Quote:
Originally Posted by Olefin
And I dont see Australia getting hit by nukes in the timeline - they just arent that good a target for nukes when places like Chicago never got touched - let alone important military production facilities like the United Defense plant in York PA or Anniston Army Depot.
They just arent a real threat to the Soviets as they are.
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They are members of an alliance containing the US. That's more than enough justification. If Australian forces have in any way opposed, much less hampered, Soviet forces or interests or the forces or interests of nations friendly to the Soviet Union, the justification becomes iron-clad. The Soviets are not fair-minded. To whatever degree the US might care about fair play, the Soviet Union cares even less.
From the start, the logic of the nuclear exchange has been to gain advantage without initiating a general strategic US-USSR exchange. Each nuke used in the US-USSR strategic exchange had a place in this logic. Washington D.C. gets hit because it is the US seat of power. New York, the nation’s most populous city, does not. Moscow gets hit because it is the seat of Soviet power. The rest of the targets are very important military targets, like SAC HQ, or refineries. The strikes on Los Angeles wipe out the city as a matter of collateral damage, not deliberate policy. The Soviets calculate that knocking out the electricity and petroleum refining will ruin the American war economy without inviting retaliatory strikes against Soviet population centers as a whole.
The allies, on the other hand, are a different story. If the US is playing a game of even exchange, which is about the only way to prevent MAD from becoming a reality, then nuclear attacks on US allies shouldn’t bring about attacks on the USSR. As I tried to point out already, Soviet attacks on Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand should not result in American attacks on Soviet targets, provided the Americans read the signs correctly. If one looks at the Canada hit list, Canada gets hit a lot harder than the US on a per capita basis. Clearly, the Soviets weren’t that worried about retaliation for beating the crap out of Canada.
Australia has raw materials, energy resources, industry, and a well-educated population. In the post-Exchange world, an intact Australia poses a threat to Soviet interests. The Soviets know perfectly well that it may take a century to repair all of the damage from the Exchange. If any Western nation, or for that matter any nation not under the thumb of the Soviets, is left with the kinds of assets possessed by Australia or France in 1997, that nation gets a massive advantage in the reshuffling of global power that will occur in the early 21st Century. The Soviets are not the kind of people to permit this. The US got off comparatively lightly because the US had the means to annihilate the Soviet Union if the Soviets got carried away. Australia lacks even the deterrent that France possesses. With all sympathy to my Australian compatriots, I think GDW’s portrayal of Australia as being hard hit shows Soviet thinking accurately.