1963 - Fulda Gap, Germany...

[SnoopLoggyDog]

(Reading Field Manual...) Insert cable B into socket C. Engage Primary Power. Enable nuclear fuel capsule by pulling lanyard D, while toggle G is in OVERIDE ARMED mode. Remove Primary Manual Safety Cover and extract Firing Lanyard. Place Firing Lanyard in Left hand. Ensure warhead is aimed in direction of enemy. Enable Armament Safety Override. Pull Firing Lanyard with a firm motion. Quickly bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. Wait for flash. Congratulations - you are now part of the atmosphere.

 

[NKBJ]

They just don't make 'em like they used to.

 

[deo62]

Was stationed in the Fulda Gap. They told us to bury our radios before we fired them too. Said it was so the survivors would have working radios

 

[SnoopLoggyDog]

Was stationed in NATO in the early 80's. Spent a lot of time at an A-10 Forward Operating Location, (Ahlhorn Air Base) in Germany. If the Soviets had invaded, our goal was to launch all our aircraft before the nuke hit. Usually the nuke was from our own forces, to keep the Russians from taking the base.

If we were lucky, we would have time to evacuate the base, and meet at a section of the autobahn, to recover/rearm/refuel/relaunch the strike package.

Our life expectacy was measured in hours to maybe one day. The poor Army guys in the Fulda Gap had a life expectancy measured in seconds to minutes.

 

[deo62]

Was stationed in NATO in the early 80's. Spent a lot of time at an A-10 Forward Operating Location, (Ahlhorn Air Base) in Germany. If the Soviets had invaded, our goal was to launch all our aircraft before the nuke hit. Usually the nuke was from our own forces, to keep the Russians from taking the base.

If we were lucky, we would have time to evacuate the base, and meet at a section of the autobahn, to recover/rearm/refuel/relaunch the strike package.

Our life expectacy was measured in hours to maybe one day. The poor Army guys in the Fulda Gap had a life expectancy measured in seconds to minutes.

13B here, artillery, in Bad Hersfeld they gave us around 4 minutes

 

[SnoopLoggyDog]

Davy Crockett (nuclear device) - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

More info on the Davy Crockett Nuke

 

[actaeon277]

And people think sub guys are crazy.

Geez

 

[johntheplinker]

Was stationed in NATO in the early 80's. Spent a lot of time at an A-10 Forward Operating Location, (Ahlhorn Air Base) in Germany. If the Soviets had invaded, our goal was to launch all our aircraft before the nuke hit. Usually the nuke was from our own forces, to keep the Russians from taking the base.

If we were lucky, we would have time to evacuate the base, and meet at a section of the autobahn, to recover/rearm/refuel/relaunch the strike package.

Our life expectacy was measured in hours to maybe one day. The poor Army guys in the Fulda Gap had a life expectancy measured in seconds to minutes.

13B here, artillery, in Bad Hersfeld they gave us around 4 minutes

Hof here. Since the Soviet artillery could hit our motorpool from their motorpool, our life expetancy was basically zip. And since the W. Germans had a large radar/intel gathering station right next door, it would most likely have been a quick flash then...
And to think I volunteered to go back for a second helping.

 

[Thor]

Back in the 70's they told us if you were a grunt on the ground you had about a 1/4 second in Div/Div confrontation, a pilot had 5 min and if you were in a buttoned up tank when the shooting started you might have 45 min; so, the tankers had the best chance of just dying from radiation later.

They came up with a lot of really bad ideas for nukes back then, they were talking about a backpack at one point...no thanks. The soviets with their typical disdain for life in general had even worse ones. If Europe thought WWII was bad WWIII would have been much much worse...and may still be.

 

[AtTheMurph]

Talk about bad intel, or good propaganda.

The Soviets were never in any was a threat to attack anyone. They just didn't have the productive capacity to win a war against the West and everyone knew it.

A country that only now has the GDP the size of Texas isn't going to be able to overrun or win a large scale war against an adversary with 100X it's economic power and 3X it's population.

But it made, and still makes a MIC billions upon billions of dollars every year.

 

[SnoopLoggyDog]

The Soviets were very good, at taking bad courses of action. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Soviet war plans were uncovered that showed them opening up WWIII with nuke strikes on 180 NATO targets. I attended a briefing on this plan, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It later became open-source declassified information after the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact. Their ideology overrode their wallet.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/03/16/soviet-bloc-had-detailed-plan-to-invade-w-germany/d0d99661-8271-4700-8ac9-df3f5b6bca01/

Seven Days to the River Rhine - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[bkflyer]

Talk about bad intel, or good propaganda.

The Soviets were never in any was a threat to attack anyone. They just didn't have the productive capacity to win a war against the West and everyone knew it.

A country that only now has the GDP the size of Texas isn't going to be able to overrun or win a large scale war against an adversary with 100X it's economic power and 3X it's population.

But it made, and still makes a MIC billions upon billions of dollars every year.

I'll have to disagree with you on that. I was in Germany 84-88,7th Cav.

 

[deo62]

I'll have to disagree with you on that. I was in Germany 84-88,7th Cav.

83-87, 3/11th Cav

 

[actaeon277]

WWII Germany also had a small GDP compared to all the countries they attacked.
And they had limited production capability compared to them.

The same could be said of Japan.

And yet...

 

[johntheplinker]

I'll have to disagree with you on that. I was in Germany 84-88,7th Cav.

83-87, 3/11th Cav

82- 84 2/2 ACR
86-90 2 ACR

 

[AtTheMurph]

I'll have to disagree with you on that. I was in Germany 84-88,7th Cav.

So what do you know that makes you think the Soviets were ever a real threat to invade the West?

Maybe their inferior industrial capacity? Or was it their resounding success subduing the Afghanis? Or was it the stress they were under trying to keep their "Republics" together?

I studied Soviet Economics during much of the time you were in Germany. Maybe our frame of reference was different. I know that the Soviets could never have defeated the West, the Soviets knew it too.

American intel knew it as well but that doesn't get you funding. Much better to have a scary adversary ready to drop A-bombs on your head so that you can develop $10B boats, $60B helicopter/planes, a single destroyer that costs almost $2B, and single planes that cost $100,000,000 that are too expensive to risk in combat.

And none of it was actually necessary.

 

[SnoopLoggyDog]

So what do you know that makes you think the Soviets were ever a real threat to invade the West?

Maybe their inferior industrial capacity? Or was it their resounding success subduing the Afghanis? Or was it the stress they were under trying to keep their "Republics" together?

I studied Soviet Economics during much of the time you were in Germany. Maybe our frame of reference was different. I know that the Soviets could never have defeated the West, the Soviets knew it too.

American intel knew it as well but that doesn't get you funding. Much better to have a scary adversary ready to drop A-bombs on your head so that you can develop $10B boats, $60B helicopter/planes, a single destroyer that costs almost $2B, and single planes that cost $100,000,000 that are too expensive to risk in combat.

And none of it was actually necessary.

What the Intel agencies knew was that the Soviets not only had a huge advantage in conventional and nuclear forces, they also had a huge stockpile of chemical and biological weapons. They had enough anthrax loaded in missles to kill every human and mammal in the U.S. and most of Canada and Mexico. Their military industrial complex is what eventually bankrupted them in the 90's. In the 70's and 80's they were always teetering on the military edge of use it or loose it.
This is a good book to read about their CBRN program.

 

[Alamo]

Their limited economic clout was invested in their military and security services first and foremost. Their civilian sector sucked, and their care of military personnel stunk except for a few elite units, but hey, they were Russians and expected to suffer for the Party and Rodina. A good percentage of that investment sat just across the German border. They knew, as did the North Vietnamese and other countries, that they did not have to defeat the western militaries, they just had to make a big enough...or in the case of Vietnam, a long enough mess to defeat the civilian political structure. Hence their funding of pretty much all the ant-nuke/anti-war/anti-American/anti-capitalist-free-market protest and terror organizations in Europe in the 70s and 80s. They hoped to turn Western Europe without a shot, but they were prepared to do it the hard way if they thought that grabbing off Germany could be done without it turning into a complete **** show, as the linked article above showed. (But just Germany. The French had their own force de frappe.)

But the level of American backbone in the form of tripwires (sorry, Army guys) backed up by cruise missiles and bombers and bubbleheads kept the stakes too high too pull it off. Reagan in particular really did scare them, and because of the vast difference between the Soviet and US economies, which led to technological superiority, the Soviets could not be sure that they wouldn't get turned into dust if they got too froggy. So they kept pouring stuff into their military might until the civilian sector collapsed, taking the military and the government with it.


ETA: Oh, and yeah, I was on an airbase that was as far from the inter-German border as one could get - the end of the runway was literally on the Dutch-German border. For a 500 knot fighter that's about 30 minutes flying time, or for a missile, much less.

When I first arrived the basic plan was that at the first sign of trouble all the E-3s (NATO AWACS) would fly away and recover at RAF Waddington (the British E-3 base) or wherever they could after flying their first mission, assuming they weren't shot down (the East German Air Force pilots I talked to after the Wall came down said their whole regiment (couple or three dozen fighters) was dedicated to shooting down ONE E-3 as soon as the war started). All our NATEVALS emphasized crew generation and launching of aircraft.

The "plan" for those of us left behind on the base was to throw as much stuff on as many trucks as we could round up and drive west towards the Channel. With any luck we would reunite at RAF Waddington. Ha ha. That part of the plan was never seriously exercised, or even table-topped. Hell, it wasn't even unseriously looked at, everyone just read that part of the plan and said yeah right and went on. The only serious plan on what was to happen to us was in the Soviet plan.

 

[AtTheMurph]

What the Intel agencies knew was that the Soviets not only had a huge advantage in conventional and nuclear forces, they also had a huge stockpile of chemical and biological weapons. They had enough anthrax loaded in missles to kill every human and mammal in the U.S. and most of Canada and Mexico. Their military industrial complex is what eventually bankrupted them in the 90's. In the 70's and 80's they were always teetering on the military edge of use it or loose it.
This is a good book to read about their CBRN program.
View attachment 129583

What intel knew, but would never say out loud, was that the so called superior conventional and nuclear forces were for self defense from the West, rather than the alternative.

Russia/soviets have no history of ever launching offensive wars with the West. (excepting Sweden if you consider them the "west" and at the time of the wars they certainly were not.)

The Soviets/Russians had very well defined and historical geography in which they play. The idea that they would try to overrun Western Europe was always preposterous.

The Russians were and should have been worried about being overrun from the West. The West having a long history of attacking and trying to beat the Russians/Soviets into submission.

But I guess our intel never could figure that out. Or more probably, they needed the story to keep the funding coming so everyone involved could get rich off the taxpayers orchestrated fear of Soviets dropping Hydrogen bombs on us or infecting half the world with anthrax or whatever scary agent could be surmised.

It's like the Russian bogeymen that tried to poison Sergei Skripal and his daughter with the "most lethal nerve agent ever invented" Novichok. The world was aghast. But either the Russians are very bad and exposing someone to Novichok or it wasn't really Novichok as no one died! But the fear was created.

Just like the same Russia BS we are endlessly bombarded with today. Russia stole the election. Russia meddles. Russia does this and that that we should all be very fearful of. It's complete lunacy, just as the spending on the Cold War was.

I guess the fearmongering over tiny little backwards North Korea wasn't working well enough, so we needed a bigger, redder, bogeyman. Can't use China because they own our bureaucratic machine. They wouldn't be using themselves as a target. that could backfire.

 

[Ark]

Was stationed in NATO in the early 80's. Spent a lot of time at an A-10 Forward Operating Location, (Ahlhorn Air Base) in Germany. If the Soviets had invaded, our goal was to launch all our aircraft before the nuke hit. Usually the nuke was from our own forces, to keep the Russians from taking the base.

If we were lucky, we would have time to evacuate the base, and meet at a section of the autobahn, to recover/rearm/refuel/relaunch the strike package.

Our life expectacy was measured in hours to maybe one day. The poor Army guys in the Fulda Gap had a life expectancy measured in seconds to minutes.

The A10 would have been vital to stopping the Zerg rush of tanks that was expected, but it would have been a missile threat environment unlike anything ever seen in modern warfare.

The hypothetical war in Europe is a fascinating topic to me. Neither side had the material or ammunition to really support full-throttle conventional warfare for long, but man it would have been an unbelievable meat grinder even without NBC deployment.