Did nukes prevent WWIII? ...erm, up to now that is.

[Whoha]

Originally posted by GePap


Not really. The missile gap was a pipe dream. The fact was that in the early 60's the US was FAR ahead in number of warheads and our ability to deliver them, since Strategic Air Command was in business BEFORE the soviets got ICBM's;

http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/nukenotes/nd02nukenote.html

note, in 1960 the US had 20,000 nuclear warheads, the Soviets 1,600. In 1968 it was the US 28,880 to USSR 9,399. IN fact, the Soviets did not surpass the US in actual warheads until 1978. By which time both side had more than dequate delivery systems.



Given what you said, I am sure I have read far mnore book on the subject that you. Heck, it took a simple google search to prove you wrong.

deliverable warheads != missiles, they did have something like between 300 and 500 more missiles then us. but yea, our nuclear pile dwarfed theirs.

[edit] also I think you are counting pile, not deliverables, the US has never had more then around 12k deliverable bombs, and the USSR never had more then 8k deliverables.[/edit]

[MrBaggins]

Originally posted by Whoha


deliverable warheads != missiles, they did have something like between 300 and 500 more missiles then us. but yea, our nuclear pile dwarfed theirs.

although they had (and continue to have) considerably more fissionable material than us.

[Whoha]

that may be, but we've got more of it in bombs then they do, by nuclear pile I mean bombs for this thread

[MrBaggins]

Sure.. but fissionable material is effectively the potential for the number of bombs that you *could* make... thus the importance... and the worry by NATO...

However... we obviously passed the point of overkill very early on, so this is an entirely theoretical discussion of superiority. After a few hundred warhead detonations, and you might as well forget about life on the surface for a few millenia.

[Whoha]

As far as the tech goes, the USSR only got the ICBM test first and the abm deployment first. all other 50 odd items listed in this book I have puts the US first, and only in the case of about 10 items. Though that will be down to 9 if they can get the manuverable re-entry warheads to work.

[Whoha]

Originally posted by MrBaggins
Sure.. but fissionable material is effectively the potential for the number of bombs that you *could* make... thus the importance... and the worry by NATO...

However... we obviously passed the point of overkill very early on, so this is an entirely theoretical discussion of superiority. After a few hundred warhead detonations, and you might as well forget about life on the surface for a few millenia.

the weapons aren't that powerful, it would take our entire stockpile to blast through a mountain range for instance.

[David Floyd]

OK, but why would you need to blast through a mountain range? It only takes one bomb to hit a city and kill 3 million people.

[Whoha]

because cities don't cover the surface of the planet, there is quite a bit of ground to cover before "all life is exterminated".

[Whoha]

still back to the current debate we have gone overkill,but a very few people would survive.

[edit] and back to the debate before that we had more bombs then the soviets did.[/edit]

[David Floyd]

because cities don't cover the surface of the planet, there is quite a bit of ground to cover before "all life is exterminated".

Well, you'll excuse me if I'm primarily concerned with the extermination of the majority of human life

[Ned]

Originally posted by Sava
the US was behind for a long time... after Strategic Air Command was created, the US caught up to and surpassed the Soviets. But Che is correct.

And Ned, the US had missiles in Turkey long before the Soviets went to Cuba.

So what. The point is that the Cuban missle crisis came oh so very close to escalating to a full scale nuclear war. Castro even wanted to do it knowing that his own country would have been devasted in return.

(Actually, this is a point to stop and reflect on that. Castro wanted to attacked the US even knowing his country would not survive. Had he had a nuke on his own, well....)

[Ned]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
In terms of conventional weapons the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies held a vast commanding lead in Europe from the end of WW2 until the end of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. In terms of quality Russian tanks were better than Allied tanks at the end of WW2. The US did not have superior armored forces until the latest generation of tanks and AFVs came along in the late 1970s. In terms of quantity the Warsaw boys held the lead until the end. From 1945 to 1975 the two sides competed closely in terms of the quality of their fighter aircraft, with sometimes Russian craft being better, and sometimes western planes being better. After 1975 Western fighters were technologically superior, but in some regions the copmmunists held sufficient numerical superiority to give the free world a run or their money.
Western bombers were superior throughout the era. At the time of the first Berlin crisis the communists were willing to bet that the US wouldn't risk destroying precious western European territory in order to engage the Russian armies. The US managed to convince Stalin that American bombers did indeed have the capability of reaching deep into Russian territory, a capability which the Russians could not reciprocate. As long as the US was the primary adversary during this conflict the Soviets were forced to contemplate the very distasteful prospect of coming against a foe whom they could not touch, but whom could hurt them dearly.
Without nukes the Warsaw Pact forces could very likely have taken the rest of continental Europe any time they had pleased, but the US held an overwhelming nuclear trump card right up to the mid-1970s. There were points during the cold war when the US and its NAYO allies didn't know with certainty how much a lead in nuclear forces they had. The days of the Cuban missle crisis were one of them. The US sincerely did not know what a hollow threat the Soviet ICBMS were. After the fall of the Soviet Union Yeltsin admitted that they had only a paltry dozen operational missles in 1962. The US OTOH had hundreds of srtrategic bombers capable of reaching the USSR and had even equipped their bombers with nuclear anti-aircraft missles to clear a path to their targets.
Had nuclear weapons not been available after WW2 I think that WW3 might have broken out in 1948, 1950, or 1962.

According to McNamara, we knew we had a huge advantage in ICBMs, but we did not know that there were any warheads in Cuba to go along with the missiles. We thought the warheads were still in transit.

Thus, we almost went to war with Cuba with a possible response that Khruschev could have launced up to 90 nukes at US cities wiping out 100 million people.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
Western bombers were superior throughout the era.

What about the Backfire?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Joseph
That is why we finnish the Korean war with a 15 to 1 kill ratio. Yep they were better than us.

It helped to have more of them planes. Besides, in a war, one side always exaggerate the casualties of the other side and underestimate the losses of its own side. Always.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Whoha


deliverable warheads != missiles, they did have something like between 300 and 500 more missiles then us. but yea, our nuclear pile dwarfed theirs.

[edit] also I think you are counting pile, not deliverables, the US has never had more then around 12k deliverable bombs, and the USSR never had more then 8k deliverables.[/edit]

We are talking about the ealy cold war here. The USSR got ICBM's first, but as was explained already, they were few, inefficeint, and the US had, unlike the soviets, the option of using long range bombers at the time. SO, at NO point in the cold war did the USSR have a superior capability to deliver strategic warheads than the soviets did, which was the point.