Quote:
Originally Posted by John Farson
But as everyone who's read about Twilight 2000 knows, even the limited nuclear war dealt immense damage to the world. Countries like Australia, Sweden, Finland etc., you don't even need to use that many (or powerful) nukes to screw them up.
I don't remember where, but somewhere I read that you'd only need about 100 or so nukes to completely destroy the United States as an organized entity, maybe even less. Though it had its flaws, Jericho did a good job in showing how even 23 Hiroshima-size bombs detonated in as many cities could deal a hell of a lot of damage to the U.S. Total nuclear war is like two guys firing rocket launchers at each other: their bodies will blow apart. The limited nuclear war as described in T2K is more like two guys blowing each other's heads off with sniper rifles: the rest of the torso may be intact, but it's no good if your brains are all over the wall.
Considering this, I find it to be no stretch of the imagination to consider that the Russians would have had no problem in expending a few nukes to make sure that Scandinavia (and Australia too, for that matter) would pose no problem for what remained of Russia in the post-nuke world. You can bet that the Americans would have the same policy. Heck, both sides have people whose sole job is to figure out how many nukes are needed and where the targets would be.
|
This is an issue that has been brought up here and on the previous RPGHost forum numerous times over the years, and, not surprisingly, we as a group always end up agreeing to disagree. Ultimately, I feel its up to each GM to decide what level of devastation his T2k universe has. With that said, I agree completely with the above. While we can all come up with a great many potential nuclear targets (I have a list of over 1450 Pact ones, some of which could conceivably take over 350 warheads), the breakdown portrayed in T2k (of whatever version) doesn't require all of them, or even 25% of them, to actually be hit. A modern economy, particularly a war economy, is a large and delicate instrument, a very complicated system of systems, that is relatively easy to upset. (In WWII in Europe, the USAAF had a campaign to strike the ball bearings plants as a way to cripple the German economy, as was the successful effort to starve the Wehrmacht of fuel.) A massive strike of thousands of warheads or hitting every conceivable target is simply unnecessary to create the breakdown portrayed in T2k (of any version). (And some assets will be shut down without a strike - we have discussed the possibility of refinery workers not reporting to work once other refineries have been hit, and
Howling Wilderness, I believe, mentions that the nuclear power plants were taken offline to avoid damage.)
With that said, I could see the nuclear powers sparing a few warheads for targets that could be used by their opponent for eventual reconstruction (such as the Finnish refineries, no matter what their distance from oilfields would be), but it wouldn't be too widespread. Why? Given the immense destructive power of a even a limited strike, a large-scale nuclear exchange would result in us playing Gamma World rather than T2k.