[Olefin]

Originally Posted by swaghauler

This is one of the areas in which GDW was WAY OFF. In their defense, it's not like they could just Google it. The Russians ALWAYS planned on high-altitude detonations to cause widespread failure of Civilian Infrastructure. There was even a posting about it in a thread on this forum. I disagree with the NUMBER of large strikes BOTH SIDES made in the original Canon (as you already know I don't follow Canon without reason). In my Exchange, only about a dozen ICBMs are launched with the SPECIFIC purpose of causing EMP. The Russians (I start with V2.2) also EMP Poland, Germany, The UK, and (supposedly by accident) Northeastern France near the Rhine and along the Channel. Ground targets which are hit by nukes at all are only hit by smaller nukes (150kt or less) launched by ships or subs (so as not to trigger a general Exchange) or TAC Nukes (50kt or less) fired by artillery.
In my scenario, most of the major damage inflicted in Poland was done by large Thermobaric Munitions like the attack on Warsaw. They cause the same physical damage as nukes without the radiation so no "slow death in the rubble." There is also a precedent for this. When Putin attacked Grozny in 1999, he asked about using poison gas. After he was informed that the UN would treat that as a "war crime," he chose Thermobaric Munitions instead. The Chechens were literally INCINERATED trying to defend the city. It fell in days. Thermobarics carry all the horror of a nuke without the fallout.

I was actually surprised they didnt include EMP large scale attacks - they were in the novel War Day that had been published in 1984 - in fact those attacks were what caused most of the damage to the US in the exchange in that war - and the US fried the Soviets with EMP as well. They definitely overestimated the effects of EMP from the local nuclear attacks - those would have cause issues in the area surrounding the detonations but wouldnt have affected areas hundreds of miles away