Nuclear First Strike - Bad Idea?

[BeBMan]

Found the time to play another game. I wanted a long game that goes well into the modern era, so I turned every victory option off except conquest/domination.

It's continent, noble, epic speed. I'm Charlemagne, in the 1960ies now, have a solid lead over the rest, finished off the Mongols, and next is a little crusade against Saladin. After taking several cities my offensive was losing steam so I nuked the city where he got the biggest unit stack in, then took it. Then I made peace, leaving Saladin with some cities I wanted to take later.

Some years later everyone from the other continent declared war on me, and I have to take something like 8-10 nukes overall....of course no SDI (I was just building it) so my continent was glowing....They're all saying something like "You nuked our friends"....

Is it pretty much a given that someone will nuke you once you were the first to use nukes, or would the AI have done it anyway? Or do they just care about the "friends" thing - I mean would they care if younuke someone they have bad relation with anyway?

[wodan11]

In my experience all AIs will hate you for using nukes, even against their enemies regardless of their relations with you, and even your friends regardless of their relations with the nukee.

[Unimatrix11]

hehe - i hardly ever use them, but i love to put some tacticals on subs and feast myself with the option of nuking the s*** out of them, should they dare to attack me... So for your question, bebro: i have no idea

[Blaupanzer]

The first to crack the barrier pays the price of no friends and sporadic nuking? The designers' sense of "justice" I suspect. In RL, the US used them first and no one has ever done anything than test them since.

[Unimatrix11]

Yeah, it´s kinda odd how that slipped the public mind. I mean, the picture of cities being A-bombed is the ultimate horror-scenario and everyone acts like it was science fiction, kinda. Very few realize, when they think about that, that this has already happened - twice in 3 days - in cities made of wood.

I think, that this is due to an ongoing campaign that downplays the allied air-raids of WW2. Take Dresden: Had it 65th ´anniversary´ in february and on this occasion the radios talked about 20,000 killed there. That´s just outragous: 30,000 wedding rings were collected in buckets afterwards alone. The true number lies somewhere between 80,000 and 130,000 - it may have been the bloodiest bombing raid ever - including hiroshima and nagasaki. The official number shrinks from anniversary to anniversary. On this occasion, the various neo-nazi groups regularely demonstrate in germany, branding the bombing-campaign as genocide and such. I am seriously considering joining one of their marches (despite the fact that they are my political enemies), cause when they say the media lies about the truth of the air-campaign, they are basically right.

In the well-renowned historical map-book `Putzger´ the total civilian losses of lives in Japan in WW2 are given with 300,000. On the 9th of march ´45 an airraid on tokio had cost about 84,000 direct casulaties alone (267,000 houses were destroyed). Add Hiroshima and Nagasaki and you are almost at 300K already. But besides that, the allies ran operation ´point black´ - a program calling for the destruction of all japanese cities. Between june 17th and august 14th ´45, 60 cities (smallest: Tsuruga pop31,250, biggest Fukuaka, 323,000) have been attacked, most of which were destroyed to about 70% (meaning 30% left), one (Toyama, 127,860) to 99.5%. By the end of July, Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe and Yokohama have been destroyed by about 50%. Even before the nuclear bombings, the death-toll was close to one million, and certainly surpassed it afterwards - and this does not even account for ´indirect losses´ (if you wanna know what i mean by this, watch ´grave of the fireflies´). If the well-renowned Putzger-Atlas gives the number 300K, i thus have no choice, but to call this historic fraud.

I am not talking wether or not the raids were legitimate - that´s not my point. But whatever the case, one has to stick with the truth. That is the point i am trying to make.

(The numbers are taken from: ´Der zweite Weltkrieg´ (´The second world-war´), by Raymond Cartier, 1965)

EDIT: The comparison is not really ligit, but imagine, if german officials were constantly downgrading the number of people murdered during the holocaust. 6 million in 1950, 5.5 by 1955... 2 million by 1980 and 600,000 today, including school books and everything being ´rectified´ (1984) to fit the ´new truth´. Again: i am not questioning the (il)legitimation of the various ´acts´, but such a twist on numbers is simply intolerable, as i try to demostrate with this example in extremis.

EDIT II: A kinda odd thought just crossed my mind: I think it is true, that during the hay-day of the air-campaign, the allies killed civilians faster than the Nazis ever did. The Tokio bombing´s anniversary is tomorrow, Dresden´s has been 3 weeks ago. Roughly (or close to) 200,000 in 3 weeks on these two occsions alone, is quite a stunning killing rate, that was probebly never ´achieved´ in the gas-chambers of all concentration camps combined. In this period, the allies killed about 10,000 civilians daily. It is kinda understandable, that after the fact, after the war had ended and the bitter hatred subsided, they didnt quite want to admit that.

[wodan11]

Whew, I think you punched your own button, Uni.

[Unimatrix11]

You mean like a cavalery-horse with a trumpet in its mouth, playing the ´charge´-tune itself? Yeah, probably...

[BeBMan]

Well, dunno about Japan, but I'd be somewhat suspicious of the higher numbers for Dresden after even the Irving guy had to admit he was wrong with his numbers. Afaik lower numbers rest on internal NS documents (SS, police) as evidence which speak themselves of ca. 25k deaths max. (with another ca. 30- 35k missed).

Otoh Goebbels babbled officially about 275k victims for propaganda reasons, but he didn't back up it at all (well, that's how we know him).

[Unimatrix11]

Okay, i got my source up now, and first i have to correct myself: 20,000 wedding rings not 30,000. But again, its quite unlikely, that the bombs selectively killed only married people.

I´ll give an excerpt of Raymond Cartier´s (who is/was french btw, FWIW) account of it (p. 1130f in affore mentioned book)- i´ll have to do the translation ad hoc - so please excuse minor mistakes:

´A tide of refugees from silesia had flooded into Dresden. [...] Trains had arrived, which wagons, despite the biting cold, were open, packed with people who had to stand. Then numerous trecks of farmer-wagons, carts, sledges and walkers arrived. [...] At the evening of feb. 13th, half a million of them [refugees from silesia] were in Dresden. They crowded the train-stations, camped in the parks and at the shore of the Elbe, around the Zwinger [famous building] and the court-church [...].
The night of the 13th to the 14th was clear and silent. [...]. At 22h [10pm] the RAF [royal air force] added the illumination: The >christmas trees< of the big illumination rockets tore the sites and the corwded streets of the ancient city out of its darkness. [...] Not a single shot disturbed them [the 24-Lancaster-bombers]. There was no Anti-aircraft fire; all batteries had been redeployed to silesia. The first bombs fell around 22.15h. They were the four-thousand-pounders, whose mighty explosions were especially destined to break the windows, so that the fire could spread faster. [...]
The wirst wave was followed at 1.30h by a second, twice the strength, 529 Lancaster bombers, and around noon came the 450 >Flying Fortresses< of the USAAF. Target of 650,000 fire-bombs was the centre of the city, the triangle, which was the border of the whole historic quarters of narrow streets and old houses. When the second wave arrived, the city was burning from one end to the other with such an intensity, an obeserver said, that >i could write my report in the light that filled the cabin<. 12 hours later the flying fortresses did their bombing from within a 5000m high cloud of smoke. The bombardement of Dresden was one of the most terrible episodes in this war, that was so rich with terrible atrocities. The fire became a fire-cyclon, which fed itself by the drop of pressure it caused - until the moment, when the heavens, more merciful than man, send rain that put out the flames. No resistance, no escape was possible. Who stayed in the shelters, suffocated. Who left the shelters, was burned in the sea of flames. The asphalt of the streets was burning. On the old marketplace a large group of people burned like wood. Hundreds of people, who sought to escape the torture of the flames, drowned in the Elbe. The main station was spared during the first attack; the thousands of refugees, who sought protection there, believed themselves out of danger, but the second attack came without a warning and had an undescribable bloodbath as a result. The fire departments of Dresden had been anhilated by the fire, and those of the neighboring cities, huring for help, got strafed by the >Mustangs<, which had escorted the Flying Fortresses of the third wave. The fire lasted for four days, devoured 20 square kilometeres and filled the valley of the Elbe with burned debris. The ammount of corpses was shocking: 20,000 wedding rings were collected in buckets. 5 big ´piles´ of corpses where burned on the old market place and the 2-Meter-high pile of human ash was buried with shovels. The number of victims is impossible to name exactly, even today [1965], but the estimated ammount reached a number of ca. 135,000; the bombardement of Dresden thus was the most murderous of the whole war, Hiroshima included.

--- end of quote ---

Now 135,000 may be a tad too much, but i´d at least count all the ´missing´ for ´dead´ (cause when a 4k-pound bomb goes down anywhere near you, there is not much left you, to count you as dead - so you would be ´missing´).

EDIT: Now, i wouldnt mind, if the official number were like 20 or maybe 25% below what i would regard as the ´real´ numbers, since, after all, who can claim to know for sure? But if the official numbers merely reach 20 to 25% of what i regard as the ´true´ numbers, there is good reason to protest them IMHO...

[BeBMan]

Well, but in the end he is clear that his numbers are estimations, and from what's known today the number is indeed lower. Also, it would be nice to know what *original* sources he bases his stuff on - the numbers he tells must have originated somewhere. Afaik Irving had to correct himself in 1966 precisely because new primary sources were showing up (the SS, police reports I mentioned).

Another thing, there are some things around the attack which are regarded as myths today: for example that people got strafed by escort fighters (Mustangs he says) is a widely held belief, but most historians today regard it as something which simply didn't happen in the case of Dresden, for a number of reasons (source-wise and practical). Doesn't mean the eye-whitnesses who told this lied, but that they simply got something wrong. That's no wonder in all the turmoil surrounding such an attack, and there are comparable myths in other cases (like the famous "Panic of Bulson" in 1940 resulting from French soldiers wrongly reporting German tanks which clearly had not advanced that far).

The were also irrationally high numbers of deaths flowing around in other cases - for example after the attack on Guernica 1937 (?IIRC) by Legion Condor there were press reports speaking of some 30000 deaths while the city had not even 10k inhabitants (numbers given today range from far lower than 1000 - ca. 1600)

To my knowledge the most devastating air attack with non-nuclear bombs was on Tokyo in WWII, with ca. 80 - 90000 victims. The attacks on Germany, esp. Dresden, Hamburg and Berlin were certainly devastating as well, but I would trust newer research more on this matter.

[wodan11]

I'm not sure I would trust the research of any German, recent or old. (And I'm not talking about you, Uni. Quite the contrary.) The German peoples STILL have a bug up their butt about the whole WWII and anything related to WWII. It's like they WANT to have their blinders on.

[Blaupanzer]

The Bomb Damage Assessment conducted by the allies AFTER the war noted that Allied estimators had in may cases overestimated the damage done during the war to such targets as Axis oil, Axis aircraft production, rail transportation, etc. However, in the case of DRESDEN, their estimate of 90,000 people never accounted for was probably conservative. This implies that the target for that set of raids was killing civilians (something the US claimed was a side effect of their bombing campaigns, a precursor way to say collateral damage). Secondly, that based on their post war research, BeBro's numbers are right -- at least 90,000, probably more. They discuss their methodology in the supporting information for the reports, singling out the destruction of records and the chaos in Dresden as particularly vexing.

I don't know if they confirm or deny the fighter strafing to prevent people from fleeing or prevent rescue crews from coming in. Based on the pilots understanding of American doctrine, I doubt that such a thing would have occurred without lots of chatter about it after the war. I've not seen any "exposes" or somesuch.

[Blaupanzer]

The Bomb Damage Assessment for the ETO should be released from classification soon. May already be released.

[BeBMan]

Well, just to go back on topic, I reloaded an earlier save and didn't nuke first this time - didn't matter, I got still nuked by three guys from the other continent some turns later

I had only 3 ICBMs myself and no TacNukes - does the AI somehow check if you're weak on nukes and strikes first then (could simulate MAD nicely)?

[Unimatrix11]

Well, thanks for discussing the off-topic thing, anyways. It´s always nice to chat with people, who know what they are talking about (i am absolutely not sarcastic - i mean, how many know about the Bulson-thingie ?). Just wanted to add that - (off-topic) Poly-tone can always use a little polishing iMHO...