[Legbreaker]

While everyone is certainly able to make their own decisions about "their" T2K world, I can't see 5 plants being possible. Yes, the one plant would almost certainly be running 24/7, but the construction, or conversion of other plants takes time, resources and money.

As an example of what may have occured, take a look at the last few years in Iraq. US troops couldn't get even some of the more basic items such as armour for their Humvees. Admittedly this is a much lower level "conflict" (if the word can be applied), however, I doubt public opinion would be all that much different in a full scale war - they'd be wanting and demanding their soldiers have the best possible protection, etc.

1500 tanks per year, or roughly 125 per month, per plant seems rather excessive to me. Five similar plants means 625 per month - how many armoured divisions is that?

Presuming all the plants could be built, workers and engineers found, materials supplied, etc, how do you transport all those tanks through hostile waters to the front lines? At approximately 60 tonnes each, plus spares, that's one hell of a lot of shipping!

And then there's cost. $4.35 million per unit according to wiki is a hell of a lot of cash for the US government to be throwing out there! Now multiply that by the 625 per month, plus the plant construction costs, shipping, etc and you've got a recipe for bankruptcy. Ok, so it's war and money tends to be a bit less of an issue, but it's still an issue....

On the general war production topic, would production really ramp up all that quickly? Until around September 1997, NATO appeared to have the upper hand, having already penetrated into the Soviet Union itself. Meanwhile, the Soviets were fighting on several fronts - China (winding down but still a drain on resources), the middle east, south eastern Europe (Romania, etc) and of course central Europe. Poland was effectively out of the fight as far as production and many of the soviet "allies" were suffering badly.

It is my belief that Nato's main problems at the time was supplying the front lines with ammunition, fuel and food rather than replacement tanks, etc. This situation of course was to change dramatically moments after the first nukes were used...

It took several years for the Allies in WWII to be ready for D-Day. Yes, there was action taking place elsewhere in the world (northern Africa springs to mind), but the tanks, planes, ammunition, etc still needed time to be produced and shipped over to England. With the lower technical complexity of 1940's armaments, I can see production being a lot quicker than in the early stages of WWIII.