Timsup2nothin
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Unfortunately it made the probability of a huge conventional war that much higher. Water under the bridge now, but we were lucky to avoid it I think.
If the Cold War turned into a real war, who'd have won?
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Unfortunately it made the probability of a huge conventional war that much higher. Water under the bridge now, but we were lucky to avoid it I think.
History_Buff
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No it didn't. Prior to say, 1980, NATO would have had a hard time winning a large conventional war, which is exactly why their plan was to resort to nukes almost immediately. Both sides were aware of this.
Timsup2nothin
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We already covered that and agreed with you completely (at least I did and didn't see any active disagreement). My point was that the one sided nuclear option pretty well eliminated the possibility of a large conventional war, so when the nuclear option was no longer one sided the probability for a large conventional war went up.
gay_Aleks
from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
Not even then. A nuclear winter would change the climate so profoundly, even if you weren't directly attacked by a nuke, it'd still be a catastrophe.
Timsup2nothin
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As long as by 'didn't get involved' you mean 'were living on another planet at the time'....yeah, them.
Mount Suribachi
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Even then, I'm not so sure. Soviet doctrine was to pretty much launch a nuclear first strike and roll the tanks in.
And they planned for NATO to launch pre-emptive nuclear strikes because that's what they would have done. The Soviets never understood that post 60s NATO would simply never do that. Their diplomats and agents in the west understood it, but they could never convince the generals and the politicians back home of it - too much of the Stalin way of thinking still ie assume at all times that the enemy is as devious and ruthless as you are
Soviet doctrine included no-first-use policy for nuclear weapons, unlike Russian one.
Timsup2nothin
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I'm thinking Soviet doctrine may have looked a lot more like 'for the first time in history we don't have to worry about getting the snot knocked out of us by either barbarian Mongols or imperialistic Germans, and now these Americans come along rattling their sabers. Are we just cursed?'
However the paranoid view you express is far more popular.
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Ajidica
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From what I've read on Soviet military policy, it didn't appear they intended to use nukes in a first strike situation.
Under Kruschev, Soviet missile policy was to use nuclear weapons to discourage America/NATO from launching an attack -conventional or nuclear- while Soviet resources were diverted away from military expenditures. With Brezhnev, we saw an expansion of the Soviet Army -particularly in its mechanized divisions. If you are planning a nuclear first strike there isn't much point to investing in conventional forces as there wouldn't be much left to invade once the bombs went off.
Under Kruschev, Soviet missile policy was to use nuclear weapons to discourage America/NATO from launching an attack -conventional or nuclear- while Soviet resources were diverted away from military expenditures. With Brezhnev, we saw an expansion of the Soviet Army -particularly in its mechanized divisions. If you are planning a nuclear first strike there isn't much point to investing in conventional forces as there wouldn't be much left to invade once the bombs went off.
Cheezy the Wiz
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FWIW in a nuclear situation a mechanized unit is probably more vulnerable than a foot soldier under cover. Once vehicles are irradiated they remain deadly-radioactive for thousands of years.
Timsup2nothin
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Not to be pedantic, but...iron exposed to neutron flux can lead to stable isotopes absorbing neutrons and forming Fe59, which is radioactive but has a half life in the range of months, not years, and certainly not thousands of years. Chromium also doesn't have any radioisotopes with exceptionally long half lives. Given that iron is by far the most common element in a steel vehicle and chromium is going to be most of the rest I don't see how an irradiated vehicle is going to become 'deadly radioactive' and stay that way for thousands of years.
Some hardened steels will have more than trace amounts of cobalt. Co59 in a neutron flux can become Co60 pretty readily, and Co60 can be a very strong source. Even Co-60 has a half life only in years, not even decades, so in about a quarter century that would be gone too.
That said, anything, vehicle or otherwise, that is close enough to be exposed to a strong enough neutron flux to be significantly activated is going to be radioactive fallout, not whatever it was before. Anything that close will leave as vapor, not vehicle.
Cheezy the Wiz
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I'm just saying that you can walk pretty close to The Sarcophagus right now, for about an hour or so before it gets too dangerous, but when you do so you must avoid all the cars, helicopters, and vehicles in the exclusion zone, because they remain very radioactive. I don't know what specifically causes that, but it's still a thing. Hell, they buried the first-responding fire trucks in a giant ditch to protect people from them.
I wish I could find the data for this, but all I can find is stuff on depleted uranium. I'm sure I read that irradiated tanks remain uninhabitable for at least hundreds of years. There are other elements in tank armor too, tungsten, carbon, aluminum, possibly one of them has a dangerous isotope that can be induced by accepting one of the forms of radiation?
I wish I could find the data for this, but all I can find is stuff on depleted uranium. I'm sure I read that irradiated tanks remain uninhabitable for at least hundreds of years. There are other elements in tank armor too, tungsten, carbon, aluminum, possibly one of them has a dangerous isotope that can be induced by accepting one of the forms of radiation?
I think this is because vehicles were contaminated by isotopes from reactor, not because of irradiation. There's still a lot of long-lived isotopes inside the sarcophagus, some of them probably contaminated vehicles while it was built. In the event of nuclear strike, contamination supposed to be much less than it was near reactor, moreover tanks have additional protection for such cases (air filters, radiation shielding IIRC).
Timsup2nothin
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When you say 'sarcophagus' I think Chernobyl...that's a whole different deal because there wasn't any nuclear explosion. A reactor contains and operates with a continuous high level of neutron flux. It was a carbon moderated reactor, and the carbon actually caught fire and burned. Most common carbon is C12, which when exposed to continuous neutron flux will produce C14 in large quantities, and carbon 14 has a 5000 year half life. Burning carbon makes soot, which lands everywhere. End of story for anything close to, or downwind of, the fire for the next twenty millennia or so.
This by the way is why building carbon moderated reactors is considered to be a really bad idea. Even if it doesn't burn up, big piles of C14 are very bad news for a very long time. Among other problems carbon is the basic component of all organic chemistry so the number of ways for radioactive carbon to enter the food chain is pretty much unlimited.
Cheezy the Wiz
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Ah, gotcha! Yeah, I meant the Chernobyl sarcophagus, and the Pripyat exclusion zone.
PhroX
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As an example of vehicles being hit by a nuclear explosion, take a look at the so called "Atomic Tank", a Centurion used by the Australian Army in a nuclear test, where it was placed within 500m of the epicenter, that later went on to have a successful service career in Veitnam.
