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Comment by sjg007 | Hacker News Reader

The NIKE missile silo is interesting too. They have some information about the armaments of the US and the USSR. From what I recall, or what at least left an impression, the US had technically better missile systems that were reliable but less nukes overall. In contrast, the USSR had worse targeting and less reliable missiles and so was relying on a very large number of nukes. I remember thinking about the probabilities.

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The US actually had many more and much better nuclear weapons and delivery systems, but they thought the soviets were much further along than they really were.

The Soviets were the first to deploy operational ICBMs.

They also had the first Submarine launched ballistic missile.

They had the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons for many years.

They developed the most potent nuclear weapons.

Can you be more specific?

Guidance systems were (and are) presumably worse, if one has to judge by officially released data. Propulsion systems were much more difficult to keep in a ready to launch state, and much more fragile. In general, USSR preferred less sophisticated solutions, instead making sure they could be easily replicated.

Because that had worked for them in WW2, when German tanks (among many other things) were technically superior to their Soviet counter-parts with the results we all know.

Fortunately this will never happen but I have always been curious about how US technicals would fare in a ground-war in Russia. My bet is that they would fail most of the times with no possibility of easy fixes, at least compared to their Soviet (now Russian) equivalents. What’s the US equivalent for the Russian Ural or Kamaz trucks?

Quantity has a quality of its own.

T-34, which was superior to most German tanks like pzkpfw 3/4 when it was introduced, was produced in vast numbers, around 80000. German designed a competitive tank with the Panther, but only about 6000 were made, and they were beset by reliability problems.

Add in the production by the Western allies, such as 50000 Sherman tanks, the surprising thing is that Nazi Germany didn't collapse faster.

Don't know about modern hardware. Certainly Soviet hardware has a reputation for reliability in adverse conditions. OTOH the first Gulf war was a pretty damning indictment of the warfighting ability of Soviet armour.

I have seen a description of the allied fighting in Normandy that concluded that it doesn't matter if your tanks are 6 times better if your enemy has 10 times the number of tanks.

In Northern France much of the tank action IIRC was at very short range, due to lots of hedgerows.

In such an environment where all tanks are able to reliably hit and penetrate all others, numbers become the dominant factor.

In more open country, tank armour and punching power make more of a difference.

> My bet is that they would fail most of the times with no possibility of easy fixes

That's a solid bet. The US has not engaged a similarly sophisticated opponent in generations and with high unit costs of American weapons, any such war would be extraordinarily costly.

(offtopic) Last sentence made me want to play red alert 2. Though, you cannot call apocalypse tanks unsophisticated...

I believe GP was referring to this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap

While there was lots of bluffing on both sides (Star Wars, cough), the notion of "better" is a terrible misunderstanding of that time, and of nuclear weapons today. Once capacity exists on all sides to end earth several times over, better is an exercise and distinction without meaning, a mad illusion of value maybe to military grammar nazis

More effective?

When you have 100 nukes comming at you, it doesn't matter that much how effective they are. You'll get nuked, no doubt.

It matters, a great deal in a sort of sad way.

I can only speak for Sweden, but a lot of large military and civilian defence bunkers (and hardened, fixed in bedrock artillery) went obsolete went “the other side” got better targeting systems.

Until then, a lot of the installations were immune to anything but a direct hit, which was incredibly unlikely. Airbursts just wouldn’t have cut it to crack open the more serious underground installations.

Hmm, didn't think it that way, you're right.

modern airburst fuzes are indeed accurate enough to destroy hardened underground bunkers: https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...

Minutiae:

Just to clarify I meant the old “hit somewhere in the city core” airbursts against which our underground shelters would have held up pretty well. To maximise impact a ground hit is seldom the right choice, too much energy is initially absorbed. (Also the fallout is made worse in a ground burst which can be a bad thing for an attacker if they want to follow up with boots on the ground.)

Capability of actual MAD did not exist for most of the Cold War. If Kennedy went bonkers and initiated pre-emptive strike. USA would survive. It would lose some of the major cities and tens of millions of people, but it would live. USSR would cease to exist a long with all of its proxies in east Europe. A lot of the Europe would be gone but again probably damage on level of Black Death not extinction event.

Soviet intel and propaganda was always far above what west could do. It is what kept it looking close for two decades.

Korea for example. US could easily use nukes with impunity. It did not but there would be no consequences in terms of nuclear retaliation as Stalin knew what the equation was. Still he took the bet to attack south.. just a mad lad that he was. When Chinese counter attacked if US used nukes again there would be no retaliation, McArthur got retired over that.

I am really happy we lived through that. It is incredibly lucky that it was US that got the nukes first and not Germany or USSR or other similar regime.

>A lot of the Europe would be gone but again probably damage on level of Black Death not extinction event.

If you think "oh this is not so bad" you should watch Threads.

Second that. Left me in a state of shock for weeks when I saw it. Compared with threads, "the day after" is kids stuff.

https://archive.org/details/threads_201712

In the early 1960s an all out attack by the US would have resulted in at least 600 million dead - including 100 million dead in Western Europe.

Add to that the effects of medium range Soviet weapons in Western Europe (which they had a lot of) then things would have been very bad here.

Source: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg

What are you on about?

The whole race was about creating nukes to nuke the other nukes out of the orbit when they are attacking, so the total amount of nukes was way beyond what was required to destroy the other side.

Fun fact - the US spent more on developing stealth aircraft than on Star Wars.

The USSR seemed to spend little or nothing on stealth.

From the book 'Stealth' by Peter Westwick.

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