Quote:
Originally Posted by Webstral
I'm coming to this one late, so I'll be quick. It seems to me that the nuking of the main Atlantic base has to be handled delicately. Outright destruction of the whole place is out, as many have said. Negligible destruction is out, too, because the Soviets will follow up and finish the job. There has to be enough destruction that the Soviets, who know the US will go warhead-for-warhead, don't want to put another nuke on the table. There has to be little enough destruction that parts of the place are quite usable.
|
I have a suggestion about this, one that is highly speculative guesswork and requires stepping out of the literal, hard-numbers strategic point of view, but bear with me a moment:
Let us suppose that Norfolk was a near-miss. The spread was too far apart, the pattern was badly programmed and the warhead missed off the coast, whatever. From the point of view of the poor civilians there, they were most definitely nuked. Enough of the city is irradiated rubble, enough people went through a "The Day After" or "Threads" type scenario that if you ask anyone who was there what happened they'll tell you "A nuclear strike."
Norfolk was, by our own lingo, a
counterforce strike. To wit: the destruction of an enemy military base to reduce his force capability.
Presuming the Soviets "saw" what happened (sleeper cell did a direct observation, satellite, nearby sub, later strategic overflight, whatever) there might have been some thinking along these lines: we hit that city, or rather, we brushed it. There's wrecked ships, there's probably in excess of a hundred thousand dead civilians, the port facilities are for the time being, unusable.
However if we hit it
again the Americans
may well view it as a
countervalue strike - that we are at this point "terror bombing" and just trying to kill people for no good reason other than to kill people. That might lead beyond even where we are now, with 3000+ nuclear weapons coming out of their remaining subs, silos and bombers. No, we've hurt them, that's enough.
That's very thin, but it's all I can think of at the moment.