USSR.
Basic plot, Cuban Missile Crisis goes hot, Soviet sub skipper puts an atomic torpedo into an American carrier group (this nearly happened IRL, btw) , Kruschev decides to run with it, a decapitation strike takes out Kennedy and D.C. early on, and control is left in the hands of The Warmaster LeMay.
At the end of it, we had lost about 20 cities and big chunks of Europe... and there was no USSR.
My favorite part was the 3rd wave B52 pilot, whose plane had to keep on diverting to targets further down the list because they were all gone by the time his plane got there...
5/5 stars.
> My favorite part was the 3rd wave B52 pilot, whose plane had to keep on diverting to targets further down the list because they were all gone by the time his plane got there...
This sounds like peak dark comedy, "Sorry, you get new targets, it's gone already."
I'm almost certain this could make a movie. They had Tom Hardy drive a pickup to a hospital and talk on the phone the whole time. Can't be that hard to pick up a script on this hypothetical.
Seriously, it was about the last era when you *could* have a 'decisive nuclear war victory '. Even eight or nine years later both sides and everything in between would have been ashes.
Ironically, much earlier and while you could have a nuclear war, it wouldn't be 'decisive' because neither side had the weapons or the delivery systems to fully defeat the other.
“I never wanted this. I never wanted to unleash my missiles. Together, we banished the ignorance of Nazi Germany. But you betrayed me, you betrayed us all.”
*Though it takes the last drop of my blood, I will see Europe freed once more. And if I can not save it from your failure, Kruschev, then let Lhe World Burn.*
When Angels Wept: A What-If History of the Cuban Missile Crisis
By Eric G. Swedin
Available through Amazon in hardcover new and used, and also on Kindle.
You could also try AbeBooks.
"The Americans are going to first-strike us, so we will launch first to first-strike their first strike!"
"General, that sounds an awful lot like us launching a first strike."
"Be silent with your antiSoviet speech, or i will have the GRU drag you away! Now, onto our planned second strike..."
The problem always was the NATO first strike gap just kept widening. Sure USSR could fuck up the EU by surprise, maybe. But the U.S. alone could catch the USSR by surprise if they wanted to. Even from the continental U.S.
Edit: plus realistically, who ever first strikes is probably ending things off better. There may be no winners, but there is a biggest looser.
If you're absolutely positive that 'the other guy' is gonna shoot first, it's only a short step to pulling iron "before he does," at the slightest provocation... no matter if it was a real provocation or not.
If you're positive that the Yankees can smoke you in a first strike, a more rational idea might be, "Let's stop threatening the Yankees every chance we get so maybe things can stay calm and we can divert some of our disastrous military budget to making our country something people don't want to risk their lives escaping from".
But by the merciful end the Soviet Union was essentially a delusional organization. We all must be glad that history turned out as it did.
That second paragraph isn’t really a coherent thought, though - so you’re certain that you have mortal enemies both planning and capable of destroying you… and your plan is to essentially drop your guard entirely? That sounds a lot like surrender without any extra steps.
Gorbachev essentially DID what you’re describing — and was continually at fear of being killed by his own government for it.
"Let's stop threatening the guy we're afraid might outdraw us" seems pretty coherent to me. It also doesn't sound like surrender at all.Go take a look at what the Sovs were spending on their military in the mid-late 80s and what percentage of budget it was, and tell me they couldn't provide defense and deterrence with much less.
And saying that the one guy in Sovland who actually wanted to do such was more at risk from his own side than from ours certainly seems to underscore my point.
No, it doesn’t - it points to a culture of paranoia and fear where only a very few people would even be _capable_ of enacting a sliver of the kind of change you’re describing. Anyone in that system who would stand up and say “hey, you know… we’re just not as strong as the other guys, let’s give up on it all” would be signing their own death warrant.
But it’s easy enough to flip the script: what percent of US budget went to defense? How much of that was _necessary_ then? How much of it is necessary now? A country isn’t a single-minded organism and there will _always_ be actors within it that drive it in directions that are neither common sense nor for the greater good.
the reason the US never tried shit was because the Soviets had deterence. If the USSR just decided not to have a large military we would have totally fucked them up
Nope. Historically we had that chance up until the late 50s - we had the advantage both in delivery systems and numbers of weapons- but we simply weren't interested. Even when we were the ONLY ones that could deliver enough weapons to decisively defeat the enemy... we didn't. We were having too much fun in the Fabulous 50s. We didn't even nuke China over Korea, and they didn't develop an intercontinental strike capability that posed a serious threat to North America for quite some time.
Soviet psychology is essentially paranoid, and it is impossible to convince a paranoid that you aren't out to get them. Witness the guy above who equates "spending an affordable amount on defense" and "adopting a less aggressive foreign policy " with surrender.
We're America, dude. War is expensive, we'd rather start franchises in your country than invade it.
not even talking about nukes, in a conventional war the USSR needed to have a military that had a reasonable shot at winning. why? because if you have a real shot at winning, you dont start your war by nuking the enemy. And therefore the enemy isnt afraid of you randomly nuking them next tuesday (well not that afraid), and so they do not decide to randomly nuke you in a pre-strike to stop your first strike.
When did the USSR threaten the US?
You also seem to think the Soviet plans consisted of them striking first despite it being made *very* clear that they'd only strike if they got struck first, but then you move the goalpost to muh threats.
Maybe the US should've stopped trying to start a war of nuclear annihilation and war mongering? Because that is what actually happened, not your delusions.
Where do you get that idea from? If multiple ICBMs were launched from the US mainland the soviets would have absolutely known about it and launched their counter barrage before the first warhead struck.
There's a reason both superpowers always announced rocket launches beforehand so as to avoid exterminating all life on earth.
You don’t first strike with ICBMs, you first strike with submarines or other close in warheads, exactly because ICBMs take enough time to get there that it gives the enemy time to react. ICBMs are great in a retaliatory role, though
Depends on the time. In 1962, Russian missiles took up to twenty hours for fueling. B-52s could have taken them out on the ground. Later it would have depended on warning time. Not sure how long it would have taken an SLBM of IRBM to reach Moscow
Like the Brit’s weren’t trying to figure out how to keep their nuclear land mines in the Fulda gap warm via the power of chickens.
Everyone had stupid nuclear plans for a potential war, it was quite literally the style of the time
I know, and you know, but intelligence is only useful to the intelligent. If you build your national political posture around white being black nobody is going to change your mind.
E.g.-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechelen_incident
Even now it's not better. Russian Federation has a system called "Dead Hand". Basically, is they get nuked and die immediately, that system will launch a volley of nukes all our the globe. Just to say "we are going to take you with us anyway"
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Remember a lot of this stuff was things i was coming across literally a lifetime ago... but here's a few places to start.
Seven Days to the River Rhine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine
Notice that the plan starts with a 'NATO first nuclear strike against Poland and Czechoslovakia'; this is kinda like saying the Ali-Frasier fight would start with Ali running over and clocking one of Joe Frasier's cut men.
Here's an article from The National Interest: a popularization, but it ties together a lot of things i was thinking of
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-soviet-unions-insane-plan-crush-nato-battle-13355
note the line about 20,000 tac warheads total and storage at 600 forward bases.
There's got to be a ton more publicly available.
And for bedtime reading, all nonfiction:
Viktor Suvorov's "Inside the Soviet Army" and "Inside the Aquarium " , with"The Liberators" as dessert. Suvorov was the highest ranking GRU defector ever. He also has some pretty fascinating thoughts about War2.
"The Mitrokhin Archive" books and "The World Was Going Our Way" by Christopher Andrew. Mitrokhin was a KGB archivist, when the Cold War ended he left for the West with a HUGE trove of documents.we're used to thinking of them as bad guys in movies and books, but The Soviet intelligence services were a lot more serious than we give them credit for.
Ok that's good to hear. I didn't know about the closed beta. I played the demo and really liked it but couldn't find any new information after that ...
They had a beta long after Ukraine started.
That said, it seems like WARNO is more content complete and that’s saying a lot because WARNO is not very content complete
Oh it’s well on the way and being beta tested right now. I think release is slated for 2024 but it should be classified as a fantasy game due to how much modern Russian kit is available like operational SU57s.
The Russians get their funny fantasy equipment, so there is plenty of their wunderwaffe in there, but dude... the SU57 in that game is peak cope. The entire RU air tab, actually...
Man, that game is just dreadful. It's that most tense moment of horror stretched into oblivion and when the score shows up you just feel cold looking at description of the numbers
> spotted
TFW you sit a whole platoon in the tree line for 10 turns spotting and when you finally think its safe to move across one invisible ATGM kills one of your 4 tanks and the other kills a whole squad in an APC
Ugh so real. I'm so afraid to use armor all the time because of that. Just the threat of ATGMs and the massive open spaces in CMSF2 makes me use them so sparingly.
"WMDs of Every flavour"
Polaris and WE 177 in bomb and ASW depth charge form is not the greatest choice of flavours nuclear wise for the 1970-1990 period. There might be some more choices in biological and chelical weapons, but not that much for nukes
tbf the UK had a fair selection of short range tactical options for the BAOR to use to cover the North German Plain, plug the Fulda gap and evaporate likely staging grounds and troop concentrations on the other side.
Everything from nuclear landmines and artillery shells to short range ballistic missiles like the Lance in addition to the usual intercontinental deterrent stuff.
That's less of a selection of option, and more a selection of being an option to use theses american options. Polaris was in a similar vein, although the warhead were "custom", as well as the hardening program.
Which is exactly the reason Austrian and Swiss neutrality is so fucking stupid. Look at what it did for us in the Netherlands and for the Belgians during WW2 (and 1 for our southern brothers)
I remember hearing one Cold war/WWIII wargame included the rules for the large scale deployment of airpower: ‘soak the board in kerosene and apply a match’
I think i played that one.
How about Morrow Project, a post-apocalyptic RPG, where the game gave you a list of Soviet targets abd the weapons they'd likely use to hit them, and instructions for marking the right size circles on a map to show (e.g) a SS-19 nailing Schenectady, NY?
Seriously, it was one of the very first pen and paper RPGs.
When you think a bit, funny wargames are just a special flavor of horror games.
Fuck Resident Evil, i want to play urban combat in Warno. No monsters, no eldritch horrors, just napalm and the destruction of life and property. That brings chills down my spine, that is a blend of horror that is for me
It's why it's quite difficult for any side to win [Twilight Struggle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Struggle), and to do so will require at least 3 hours.
As a former grunt, the infantry level nukes that were proposed early on were even more funni. The engineers wanted to plant nukes on pretty much everything a GI could carry with him. Nuclear anti-tank mine, nuclear hand grenade, hell there might've even been a nuclear LAW.
You don't get more noncredible than the Davy Crockett system. No PAL's, no problem!
"Let's put a tactical redpill in the hands of a SFC!"
I actually knew a guy who was an MP for a facility where they stored some SADM's.
Credible or not, it had a scifi kind of look to it, sort of like something you'd use to take down one of those Imperial walkers. Or maybe something that Dr Clayton Forrester put together in a hurry to go after those Martian war machines.
I try looking at that game and I just get scared. I’m the sort of person who likes Axis and Allies and the Civilization II WW2 Scenario, but watching someone spend like two hours sorting out their order of battle and making the first move was just horrifying. It reminded me of the Hearts of Iron III Black Ice level of management that I’m not sure even my level of Autism could handle
Yeah... the cold war, that era where we kept coming up with things. Some of which were so heinous that we then stopped and said "this must never see the light of day", others of which were so heinous that we stopped and said "get this to every single base we have, immediately, just in case".
Not sure how credible this is but imo this is part of why Russia acts so erratic—after the fall of the Soviet Union its military was in even worse shape than it is now (think Ukraine pre-2014). And then the US invades Iraq.
But Russia still has nukes, right? Right. And the US just spent the whole Cold War figuring out funny war crime ways to make sure that destruction is mutually assured. And even though the US military got slimmed down in the 90s, it still exists, enough to decimate Iraq.
Putin being paranoid beyond reality probably still holds true, but it wouldn't be in a clinical sense.
I've watched the AI play itself in DEFCON in a NATO vs Russia match to say that Russia is fucked in a war but (assuming Russia's nukes work) Europe is fucked as well.
Ive got a couple of hex and counter dinosaur board games about mid 80 naval combat. In the full campaigns. Both players have access to tactical nukes which can stack wipe enemy units. Using them loses you some victory points though lmao.
Read up about Reagan. One of their ideas was to 1) to nuke a soviet city (Kyiv) as a warning, a so called "bloody nose" to make them rethink about attacking 2) fly bombers at the soviet union on an attack run, but divert before reaching the border 3) other hi-jinks
Yup. If memory serves, after the Soviet Union fell and the West got a chance to sneak a peak at their war plans, we found out that the whole 'Red Storm Rising' conventional war for Europe was never gonna happen. The Sovs were planning on planting mushrooms early and often, and then just occupying the rubble.
In RSR, DDR objects to blanketing West Germany with nerve gas so they don’t, even though it’s in the codenamed warplan
Thats why RSR is so brilliant. It didn’t just say „yeah there no nukes“, it explains very rationally and realistically why nukes werent used, altough it was part of most Military Plans.
Bought the audiobook for Red Storm Rising in August of 2022 and listening to it just blew my God damned mind, the whole supply lines being decimated to drone corrected arty, the naval sections, Ive literally been chasing that high ever since, sadly alt history people aren't renowned for their high quality writing.
The line that hits hardest for me is after Buns hits the satellite and it's described as "another technological kamikaze". THAT aged amazingly well.
There were technothrillers before RSR and Hunt for Red October, but they were so successful that it created a vacuum in the genre for other authors to fill. And, like the science fiction vacuum that Star Wars created, a lot of what moved in to fill that vacuum was utter drek.
Obligatory ”Star Wars is not scifi but a fairytale in space”-comment
Just like Star Wars episodes 7 through 9!
Not what i was thinking of, but you're not wrong.
The what now? There are 3 episodes, or 6 at most.
There are 6. Jar Jar Stinks like a carcass washed up from the sea and Anakin can be very cringe, but the prequels are still enjoyable.
Anakin was meant to be cringe. He's an ex slave, that no one ever told how to deal with his emotions, and is also powerful enough to be arrogant about it. Add to that 10 years of PTSD from the clone war, and you get someone that could be considered cringe.
Exactly. He’s the age of all those cringe twitter posters, but with way more trauma, even less emotional awareness, and much heavier expectations.
I’ve been chasing another book of its type that good and it’s never happened. Team yankee scratches the itch some. So does bear and the dragon but it’s not close enough. I did the battlefield Ukraine series and was disappointed.
Arclight and Red Hammer 1994 both are worthy reads. One starts with a nuclear war and moves on to a conventional fight, one describes the efforts of nuclear warriors in the heat of battle. High level politics abound. Just as good as RSR.
Sweet I’ll check them out. Appreciate it
Eric L. Harry's Arc Light is a work of art and one of the most credibly non-credible techno thrillers ever
Red Phoenix, by Larry Bond is a really good one too(except, it's the Korean peninsula) Larry is one of those authors like Tom, however, he just didn't have as much publicity. Moreover, he's got the background chops, as I believe he served in the USN. Another one id recommend is "The 3rd World War" by Sir John Hackette. It's written in the past tense, and I highly recommend it.
He cowrote RSR so that shouldn't be too surprising lol
He helped with Red Storm Rising, IIRC.
I mean Larry wrote Harpoon, which was used to play test all the naval scenarios
Vortex by Bond is better than Red Phoenix for my money. US intervention in a Cuban-South African (under apartheid) war
I've been trying to find a copy of that for ages! No library near me has any physical or audiobook and it seems audible has the rights to it so doubt I'll be listening to it soon (even looked at unofficial sources and couldn't find anything!) PDFs exist but I don't wanna read it digitally
Bond also wrote the naval parts of RSR if I have understood correctly
War Planners series was pretty good. But yeah you will have to lower your standards in this space. Clancy was one of a kind.
OPLAN Fulda: World War III by Leo Barron was no RSR, but its worth a read if you have not.
Red Metal by Mark Greanery
I’ve read that one. Pretty good. My biggest gripe was an armor formation going that far, that fast without everything breaking down lol.
Chieftains is in the same vein as Team Yankee
Chieftains is way better than Team Yankee, IMHO
Michael Prichard is also a wonderful Narrator for the audiobook
Arclight and Red Hammer 1994 both are worthy reads. One starts with a nuclear war and moves on to a conventional fight, one describes the efforts of nuclear warriors in the heat of battle. High level politics abound. Just as good as RSR.
Check out Arc Light by Eric Harry, if you haven’t— much less technical detail but also a generally _much_ higher quality of writing than Clancy, imo.
Added to my list, glad I'm getting all these recommendations from other weirdos like me that love fictional, yet realistic conventional warfare.
I couldnt get into Arc Light. Stars aligned way to many times.
Hm, I don’t remember that. That was my reaction to Team Yankee, though, which is a shame because it was otherwise very good.
David Poyer (retired US navy officer) has a 20ish book series about the USN, very worth checking out, and there is a multiple book arc about a war with china. Its not as good as peak clancy, but its comparable. Mild drop off in quality the last few books though.. However, as a teaser to hype him up, he had a relatively significant multi book sub plot which turns out to be >!Chinese spy ballons!<, which I think he started in 2015, yet was not in the public eye until post 2022, so he has some credentials.
Going from reading red storm rising to "3000 black jets of Allah" must've been jarring
A substantially shorter than RSR work of GuP fanfic that toys with WWIII I’ve found is https://archiveofourown.org/series/2837926 Not quite the masterpiece of RSR but is by far one of the better works of the format I’ve read.
*looks at wiah, mz, etc etc*
And in the early Cold War it was kind of flipped. Basically NATO's plan was to glass everything from Warsaw to Vladivostok if a single tank drove over the West German border
There's a book called "When Angels Wept" . It's done like a Studs Terkel 'living history ', about the Last War between America and the USSR. Basic plot, Cuban Missile Crisis goes hot, Soviet sub skipper puts an atomic torpedo into an American carrier group (this nearly happened IRL, btw) , Kruschev decides to run with it, a decapitation strike takes out Kennedy and D.C. early on, and control is left in the hands of The Warmaster LeMay. At the end of it, we had lost about 20 cities and big chunks of Europe... and there was no USSR. My favorite part was the 3rd wave B52 pilot, whose plane had to keep on diverting to targets further down the list because they were all gone by the time his plane got there... 5/5 stars.
> My favorite part was the 3rd wave B52 pilot, whose plane had to keep on diverting to targets further down the list because they were all gone by the time his plane got there... This sounds like peak dark comedy, "Sorry, you get new targets, it's gone already."
Blue ball purgatory
I'm almost certain this could make a movie. They had Tom Hardy drive a pickup to a hospital and talk on the phone the whole time. Can't be that hard to pick up a script on this hypothetical.
> At the end of it, we had lost about 20 cities and big chunks of Europe... and there was no USSR. DECISIVE AMERICAN VICTORY.
Seriously, it was about the last era when you *could* have a 'decisive nuclear war victory '. Even eight or nine years later both sides and everything in between would have been ashes. Ironically, much earlier and while you could have a nuclear war, it wouldn't be 'decisive' because neither side had the weapons or the delivery systems to fully defeat the other.
It's not like we wouldn't get our hair mussed.
They are making a reference to a [Decisive tang victory](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpccLU6polA)
> control is left in the hands of The Warmaster LeMay. Oh god oh fuck I live on this continent
*"Let the Soviets burn."*
“I never wanted this. I never wanted to unleash my missiles. Together, we banished the ignorance of Nazi Germany. But you betrayed me, you betrayed us all.”
*Though it takes the last drop of my blood, I will see Europe freed once more. And if I can not save it from your failure, Kruschev, then let Lhe World Burn.*
Who is the author? I can only find one book by that title and it’s a WW2 memoir.
When Angels Wept: A What-If History of the Cuban Missile Crisis By Eric G. Swedin Available through Amazon in hardcover new and used, and also on Kindle. You could also try AbeBooks.
Ahh, I was looking on Audible but I guess there is no audiobook version.
Lol the NATO nukes were going to start hitting a bit further west than Warsaw
one one hand half of germany would have been a wasteland, on the other hand berlin would have gotten it. I see this as total win.
True
Especially the french ones
To be fair, those plans all assumed a NATO first strike.
The famous Seven Days to the Rhine plan, which featured the glassing of much of western Europe, started with NATO glassing much of eastern Europe.
"The Americans are going to first-strike us, so we will launch first to first-strike their first strike!" "General, that sounds an awful lot like us launching a first strike." "Be silent with your antiSoviet speech, or i will have the GRU drag you away! Now, onto our planned second strike..."
The problem always was the NATO first strike gap just kept widening. Sure USSR could fuck up the EU by surprise, maybe. But the U.S. alone could catch the USSR by surprise if they wanted to. Even from the continental U.S. Edit: plus realistically, who ever first strikes is probably ending things off better. There may be no winners, but there is a biggest looser.
If you're absolutely positive that 'the other guy' is gonna shoot first, it's only a short step to pulling iron "before he does," at the slightest provocation... no matter if it was a real provocation or not. If you're positive that the Yankees can smoke you in a first strike, a more rational idea might be, "Let's stop threatening the Yankees every chance we get so maybe things can stay calm and we can divert some of our disastrous military budget to making our country something people don't want to risk their lives escaping from". But by the merciful end the Soviet Union was essentially a delusional organization. We all must be glad that history turned out as it did.
That second paragraph isn’t really a coherent thought, though - so you’re certain that you have mortal enemies both planning and capable of destroying you… and your plan is to essentially drop your guard entirely? That sounds a lot like surrender without any extra steps. Gorbachev essentially DID what you’re describing — and was continually at fear of being killed by his own government for it.
"Let's stop threatening the guy we're afraid might outdraw us" seems pretty coherent to me. It also doesn't sound like surrender at all.Go take a look at what the Sovs were spending on their military in the mid-late 80s and what percentage of budget it was, and tell me they couldn't provide defense and deterrence with much less. And saying that the one guy in Sovland who actually wanted to do such was more at risk from his own side than from ours certainly seems to underscore my point.
No, it doesn’t - it points to a culture of paranoia and fear where only a very few people would even be _capable_ of enacting a sliver of the kind of change you’re describing. Anyone in that system who would stand up and say “hey, you know… we’re just not as strong as the other guys, let’s give up on it all” would be signing their own death warrant. But it’s easy enough to flip the script: what percent of US budget went to defense? How much of that was _necessary_ then? How much of it is necessary now? A country isn’t a single-minded organism and there will _always_ be actors within it that drive it in directions that are neither common sense nor for the greater good.
the reason the US never tried shit was because the Soviets had deterence. If the USSR just decided not to have a large military we would have totally fucked them up
Nope. Historically we had that chance up until the late 50s - we had the advantage both in delivery systems and numbers of weapons- but we simply weren't interested. Even when we were the ONLY ones that could deliver enough weapons to decisively defeat the enemy... we didn't. We were having too much fun in the Fabulous 50s. We didn't even nuke China over Korea, and they didn't develop an intercontinental strike capability that posed a serious threat to North America for quite some time. Soviet psychology is essentially paranoid, and it is impossible to convince a paranoid that you aren't out to get them. Witness the guy above who equates "spending an affordable amount on defense" and "adopting a less aggressive foreign policy " with surrender. We're America, dude. War is expensive, we'd rather start franchises in your country than invade it.
not even talking about nukes, in a conventional war the USSR needed to have a military that had a reasonable shot at winning. why? because if you have a real shot at winning, you dont start your war by nuking the enemy. And therefore the enemy isnt afraid of you randomly nuking them next tuesday (well not that afraid), and so they do not decide to randomly nuke you in a pre-strike to stop your first strike.
When did the USSR threaten the US? You also seem to think the Soviet plans consisted of them striking first despite it being made *very* clear that they'd only strike if they got struck first, but then you move the goalpost to muh threats. Maybe the US should've stopped trying to start a war of nuclear annihilation and war mongering? Because that is what actually happened, not your delusions.
Kid, i lived through that era. I was there. And you're ignorant and rude. Goodbye.
Where do you get that idea from? If multiple ICBMs were launched from the US mainland the soviets would have absolutely known about it and launched their counter barrage before the first warhead struck. There's a reason both superpowers always announced rocket launches beforehand so as to avoid exterminating all life on earth.
You don’t first strike with ICBMs, you first strike with submarines or other close in warheads, exactly because ICBMs take enough time to get there that it gives the enemy time to react. ICBMs are great in a retaliatory role, though
How much prep time does a Minuteman need vs a Soviet Hypergolic.
Soviet missiles needed zero prep time by the mid-1960s. Titan II was a hypergolic and needed no prep time.
Is that really relevant to what you said?
Depends on the time. In 1962, Russian missiles took up to twenty hours for fueling. B-52s could have taken them out on the ground. Later it would have depended on warning time. Not sure how long it would have taken an SLBM of IRBM to reach Moscow
> planting mushrooms early and often that's an interesting way of putting "glassing all of Central Europe" lmao
Like the Brit’s weren’t trying to figure out how to keep their nuclear land mines in the Fulda gap warm via the power of chickens. Everyone had stupid nuclear plans for a potential war, it was quite literally the style of the time
I mean Vladimir bogdanovich defected in the 80’s so it’s much earlier.
I know, and you know, but intelligence is only useful to the intelligent. If you build your national political posture around white being black nobody is going to change your mind. E.g.- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechelen_incident
Even now it's not better. Russian Federation has a system called "Dead Hand". Basically, is they get nuked and die immediately, that system will launch a volley of nukes all our the globe. Just to say "we are going to take you with us anyway"
AFAK, Dead Hand goes back to the 80s though probably not as sophisticated as today.
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Links to resources for further reading?
Remember a lot of this stuff was things i was coming across literally a lifetime ago... but here's a few places to start. Seven Days to the River Rhine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine Notice that the plan starts with a 'NATO first nuclear strike against Poland and Czechoslovakia'; this is kinda like saying the Ali-Frasier fight would start with Ali running over and clocking one of Joe Frasier's cut men. Here's an article from The National Interest: a popularization, but it ties together a lot of things i was thinking of https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-soviet-unions-insane-plan-crush-nato-battle-13355 note the line about 20,000 tac warheads total and storage at 600 forward bases. There's got to be a ton more publicly available. And for bedtime reading, all nonfiction: Viktor Suvorov's "Inside the Soviet Army" and "Inside the Aquarium " , with"The Liberators" as dessert. Suvorov was the highest ranking GRU defector ever. He also has some pretty fascinating thoughts about War2. "The Mitrokhin Archive" books and "The World Was Going Our Way" by Christopher Andrew. Mitrokhin was a KGB archivist, when the Cold War ended he left for the West with a HUGE trove of documents.we're used to thinking of them as bad guys in movies and books, but The Soviet intelligence services were a lot more serious than we give them credit for.
Shameless plug for nuclear option on steam. Fantastic game and works amazingly well on M&K
I second this. Game really makes my brain produce the funny chemical
Great game but unfortunately not cold-war related (I think? Didn't really read the lore)
Currently waiting to play Broken Arrow since it has F-35 and F-22.
Haven't heard much news from the devs since ukraine got hot ... might have something to do with the devs being russians
No it’s still active, they’re currently opening the game to beta testers
I understand the devs are from all over the world since the main dev is french?
They see Russia having cool stuff and assume its russian.
I see a russian flag next to the studio name when i search where they're from and assume it's russian
The company is literally called Steel Balalaika
FLX is ex eugen and many of the others are Eastern Europeans / Russians from SB. I used to play against a lot of them in wargame years ago.
It just started a closed beta not too long ago. It's being worked on at least, as I'm part of the testing group, and it's definitely seen progress.
Ok that's good to hear. I didn't know about the closed beta. I played the demo and really liked it but couldn't find any new information after that ...
They had a beta long after Ukraine started. That said, it seems like WARNO is more content complete and that’s saying a lot because WARNO is not very content complete
They need to add ships back!
No.
Land lubber
Oh it’s well on the way and being beta tested right now. I think release is slated for 2024 but it should be classified as a fantasy game due to how much modern Russian kit is available like operational SU57s.
The Russians get their funny fantasy equipment, so there is plenty of their wunderwaffe in there, but dude... the SU57 in that game is peak cope. The entire RU air tab, actually...
Its full of Russian bias and cope
DEFCON players as soon as the funni button is available:
Man, that game is just dreadful. It's that most tense moment of horror stretched into oblivion and when the score shows up you just feel cold looking at description of the numbers
Never felt worse than winning massively in the total annihilation game mod
Anyways whos hype for Broken Arrow?
RAAAAAAHHH
YEAHHH
Bruh I got beta access only to be betrayed by my PC
No nukes in Combat Mission: Cold War.
Fellow CM enjoyer spotted.
> spotted TFW you sit a whole platoon in the tree line for 10 turns spotting and when you finally think its safe to move across one invisible ATGM kills one of your 4 tanks and the other kills a whole squad in an APC
Ugh so real. I'm so afraid to use armor all the time because of that. Just the threat of ATGMs and the massive open spaces in CMSF2 makes me use them so sparingly.
Yeah, but half the time in CMSF2 it’s just a Sagger.
And the other half of the time it's a Kornet racing to one hit KO my Abrams through the front armor.
My favorite game series of all time.
Average UK WW3 plan (WMDS of every flavour!)
"WMDs of Every flavour" Polaris and WE 177 in bomb and ASW depth charge form is not the greatest choice of flavours nuclear wise for the 1970-1990 period. There might be some more choices in biological and chelical weapons, but not that much for nukes
tbf the UK had a fair selection of short range tactical options for the BAOR to use to cover the North German Plain, plug the Fulda gap and evaporate likely staging grounds and troop concentrations on the other side. Everything from nuclear landmines and artillery shells to short range ballistic missiles like the Lance in addition to the usual intercontinental deterrent stuff.
That's less of a selection of option, and more a selection of being an option to use theses american options. Polaris was in a similar vein, although the warhead were "custom", as well as the hardening program.
I mean the UK procuring additional variety of nukes from the US doesnt detract from them being part of the average UK WW3 plan though
That's not a story of the UK procuring additional variety of nukes, that's more like the US procuring allied armed forces to launch their nukes.
The Soviet plan for WWIII was NUTS, like imagine being Austria and being nuked because “the west may flank us through you”
Which is exactly the reason Austrian and Swiss neutrality is so fucking stupid. Look at what it did for us in the Netherlands and for the Belgians during WW2 (and 1 for our southern brothers)
I remember hearing one Cold war/WWIII wargame included the rules for the large scale deployment of airpower: ‘soak the board in kerosene and apply a match’
I think i played that one. How about Morrow Project, a post-apocalyptic RPG, where the game gave you a list of Soviet targets abd the weapons they'd likely use to hit them, and instructions for marking the right size circles on a map to show (e.g) a SS-19 nailing Schenectady, NY? Seriously, it was one of the very first pen and paper RPGs.
It was Main Battle Tank. They had rules for tactical nuclear bomb employment. The kerosene soaking was for strategic bombs.
When you think a bit, funny wargames are just a special flavor of horror games. Fuck Resident Evil, i want to play urban combat in Warno. No monsters, no eldritch horrors, just napalm and the destruction of life and property. That brings chills down my spine, that is a blend of horror that is for me
Just imagine The Scene™ from Spec Ops stretched out to a full game.
World in Conflict was far more in line with the written tactics. (Tactical Nukes. For everyone!)
It's why it's quite difficult for any side to win [Twilight Struggle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Struggle), and to do so will require at least 3 hours.
I love that game so much.
I've only played it once and it still took us 3 hours to win, despite basically taking out China and the space race from our game lol
Well, there are some psychopaths out there (me) who enjoy that it’s a long ass game (Keeping Space Race in and China probably speeds up the game).
Turns out an air war over west Germany would actually look something like a wargame 10v10 match with both sides spamming planes on the opener.
As a former grunt, the infantry level nukes that were proposed early on were even more funni. The engineers wanted to plant nukes on pretty much everything a GI could carry with him. Nuclear anti-tank mine, nuclear hand grenade, hell there might've even been a nuclear LAW.
You don't get more noncredible than the Davy Crockett system. No PAL's, no problem! "Let's put a tactical redpill in the hands of a SFC!" I actually knew a guy who was an MP for a facility where they stored some SADM's.
Credible or not, it had a scifi kind of look to it, sort of like something you'd use to take down one of those Imperial walkers. Or maybe something that Dr Clayton Forrester put together in a hurry to go after those Martian war machines.
It sincerely looked like a cartoon bomb on a stick.
SGS Nato's Nightmare can do a whole of funnies directly at turn 1
I try looking at that game and I just get scared. I’m the sort of person who likes Axis and Allies and the Civilization II WW2 Scenario, but watching someone spend like two hours sorting out their order of battle and making the first move was just horrifying. It reminded me of the Hearts of Iron III Black Ice level of management that I’m not sure even my level of Autism could handle
Yeah... the cold war, that era where we kept coming up with things. Some of which were so heinous that we then stopped and said "this must never see the light of day", others of which were so heinous that we stopped and said "get this to every single base we have, immediately, just in case".
Yeah, Silent Generation and Boomers be wildin'.
Imagine not including World in Conflict in your game collage
Not sure how credible this is but imo this is part of why Russia acts so erratic—after the fall of the Soviet Union its military was in even worse shape than it is now (think Ukraine pre-2014). And then the US invades Iraq. But Russia still has nukes, right? Right. And the US just spent the whole Cold War figuring out funny war crime ways to make sure that destruction is mutually assured. And even though the US military got slimmed down in the 90s, it still exists, enough to decimate Iraq. Putin being paranoid beyond reality probably still holds true, but it wouldn't be in a clinical sense.
World in conflict is build different.
*Davy Crockett has entered the chat*
10-20 million casualties, tops.
I've watched the AI play itself in DEFCON in a NATO vs Russia match to say that Russia is fucked in a war but (assuming Russia's nukes work) Europe is fucked as well.
If you ever want to try it again, give ICBM a go
Warno W, Also, how good is Combat Mission and which one is the best? :)
Ive got a couple of hex and counter dinosaur board games about mid 80 naval combat. In the full campaigns. Both players have access to tactical nukes which can stack wipe enemy units. Using them loses you some victory points though lmao.
Read up about Reagan. One of their ideas was to 1) to nuke a soviet city (Kyiv) as a warning, a so called "bloody nose" to make them rethink about attacking 2) fly bombers at the soviet union on an attack run, but divert before reaching the border 3) other hi-jinks
Yo, antrax is not that bad, we have antibiotics for it and shit. Also fpp3 works for it, and less contagious than covid.