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That was a painful question. If soviet tanks had advanced through Europe, would the USA had responded with limited war or would had trigger the whole MAD thing?
by narag 7y ago
That was a painful question. If soviet tanks had advanced through Europe, would the USA had responded with limited war or would had trigger the whole MAD thing?
The answer wasn't as clear as with a ICBM attack, that was a much more irreversible decision.
- madengr 7y agoFWIW the neutron bomb was developed for use against Soviet tanks.
- DanCarvajal 7y agoThe smaller tactical nukes were designed around the idea of being rapidly deploy-able area denial weapons to halt a Soviet land invasion.
- simplicio 7y agoNote these were developed before MAD was really a thing. The Soviet nuclear arsenal in the early 50's was still pretty small, they had few bombers and ICBMs wouldn't be deployed till the end of the decade. On the other hand, they had a gigantic conventional army, and an obvious geographic advantage over the US in a convetional war fought in Europe. So US strategy was build around using their nuclear advantage to stop a conventional Soviet invasion of Europe before it could get out of Germany. Hence the development of tactical nuclear weapons like the M65, which seem bizarre to us today, as we're used to thinking about nuclear war in terms of MAD, but made sense (or at least, more sense) at the time.