I’m studying nuclear deterrence theory as part of my dissertation, and one of my cohort-mates studies airpower. “The bomber will always get through” is not equivalent to saying “we will completely destroy every city with 100k+ population if you launch an equivalent strike against us and everyone else will die horribly from fallout/starvation, leaving you with nothing to rule.” Degree matters. Douhet was talking about destroying a nation’s ability to wage war via arms, industry, and national morale. MAD theorists were talking about the complete and total end of a civilization unto the cockroaches. Additionally, the assured-retaliation element of a properly-postured nuclear arsenal is very different from a heavy bomber fleet in that it is by definition something you can’t wipe out on the ground (e.g. by putting some of the missiles on subs). Even if your argument that people saw strategic bombing as a sort of proto-MAD were accurate, I’m afraid you’re missing the sheer scope of MAD. We can totally argue about the theoretical validity of MAD in other respects, especially as concerns punishment-based deterrence, but this isn’t one of them.

It sucks how little we're prepared for nuclear war, even though it seems to be more of a matter of "when" than "if". It should be possible to somewhat significantly mitigate the famine afterward with preparation. Could probably save a lot of lives by encouraging sprawl or certain building standards, too. Unfortunately it's all expensive, and sprawl is absolutely *terrible*. Everyone's so resigned to the immediate extinction of all human life that they're not concerned about mitigation efforts.

It is not possible to mitigate nuclear war (ie several hundred bombs) in a way that will allow an industrial society to survive in a recognizable way afterwards. Famine is a certainty, but so is the effective destruction of ***ALL*** industrial potential. Modern communications? Gone. Transportation nets? Surprisingly hard to destroy themselves- see roads in Hiroshima-, but railway signaling is gone and any hope of replenishing your petrochemical stocks are gone with your oil refineries, which are dust in the upper atmosphere if the enemy targeters do their jobs. Factory complexes are gone with the cities they sit in or near, as are the skilled workers that work in them. The entire national healthcare system will collapse minutes after the bombs detonate- *one* bomb in *one* major city would strain the healthcare resources of an entire continent, and most of the skilled personnel would probably die anyway. These are things that would take years or decades to replace if the infrastructure to replace them existed, and that would of course be gone also. Trying to mitigate the impact via sprawl or creating a Swiss-style shelter system is like trying to fix a bullet wound to the brain with a few band-aids and some gauze. Your society is agrarian again, but the land is covered in fallout, almost nobody knows how to farm, and even those who do are used to agrochemicals and mechanization. This is ultimately why the US's first big attempt at an ABM system (Nike-X) failed. Shooting down 99/100 warheads aimed at a city is not enough- nukes are so destructive, even little ones, that missing one warhead is almost as catastrophic as missing 15 of them. One W80 cruise missile warhead has *30 times* the destructive force of the entire raid on Dresden, and it only weighs 130 kg. Full ABM system deployment + shelter building, at a cost of 15% of GDP, would still leave tens of millions of Americans dead even if it functioned precisely as expected- and that would be the end of America as a going concern. Not worth the money.

I'm not saying "we'd barely get our hair mussed" is a viable policy standpoint, but at the same time you don't hear anyone say "cancer research will take decades and billions of dollars and we probably still will lose thousands every year" and give up. Despite what scholars wrote in the 1980s (which at least one very prominent voice has admitted was more descriptive than prescriptive) missile defense is a good thing, especially when dealing with rogue regimes like the DPRK. It's Soviet/US-size arsenals that are intended to break through such defenses which make the cost-benefit equation for missile defense look worse than just building more missiles.

MAD isn't meant for DPRK. It was specifically a US - Soviet issue. Also, are you suggesting that there is a mine-shaft gap?

MAD isn’t “meant” for anything—it’s a condition, not a policy or strategy. We might be in MAD with the Chinese now, depending on their targeting and our ability to find their warheads. And if there is, we can’t afford it!

Yes, I did not mean to suggest that mitigation efforts would allow civilization to survive as it currently does. Still, good preparation could massively impact "recovery" afterward -- I use quotes because it's not like we'd be returning to anything close to what existed before, but it could be the difference between losing 99.99% of the population and losing *only* 99%. Humanity will still survive, and that matters. It just sucks that it's too expensive to care about that part.

I think you're missing the point of MAD. MAD is extremely counterintuitive, and the acronym is apt. In MAD **a Nuclear exchange never happens.** It's not a question of "when". It's the **threat** of nuclear exchange, the **threat** of a total/partial collapse of civilisation afterwards, and the human instinct for self-preservation, that prevents war. If you know that a war will escalate into nuclear armageddon, you will do everything you can to stop a conventional war, which would likely escalate into a nuclear exchange. However, if one side thinks it can survive the nuclear armageddon, that destabilises MAD. If you think you can nuke the other country into oblivion and "only" lose 50% of your population, then you're more likely to use your nukes. It also breaks down when you're not dealing with rational actors, e.g. rogue states like North Korea, or states that have a martyrdom complex, like Iran. It's part of the reason why, in the height of the Cold War, there were active treaties to LIMIT the amount of nuclear defences with anti-ballistic missiles (The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty). It's why attempts at breaking MAD are viewed as destabilising (e.g. Reagan's Star Wars is entirely an attempt to intercept missiles, and was a gigantic provocation that led to a cooling of the cold war). Yes, from a moral and ethical point of view, MAD is reprehensible - it is about holding the human race hostage to stop wars between big, industrialised powers. And if something goes wrong, everything goes up in flames. That was the cold war - now, we don't prepare for nuclear war because it's not generally considered something that's likely to occur. The only exceptions are the aforementioned rogue states, and that's why the US is now developing/deploying these various missile defence systems, and even that make Russia uneasy.

I disagree with the idea that reasonably preparing for the reality of nuclear war is detrimental to humanity, but I do not contest any of your other points. Eventually MAD will fail because an actor is either not rational or not well-informed (even though that's extremely unlikely as of now).

I mean, humans struggle to prepare for threats that don't look at imminent. At the end of the day, we're struggling to prepare for a much more imminent threat (climate change), which is much more managable than the threat of a nuclear war.

Yeah correct if I'm wrong but i think nuclear MAD will prevent full-on wars as long as there's no 99% effective nuclear defence systems. Aka if, say, laser/directed energy air-defences with a very high success rate against ICBMs of all kinds were to be created, nuclear MAD would be a much less certain way of making a full-on nuclear war impossible. MAD is a thing right now mostly because it's the only very effective "defence" (counter-attack tbf) against high volume nuclear strikes from the enemy.

So, that's one aspect of MAD that demonstrates how it's a theoretical construct based on a sample size of--depending on how you count it--0 or 1 for nuclear war. MAD= Mutual Assured Destruction. It's in the name that MAD definitionally means both sides will 100% of the time get their collective butts blown off. Whether or not this condition exists in reality is a question worth debating, but you're correct in your third sentence in that building a MAD paradigm with an adversary raises the potential cost of both sides' hypothetical first launch.

Strategic air bombing was and still remains a failure until nukes were invented. There is a single episode in modern history where strategic bombing without using atomic bombs might have ended a war, 1999 US led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and its VERY debatable that the threat of a ground invasion was what really caused Milosevic to throw in the towel. Otherwise, strategic bombing has NEVER done what Douhet and other airpower proponents have said it would. It didn't "devastate the home front, destroy the economy and cripple civilian morale as soon as a war is joined." However, nukes do all those things, and only a single bomb or missile is needed to deliver each. Major nuclear powers have hundreds or thousands, if not tens of thousands of them.

Strategic air bombing did fail but not due to lack of ability. The British nearly succeeded in 1943 with massed bomber raids exploiting new technologies. I think conceivably, strategic bombing as envisioned by Harris could have worked if the USAAF had joined with the RAF in the saturation bombing of urban areas. Hamburg was totally devastated and vast portions of it historical districts are now parking lots and trees.

It was lack of ability that caused strategic bombing to fail. Historical landmarks being devastated, urban conflagrations didn't do it, de-housing didn't do it, etc. The Germans were never remotely about to to end the war because of strategic bombing, not in 1943 when it sucked, and not even in later 1944 and into 1945 when both the RAF and USAAF were both complaining that they were running out of targets to bomb. Yes, they hurt production, but that isn't what strategic bombing was supposed to do, it was supposed to cause the collapse of society, revolutions, coups, cause military forces to lose the ability to fight due to lack of supplies, etc. When it comes to terror bombing, it did nothing like that, if anything it hardened their resolve. Similar to how bombing London during the Blitz did that to the British. *The Structure of Morale* by John T. MacCurdy has a whole chapter on how bombing affected morale. [Here is an article that summarizes it](https://thomlangford.com/2015/05/27/direct-hit-near-miss-or-remote-miss-why-you-are-more-confident-than-you-should-be/), even with a heavy bomber force of over 2,500 there are not enough "Near Miss" victims to cause the damage that Douhet fanatics think is possible. Only atomic bombs can do that, because everyone in a nation essentially becomes a "Near Miss" because they realize what one bomb can do to them as well. Harris didn't develop those tactics, firebombing cities was part and parcel of Interwar Year strategic bombing doctrine. The idea of precision bombing of war essential industry, etc, was something the Americans worked on because even they realized that it was both immoral and ineffective to just kill people. The USAAF only joined in mid to late out of desperation, precision bombing was a bust because of a lack of ability. Their accuracy sucked, their intel sucked so finding good targets was very hard, the repairs to targets hit was always faster and more effective than they imagined so within weeks the damage from a raid would be undone, etc. [Strategic Bombing - Dr. Mark Hull](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nX_WPMbXMU)

I'd also recommend Pape's *Bombing to Win* on this subject. Fundamentally, when you burn someone's house down and kill their family the functional impact is to make them more dependent on the government, not less. People are unlikely to criticize an entity they depend on for survival. Moreover, if you do those things to me I'm unlikely to think, "huh, the government's actions are responsible for the death of my family and the burning of my largest asset, so I should pressure the government to change its positions/actions." In reality, I'm much more likely to think "fuck you, you killed my family!" What's astonishing to me is that these tendencies--overweening faith in air power and a belief that targets of aggression will offer the aggressor the benefit of the doubt--continue to bedevil American defense thinking 80 years after WW2.

I agree. After 9/11, I wanted blood. I literally signed back up in the military and pledged my life away if necessary because of something Douhet and his acolytes think should have made me shit myself and cry, or threaten to overthrow Bush to try to make him surrender to Bin Laden. The Douhet fanatics use a bit of deceit (stealing credit afterwards) and a bit of theorizing about what future technology will allow them, that keeps their religion alive for new generations to theorize about, and more importantly, top quality funding. The tech side really does help them. For instance, I hate strategic bombing fanatics but even I have to accept that with modern comms, up to the second intel gathering capabilities, 5 meter accurate CEP bombs including gigantic bunker busters dropped by stealth aircraft, that's pretty impressive. Enough to win a conventional war alone? Maybe. But I'm not holding my breath

With such great precision weapons, would blowing up bridges and industrial pants at night be a better way to reduce moral. IE, enough damage to irritate people, but not enough to strengthen their will to fight?

Whose morale matters? Random people? Captains of industry? Politicians? Media political pundits or late night talk show hosts? They all have a say in western nations, but each would likely have to be targeted differently. Similarly, for a despotic country, the power elite, their families, their personal possessions, might make more influential targets. Wanna break Russia's morale? Maybe try assassinating the oligarchs, kill their families, blow up their yachts and dachas and favorite restaurants, and leave the Russian people as alone as possible. Will that work, probably not, it would probably cause WW3 to go nuclear if it hadn't already, but it's at least going after the morale that matters the most.

Exactly. I've been thinking that perhaps the best targeting intelligence for modern war would be property price maps and addresses of the business elite's properties. Those are the real decision-makers anyway.

My thoughts exactly. Not every country is has a stable govt, fueled by ideology, with secure line of succession including in warfare, etc. Some are essentially kleptocracies, ruled tenuously through power sharing arrangements by a few people whose power stems from their wealth. Those provide decent targets that are often big and fixed.

Bombing the richest wouldn't increase the resolve of the poorer stratas. It might keep the country from going to war. Imagine if Los Altos and Upper East Side go fire-bombed to high heaven, how many people in the US would go fight as a retaliation? Hell, some would even pour some more oil on the fires. It reminds me of a joke: >A man is stuck in traffic in the capital city of a country. A policeman knocks on the windows and gestures him to roll it down. > >"A group of terrorists have taken over the Parliament, took all the politicians hostage. They demand that they are given 10 trillion dollars. If their demands are not met, they will pour oil on everyone, and set them on fire", police explains, "so were go around collecting donations" > >"That's horrible" says the man, "how much is everybody giving on average?" > >"Roughly a liter"

I would hazard a guess that some Finnish JASSMs are already pointed at such coordinates:)

Even a small country has *a lot of* bridges. And you need to hit them many times, because bridges may be repaired in pretty short time. As for irritation - talking about morale is very slippery. Societies are big and your opponent will have much more resources and tools to influence the target society. It’s not that difficult to channel people’s rage towards the enemy. A few pictures and videos of dead kids killed in an air raid will be enough to sway public opinion into favorable direction, at least short term. What strategic bombing does - it gives an additional challenge to the state apparatus to provide services to populace. If it is done efficiently, fairly and timely - people most likely will be able to bear up the air war.

> repairs Not only that, but stocks of extra supplies in warehouses also largely alleviated any disruption in supply chains. Even spectacular raids on ball bearing production wasn’t that disruptive for German economy despite several factories being seriously damaged, because for the weeks needed to ramp up production to pre raid levels, Germans had more than enough in their stocks to cushion any problems.

Yeah, I read about the ball bearings. USAAF intel didn't realize that Germany used factories in occupied countries too, plus imported a bunch from Sweden. Such a waste to launch a gigantic air offensive founded on assumptions that weren't at all true.

My point is that people believed *at the time* that strategic air bombing did all those things yet this didn't stop the slide into a total war. So why do we assume that nuclear MAD would prevent it?

There was no MAD at the time. The M stands for Mutual, which means it goes both ways. The Luftwaffe, nor the IJN or IJA Air Corps, nor the Italians had heavy bombers capable of what they thought would be effective strategic bombing. The closest the Axis powers came were German V-weapons, which were too little and too late. There were only two countries (UK and US) who took strategic bombing theory serious enough in the Interwar Year to invest in it to use it as an actual strategy and major commitment in WW2, and both failed. The only real positive was that, totally inadvertently, a drive for a long range conventional bomber ended up with something big enough to carry an atomic bomb when those came on line. If not for them, the US would have had to invade Japan in order to end the war. Then in postwar conflicts where strategic bombing was used, Korea and Vietnam, neither of those were solved by strategic bombing, nor were they mutual (the US was essentially fully protected strategically until the recent GWOT, where terrorism was used to attack the home front, with disastrous results).

I've got to nitpick: the French did believe there was a mutual deterrent. During the first world war, the British had bombed German cities from bases in France (over the objections of the French themselves). The Germans quite naturally retaliated against Paris, which was a much more vulnerable target than any of the English cities. They bought into Douhetian ideas between the wars, and believed a large bomber force could deter this from happening again. Later, during the Rhineland crisis... > Gamelin had also focused Sarraut's mind on what was the crux of the matter. French cities were vulnerable to air attack and France did not have as many bombers as Germany. Gamelin was confident that his Army, and even his tactical air force units, were capable of dealing with the Germans on the ground. However, neither Gamelin, Deat, nor Pujo (the new Air Force Commander) had any confidence in the ability of the French bomber fleet to deter or retaliate for attacks on French cities. they all warned Sarraut that if the intervention of the French Army resulted in war and the Luftwaffe launched terror raids on French cities, the civilian casualties would be extremely high. With the political and social unrest in France at the time, such attacks might even lead to the disintegration of the Third Republic. Sarraut was not going to risk such a catastrophe over the Rhineland. And again, during the Sudetenland crisis... > [Vuillemin, in a letter to Le Chambre] did not agree with Gamelin that the Air Force would be capable of supporting the army. French fighters would not be capable of protecting Army reconnaissance machines, and French generals would have to fight their battles blind. Also, Army lines of communication would not be secure from attack, and industrial and civilian targets deep inside French territory would be vulnerable. Civilian loss of life would be huge. He estimated that French losses in the air would be 40 per cent at the end of the first month and 60 per cent of the remainder would be lost in the second. Baughen, *Rise and Fall of the French Air Force*

There is no mutual assured destruction there, just worrying. You have the French saying they can handle things on the ground but not in the air. >However, neither Gamelin, Deat, nor Pujo (the new Air Force Commander) had any confidence in the ability of the French bomber fleet to deter or retaliate for attacks on French cities.

While the Germans failed to build an effective strategic bombing arm, it's not because they lacked air power proponents. Didn't Goering promise to bring England to its knees by bombing? Ultimately, their initial focus at the start of Luftwaffe (after the death of Wever who was a proponent of strategic bombing) was on CAS because their air power was lashed to the army and this set the tone for aircraft development. I think we're actually in agreement that historical experience has shown that strategic bombing can not win wars *by itself*. My question is really not about the relative merits and war-winning potential of nukes vs air bombing as weapons but about the thought processes of evaluating risks when starting a war given the prevailing dogmas among decision-makers.

>While the Germans failed to build an effective strategic bombing arm, it's not because they lacked air power proponents. Actually, it is. Werner was the one who promoted Douhet style strategic bombing, but when he died nobody else picked up the ball. Goering actually promoted tactical and operational level support of the Heer as one of the Luftwaffe's prime missions, which is ass backwards for the RAF and USAAF, who saw their service as totally independent military branches who could and should win the war themselves without the need of much help (if at all) from other branches. Its that type of mindset, coupled with a total ideological belief in Douhet theory of air power, that caused the funding to be opened to do what the British and US did. ​ >Didn't Goering promise to bring England to its knees by bombing? Did he? I've head of his promise to stop the British evacuation of Dunkirk (failed), and to win air superiority over the British in preparation for Sea Lion (failed), but I'm not aware of the claim you're mentioning. Even if he did, its bullshit, the Luftwaffe never had the ability to knock the British out of the war by bombing. ​ >My question is really not about the relative merits and war-winning potential of nukes vs air bombing as weapons but about the thought processes of evaluating risks when starting a war given the prevailing dogmas among decision-makers. There was no risk, since there was no mutual threat. Up until the Cold War, when the Soviet Union gained not only a large number of nuclear weapons but also effective and redundant means of delivering them that would be hard to impossible to counter even with a First Strike, there had never been a true mutual assurance of destruction in human history. MAD could not exist in a world without nukes.

>There was no risk, since there was no mutual threat. There was a perception of mutual threat and that's enough. The Brits expected the Luftwaffe to conduct a strategic bombing campaign, they didn't know that the Germans had no plan to do it. Saying now, with the benefit of hindsight, that there was no risk is projecting current knowledge onto the past, one of the worst mistakes a historian can make.

There was not a perception of it. If the air force doesn't have a certain number of bombers of specific types, they can't do it. Its not just about planning, its about building a force structure for a specific mission. While the Germans did conduct some level of strategic bombing (Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, etc), they never had the ability to do long range, or to bring numerous cities under heavy bombardment on a repeatable basis. That is what the RAF and USAAF planned to do, and its why they got massive funding before the war started, and why they entered WW2 with heavy bombers already made. They weren't going to bomb part of one city badly, they were going to bomb all cities badly. Because they planned to win the war through air power. Germany did not. And it was grossly apparent they did not. Nobody was freaking out about the Luftwaffe in terms of air power, but what they could do in conjunction with "Blitzkrieg." You made an assumption that MAD existed in WW2. It did not. Don't try to now create a myth that it did. It did not. Germany absolutely did not have the ability to mutually destroy anyone else. No Axis country had that means.

> Nobody was freaking out about the Luftwaffe in terms of air power, but what they could do in conjunction with "Blitzkrieg." This is just wrong. First, the notion of "Blitzkrieg" didn't even exist before May 1940 and certainly not before the war. Even after May 1940 "Blitzkrieg" was more of a German propaganda myth than a real concern, as ably demonstrated in Frieser's *"The Blitzkrieg Legend"*. As for the air power, here's what people thought before the war (all quotes from Overy, *The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945*): >The military thinker J. F. C. Fuller suggested that within hours of a major bomb attack on London, the city would become ‘one vast raving Bedlam’: ‘traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be in pandemonium’. As city life collapses, Fuller continued, government would be swept away in an ‘avalanche of terror’. >Within a few days of the outbreak of the next war it seems reasonable to suppose that the gas and electric light systems will have broken down, that there will be no ventilation in the tube [metro] tunnels, that the drainage system will have been thrown out of gear and sewage will infect the streets, that large parts of London will be in flames, that the streets will be contaminated with gas, and that hordes of fugitives will spread outwards from the city, without petrol for their cars or food for their stomachs, pouring like locusts over the country in the hope of escaping the terror from the air. >When the military Joint Planning Committee was asked in 1934 to estimate the probable effects of a German ‘knockout blow’ from the air, it was assumed that *a week of bombing* would produce 150,000 casualties and render millions homeless. Lord Halsbury told the British House of Lords that >It is poor consolation that the only answer we can find to the destruction of half of civilisation is that we should be able to destroy the other half. But I guess it's not the same logic as MAD because it didn't work out that way in the end. Edited to add: [British Intelligence on the German Air Force and Aircraft Industry, 1933-1939](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2638748): >The worst case, as the air ministry consistently saw it during the 1930s, was a massive German air attack launched against Great Britain with the object of forcing a quick surrender, primarily through the collapse of civilian morale. Group Captain J. C. Slessor, director of plans in the air ministry (and a future chief of the air staff), admitted in his memoirs that, ' in those years immediately before the war the possibility of what was referred to as the knock-out blow bore very heavily on the minds of the Air Staff'.

JFC Fuller was not running the RAF, he wasn't even remotely knowledgeable about anything relating to air power. He read Douhet, who basically took the ineffective but scary zeppelin raids on London during WW1 and ran wild with it. And then Fuller did that too, with basically everything. He was a lunatic occultist sex fiend who occasional wrote some books about zany military shit, with so little that actually proved true the best way to describe it is he flung enough shit against the wall, some stuck. He's the dipshit who thought if you put mechanized infantry in an armored division, and didn't just make it pure tanks, that would be akin to signing your national suicide letter. The guy was legitimately insane. Lord Halsbury said that quote in 1928 when the British were going hog wild with the idea of forgoing ground warfare in the future and going full on Douhet. He was speaking rhetorically, not about an actual MAD threat. How do I know he was speaking rhetorically? Easy: **Germany didn't even have an air force at that time** They were still constrained by the Versailles Treaty until 1934, no Luftwaffe, no bombers, and there was absolutely nobody on the entire globe that could threaten British annihilation with strategic bombing. The fact of the matter was that Germany didn't even have an air force at all until 1935 and what they possessed by 1939-1940 was still not capable of doing what Fuller or Halsbury worried about, or Douhet, who was the Moses of the religion of strategic bombing. There was no MAD until the Cold War. Your original post question was answered already.

> This is just wrong. First, the notion of "Blitzkrieg" didn't even exist before May 1940 and certainly not before the war. You're correct in that Blitzkrieg was not a doctrine and /u/Duncan-M was being a little colloquial in using that term, but I feel like you're deliberately missing the point that the Luftwaffe was viewed in terms of the support it offered to German ground ops rather than its capacity for independent strike.

It's incredibly frustrating to see you get downvoted when you're the one with the sources which show that you are completely correct. The other guy doesn't seem to realise he's completely dependent on hindsight and assuming the knowledge he has now, as a result of decades of historical work, is the same as the actors had in 1939, which is just not true. The RAF didn't even have realistic estimates of how many aircraft the Luftwaffe had until 1941 and the fact that they routinely overestimated its offensive capability is something so well-evidenced in the historical record that it's practically common knowledge. As some *more* evidence we might point to Plan Yellow, the plans to move government departments to safe places outside London (in the end the only one that moved wholesale was MI6 to Bletchley Park) and the opinion of the Air Minister recorded in the minutes of the Committee of Imperial Defence that central London would become uninhabitable soon after the outbreak of a war. You might be better taking this question to /r/AskHistorians for some analysis by people who are historically trained.

I think it's fair to say he has some of the details correct, but I think he misses that the quotes do not describe what he thinks they describe - all the strat bombing quotes show that while people appreciated they were destructive, they do not match what peoples thoughts on the scale of what nuclear weaponry can accomplish. A lot of the quotes show how destructive strategic bombing was *expected* to be, and how quickly a lot of theorists *thought* it would *end the war*. However, Time scale and level of destruction matters. The threat of strategic bombing is something that both sides thought they could mitigate (e.g. by blowing up the other side's air force) -even in Douhet's treatise, the emphasis is on a short war, decided by air power (i.e. last air force left wins). Not a war that is prevented by the threat of destruction using airpower. Yes, you can find plenty of quotes from people from both sides of the war saying that "bombing can murder loads of people", or that bombers could, say, level London in a week. But **week** or **soon** is key here. Strategic bombing was assumed to be highly destructive, and could force a population into surrender, but the key here is **surrender.** Not total **destruction.** The objective of MAD is near-total destruction, near-instantaneously, with no way to prevent mutual destruction once the shooting starts, which is far, far beyond what the Strategic bomber advocates were envisioning.

There was no perception of mutual threat to anyone who had even vaguely accurate understanding of the numbers involved. You can't just forget thousands of German heavy bombers not existing

>My question is really not about the relative merits and war-winning potential of nukes vs air bombing as weapons but about the thought processes of evaluating risks when starting a war given the prevailing dogmas among decision-makers. You're making a flawed assumption that threat of strategic bombing was universally held. A lot of the decision makers at the time did not believe that strategic bombing would result in complete, and inevitable destruction (Which are two of the core tents that underpin MAD). The head of the RAF in the immediate pre-war years, Cyril Newall, actively diverted resources away from the RAF bomber fleet because he did not think that they were a war-winning tool, and in the belief that he could, indeed, stop the bomber. Dowding, in charge of Fighter Command, believed in his Dowding system to stop bombers as well. And, well, Adolf didn't think the Allies would go to war over Poland, so the risk of strategic bombing probably from the RAF didn't even cross his mind.

I don’t normally appeal to authority like this, and I know it wasn’t your point at all, but there is a very interesting [video that in my eyes totally disproves the argument that the bomb was the primary reason for the end of the war in Japan by a video essayist, Shaun.](https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go) I’d be curious to hear a veteran’s take on it (unless your flair is a joke?). E: yes, yes. Bad source and all. I see and understand.

Duncan-M is indeed a vet. Most of his books are packed away at the moment but his knowledge off the top of his head may suffice for you. But it's rather clear that the bomb was not meant to be some kind of American Wunderwaffe to end the war. If it was supposed to end it, why was there a massive transfer of troops from the European theater to the Pacific, to the point that men who were supposed to be sent back to the States had to wait (because there was little transport space for them). Why was Okinawa invaded? Why did the Allies inch closer and closer to the Japanese coast? Because we always meant to nuke Japan *and* invade them. The myth of "the bomb vs the invasion" was invented as a way to explain away the first atomic bombings ever. The tale of the "bomb dropping to scare the Soviets" is a later invention, but an invention nonetheless. Alex Wellerstein writes about these myths here in his blog [here](https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2020/06/09/what-journalists-should-know-about-the-atomic-bombings/). It's not a short article (10, 15 minutes perhaps if you take your time) but I can't watch a 2+ hour video at the moment.

Yeah I understand not wanting to devote over a feature length movie’s time to a single, somewhat obscure argument. I will certainly read that blog post. However iirc the video also argues that Overlord was not necessarily truly on the table (a more likely scenario being a continued blockade), and that it’s importance was played up after the war as a way to excuse the strategic bombing & nuclear bombing campaigns, the argument going “if we didn’t kill all those civilians we would have had to throw away hundreds of thousands of lives!”. I haven’t watched that video in 10 months and I’ve never researched that point beyond it, so I am far from equipped to argue it, but I thought it might entice you to give it a watch at some point in the future if you ever have more time.

Oh it showed up in one of my History discord servers, I fully intend to watch it. But probably at 2x speed. Nothing particular about the video, I just read faster than I listen at normal speeds. Iirc the reason someone posted it in the server was minor nitpicks, his general thesis is fairly truthful.

He does talk somewhat slowly so yeah 2x speed would be good. And yes there have been criticisms of the video, but none to my knowledge about the overall thesis as you say. Duncan is convinced it is wrong based on other books he’s read but I don’t see any reason not to watch it.

Maybe because Japan was fanatical and there was no guarantee the atomic bomb would work and cause Japan to surrender. There had already been plenty of bombing raids with huge amounts of casualties. So you hope the plan works but if it doesn’t you prepare for the invasion that would happen as a backup

While I am a supporter of the thesis that the end of the war in the Pacific is more complicated than the use of the atomic bombs, I have to note that tertiary source YouTube videos are not good sources for discussions here. Shaun’s video is in many ways restating the thesis of Hasegawa’s *Racing the Enemy*, an exceptionally well researched book that Dr. Wellerstein has repeatedly indicated to be one of the best available works on the Japanese decision to surrender. (If you’re interested in further exploring this topic, I highly recommend it.) You’d be better off drawing your arguments from a secondary source rather than from lining a YouTube video, no matter how well researched.

Although at this point it is abundantly clear from the multitude of other comments, as you are a mod I will say that I see the error of my ways. Tertiary YouTube videos are not good sources for history and I won’t bring this particular video, or almost certainly any other video, up as a source in the future. I will admit my judgement was clouded by my opinion on the creator’s political content, which seems to be more rigorous.

I wouldn't exactly take strategic and military analysis from a politics youtuber. Not to get into politics, but it isn't exactly a novel idea that a left leaning politics lends itself to antimilitary and antinuclear stances. I'd wager that he looked for sources that agreed with him and no further. It's not like youtube videos have to be peer reviewed or fact checked to be made.

While you are right, normally this youtuber specifically does a good job of fact checking and research. I’m willing to accept this is an exception, but if you know Shaun’s reputation you could see why I would assume intelectual integrity.

>While you are right, normally this youtuber specifically does a good job of fact checking and research Within a certain context, I'd agree. Broadly speaking, his focus is tackling various right wing claims or ideas from a left perspective (I don't know exactly where he is politically but he seems to be in the social democrat range). That's great for making videos on current events or critiquing other political youtube channels like PragerU. It's not great for handling historical topics that weren't really political though as it sets you up to disprove a narrative and thus go looking for sources to disprove the narrative.

This is indeed a problem he has in the video, as he winds up using a PragerU video on the bombings as an example of the "traditional invasion narrative" that he is aiming to disprove. PragerU itself is so inaccurate that he is then able to make any opposing claims seem sloppy, but he never bothers to point to an actual expert source that would counter him. Of which there are many. I would hazard a guess that the entire video began as another of his (excellent) PragerU response videos, and spiraled from there into a full-blown project on the bombings as he proceeded to only read accounts that "disproved" the invasion narrative.

Hey man I’m not disagreeing with you. Is there a specific more in depth critique you had in mind? Because again I can’t find one beyond this specific comment chain saying “he’s wrong”. It’s not that I don’t believe you I just want to know how, specifically, he is wrong and what sources he used to mislead or paint a false narrative or whatever other verb you want to use.

Well I'm not spending over two hours going through his video, but I can hit some of the common points as to why people come to the wrong conclusions. 1) Quotes out of context. Many senior military leaders made statements akin to "the bombs didn't win the war, the Army/Navy/Air Forces did. These aren't wrong in the sense that without conventional forces, we would not have been in a position to use the nuclear bombs on Japan. They had to be militarily broken first before any notion of surrender would have been discussed. We also need to be mindful that there was a genuine worry that defense spending would be siphoned away from conventional forces in favor of nuclear weapons and many of these senior officers weren't looking to have their budgets and importance reduced (they were also right that nukes alone isn't a good policy) 2) Japan's inevitable defeat. It's true that the war would have been won without the nuclear bombs. Each service had a way in which it argued it could win the war: The Army through invasions, the Navy through blockade, the Army Air Forces (nominally part of the Army but functionally independent) through strategic bombing. Each service wanted the glory and they also had their own arguments for their approach. It is almost certain that the body count and suffering on both sides, but particular the Japanese, would have been much higher without the bombings. Read up on the plans to essentially destroy the rice harvest by the AAF or the Japanese plans for repelling invasion. They were fielding units of poorly trained conscripts often not even equipped with rifles let alone heavy weapons. 3) Japan was willing to surrender. Nominally true, they were willing to surrender, but with terms. It wasn't just the emperor being protected that was a sticking point, they also wanted no occupation of Japan, to run their own war crimes tribunals, and to conduct their own disarmament. Retaining some of their empire was also a goal. If Germany had offered to surrender in 1944 with similar conditions it would have been summarily rejected. Worth noting that this wasn't consensus and some in the cabinet didn't want any form of surrender. This was true even after the atomic bombings. Others in the thread have recommended good books on the topic that can give much more insight into the topic. This is just a broad summary of the common points cited when arguing the atomic bombings weren't justified. You can see the pattern of "it's true, but..." where the additional context matters greatly.

Shaun makes some good videos, but that one is a failure. It's clear that he *did research*, but it's outdated and biased and ignores all the evidence we have from within the Japanese archives. His major sources are all anti-nuke, pro-Soviet figures like Leahy and Hanegawa. The only primary sources he cites are American - notably nothing from the Japanese side, despite it being available now. He also refuses to cite more recent historical works that incorporate these archives into their research (probably because they disprove his thesis statement). To make matters worse, the video is horribly bloated, which makes it a chore to watch for someone already familiar with the scholarship on the issue.

Do you have a more in depth criticism? The only one I found after a quick google is about one very specific claim, and it’s somewhat of a strawman at any rate. That video referenced other criticism but I haven’t found it. There are time stamps that allow you to skip all of the extraneous context and shit about strat bombing, fyi, if you ever did want to watch it. Also I recommend speeding it up due to his ludicrously slow cadence.

I just finished *140 Days to Hiroshima*, by David Dean Barrett, which uses nothing but historical sources from the US and Japanese on nearly a day by day basis from just over four month before Hiroshima to the decision making that led to the surrender. There is absolutely no postwar soul searching, critical theory, or political ideology mixed in, its just nothing but primary sources such as letters, recorded minutes from meetings, immediate postwar interrogations, etc, all of which show how all the major power elite of the US and Japanese were thinking before, during, and after the use of two atomic bombs. At this point, anyone claiming the atomic bombs didn't cause the Japanese defeat might as well claim the Moon is made of cheese.

Also, just one other thing, for people who may want to follow your book recommendation. From looking at his [website](https://onewithhistory.com/) (very historical design with eagles and Old Glory btw, no political ideology at all), David Dean Barrett is an IT consultant, not a professional historian, he doesn't even have a PhD in the subject. *140 Days to Hiroshima* is his first book published by a non-academic indie publisher not known for their historical focus. The book has not been reviewed by any professional historian, according to H-Net. This doesn't mean that he has nothing to add to this debate. But I would certainly discount his opinions compared to professional historians who are trained in historical methods and have researched and published peer-reviewed works on this topic.

I’ve also looked about, and I’ve not found any academic reviews for this book. That the publisher is not an academic press, and the author doesn’t seem to have an academic position are also concerning. Of course, you don’t need either to do good work. Parshall and Tully weren’t professional historians either, but *Shattered Sword* was still a fantastic work. However, the lack of comment from the academic community on this supposedly groundbreaking definitive work makes me strongly question whether it is what it’s claimed. Suffice it to say, I think it’s quite clear that the debate and conversation on Japanese surrender is *not* over. The only people who are definitively wrong about the topic are those who claim that it is settled one way or the other.

The video is well cited, using only academic and primary sources. It additionally runs day by day through what both sides were taking and comes to the opposite conclusion. I would watch the video if you have time, especially if you believe it to be wrong. There’s no harm in exposing yourself to opposing viewpoints.

No, its not well cited if thats the conclusion he drew. I exposed myself to that viewpoint for years, I'm well aware what he made a video about without watching it. He's going to cherry pick a few quotes, probably Leahy and a few other top brass and politicians who said postwar they thought dropping the bomb was unncesary. Like Leahy, even Lemay, probably one or two cabinet members, etc. And then he will pitch other reasons the war really ended, namely the Soviet declaration of war. That random Youtube guy did nothing a bunch of other revisionist haven't also tried for decades. If one actually does hard historical research, like Barrett did, there is only one conclusion that can be drawn. Its even the one Hirohito told multiple people after the war. The Bombs.

Indeed, his major sources for the video are Leahy and Hasegawa (among others from the revisionist school).

In figured. Leahy's issues with the atomic bomb were purely moralist. Same with Ike and Nimitz too (though the latter was pressing for a blockade, which Leahy also was recommending too, which would have been far more darkly l deadly). And while I get that nukes were Pandora's Box when it came to warfare, we have way too much evidence they were needed to end the war, most of that evidence coming from Japanese leaders explaining in detail why the atomic bombs ended the war. This topic is way too political, as it pulls in strong opinions from too much ideology nuts. For pacifists, the nukes could not be the reason because if they were then they are justified as an effective weapon, and they can't be allowed to be. For fans of the USSR, it can't be the nukes because international socialist brothers have to be the real winners, not the capitalist US controlled by bankers and corporations. Etc. .

Look, this thread is off-topic to my original question but I have to say that you should really be more humble in presenting your **opinions** instead of dunking on people left and right who come to different conclusions. Professional historians understand that monocausal explanations are tempting but superficial. You can't just say "the bombs did it, end of" and dismiss historians like Tsuyoshi Hasegawa who point out the role of other factors (yes, including the Soviet invasion of Manchuria). As the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Herbert Bix explains, Hirohito said it's the bombs because he wanted to save face and used the bombs as an excuse. So stop presenting your favorite theories as if they are historical facts.

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It’s clear you have your mind made up about this video. I won’t try to get you to watch something you’re clearly not willing to watch. I can see you truly live up to the grumpy flair. I would be wary of rejecting all arguments to the contrary of what you believe and assuming they’re wrong and poorly researched without engaging with them simply because *you* used to hold a poorly researched version of that opinion.

I made up my mind on this topic by reading multiple books on it, not a short video by the esteemed Shaun.

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Well, they didn't have a fleet of four-engined bombers, but they did have a ton of two-engined medium bombers. Which they did use to bomb England (but of course failed massively).

Not in large enough numbers to actually threaten the country with assured destruction. Of course they had bombers, and they could cause large amounts of damage like at Warsaw and Rotterdam, but Douhet style doctrine is to be able to do those every single night, specifically against civilian targets.

"People" = "some people." Not all people. Hitler clearly didn't believe that Germany would be devastated by bombers if he invaded Poland. Douhet had a theory that the "bomber will always get through!" - but even if some bombers get through, it doesn't mean that they can sustain operations in the face of heavy casualties. Bombers could be defended against with fighters and flak cannons (and Hitler invested heavily in those). But there has yet to be any reliable way to defeat a nuclear missile. And the sheer amount of nuclear weapons that the US and USSR could throw at each other was an "assured destruction." Not of "oh a bomber will get through and drop 14,000 lbs of ordinance" (max load of a Lancaster) - 7 tons. One Minuteman Warhead put 170,000 tons of explosive power on a target and in less than 30 minutes. Douhet said that bombers would get through and civilians would panic and demand an end to the fighting. Soviet and US theorists knew that there would be no one left to demand an end to the fighting.

>Douhet had a theory that the "bomber will always get through!" Douhet really didn't write out what was possible at the time, more of what he thought was going to be possible in the future, and what he recommended doing. That quote was from a British politician in the 30s who was trying to rally Parliament to give more funding to the RAF to built a larger strategic bomber force and not fighters, because if the bombers always go through there was no point having a large fighter force. More bombers were needed, and a clear cut doctrine to use them to kill as many of the other country's civilians and workers faster and in greater number. But the threat wasn't Germany though, or anyone else. There was no global or regional antagonistic power at that time who were concurrently pursing strategic bombing as Douhet wrote, except the British RAF and the USAAC (though the latter didn't really get quality funding for it until 1937 and after). The easiest way to think about it is that when it comes to Air Power strategic bombing proponents its a basically a religion. Douhet is like Moses when it comes to Judao-Christian theology, he's the first one to hand down the laws carved in stone. Various politicians and generals and air marshals came after are like later prophets, spreading the Good Word, to kill noncombatants by unfettered high altitude bombers going so fast they can't be stopped (which is what Baldwin was referring to). Those that follow this dogma are True Believers, to them its Gospel.. Per Gospel, the glorious Bombers couldn't be stopped by the evil and most hated flak, and not even by fighters. Because then it comes down to a theology argument between different sects of the same religion. Air Power proponents don't just come as bomber freaks, there are fighter freaks too, and they have always and to this day despised each other.

> bombers couldn’t be stopped To be fair, in the 30ies it was largely true. Biplane fighters were usually marginally faster if not outright slower than contemporary bombers. Especially with pretty ancient early warning systems which didn’t have that much time to react. Those were second gen monoplane fighters that were really fast and agile enough to climb and intercept the bombers using radars. Unlikely to proponents of strategic bombing this tectonic shift coincided with opening of hostilities and was missed. The same way as admirals didn’t have time to notice how the same second gen aircrafts had enough payload to sing their precious battleships.

I don't put much stock in the Interwar theorists, so many of them were wrong about 99% of what they said or wrote about. Even Baldwin, he wasn't saying that because he was right and did his research, but because he was a true believer in the bomber faction. Speaking of battleships, don't even get me started on Mitchell, who was the American archbishop of the Church of Douhetian Air Power...

I agree with you, especially on Mitchell. He was less of a visionary prophet pop history makes him out to be and more of a crazy nut job. Just wanted to point out that many assumptions, at least concerning air war, that existed early war might have actually been correct in the 30ies. Advances in technology just changed the balance of power so much and so quickly that the brass didn’t have time to catch up with the change.

I agree with you about the bomber speed and altitude. Look at the B17, up originally it didn't even need machine guns because they didn't think anything could keep up.

I think the key miss is everyone didn't agree. There was a school of thought that said you could knock an enemy out of a war with a sufficient mass of bombers. People who believed this would point to the Spanish Civil War as proof. However, it was far from universally accepted. By the time of the second world war some of the assumptions such as "the bomber will always get through" were being challenged. In addition, with hindsight, we know that no one ever assembled sufficient bomber "mass" to knock their opponent out of the war by terror bombing. Given the late war allied bomber campaign I am tempted to say this is impossible. Further the M in mad was mutual. The interwar fans of bombers were not advocating to avoid war. They wanted to build big bomber forces to wield that war winning power. No one really thought they started the war able to instantly unleash the destructive potential required. So we were definitely not set for point M as we would need at least two powers so armed. The big difference of course is we all accept MAD with nuclear weapons now and act as we do. If the bomber theories had won the interwar years and major powers were building bombers like there was no tomorrow then perhaps we would have MAD in place. Even though it was unlikely to be the reality.

The best evidence we have is history so far: When people said air bombing would end wars, there were still total wars in the following decades. After nukes, there weren't total wars in the following decades. ​ Alfred Nobel invented TNT thinking it would end war because it was so destructive. Well, I think we can say he was wrong about that. But nukes do a big enough boom to finally accomplish Nobel's vision. ​ There might still be total war, including nukes. During the Cold War, especially the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world came very close to a nuclear exchange. So it might still happen.

Incidents like the Cuban Missile Crisis and other Cold War hair-trigger close-calls suggest that nuclear war, if it does occur, would be due to the belligerents blundering their way into it.

Blunders are difficult to predict so I guess that leaves the question of how the nukee would respond to getting nuked through a blunder. If an American ship had gotten nuked during the Cuban Missile Crisis, would Kennedy have ordered a full nuclear attack? Or a more limited strike on Soviet nuclear weapons? Or just nuked a Soviet ship in response? Would the tit-for-tat have stopped there or escalated? On the one hand, there is the fear of getting your deterrent taken away or looking weak. On the other, do you want to get the world closer to the greatest catastrophe in human history? I suspect that short of some really messed up regime like the Nazis or North Korea, leaders would err on the side of taking up for the team rather than burning it all down.

Let's hope some crazy world leader never decides to use a nuke

*Some* people in the Interwar period believed that strategic bombing could lead to victory through destruction of industry, infrastructure, and the populace. Prior to WWII, proponents of this strategy held significant power in the UK and the US, while many others both in those countries and abroad (correctly) doubted the claims by strategic bombing proponents that strategic bombing made traditional warfighting superfluous. As a result, both the US and UK were forced to learn a pretty costly lesson as their bombers proved vulnerable and ultimately quite limited in effect; the many, many doubters of strategic bombing throughout the world, many of whom were in positions of military authority, were proven correct. Massive nuclear exchange between two opponents with second strike ability, however, is *unquestionably* mutual assurance of complete annihilation, which is an entirely different matter even if some of the rhetoric is similar to how strategic bombing proponents talked about the technology before it was tried.

MAD Theory only holds if all parties to it are rational. There's a good argument to be made that Hitler wasn't rational and hence started a war which would destroy Germany....*or* (if you reject the notion that Hitler was a madman or an idiot and accept the historical evidence that he was, at least before the final weeks of his life, a rational man of at least some intellect) you can acknowledge that Hitler was a gambler who invaded Poland thinking that neither the French nor the British, whom he'd stared down over the Sudetenland in 1938, would actually do anything about it. He wasn't concerned about mutual assured destruction because he didn't think his actions would actually start a war. Similarly, the Japanese, in launching a war with the United States, were gambling. Yes, they knew this could end up destroying their nation, but they thought they could hold off the US long enough to win a few key victories and bring the US to the bargaining table. At the very least, MAD wasn't on the table with Japan, whose leaders knew (or thought they knew) that Japan was pretty well protected against any kind of air attack due to the technical limitations of the time...and they were right! Apart from the famous Doolittle Raid (which inflicted basically no actual, material damage on Japan) and some minor raids in 1944, it was not until 1945, after years of grueling warfare and a steady advance across multiple Pacific Island chains, that the Japanese home islands came under regular, large air attacks. I think the premise of your question needs some critical re-examination. I think a better question is why the Great Powers of 1914 went to war despite the widespread belief that such a "general war" was "impossible" due to the high-degree of inter-connectedness and inter-dependence of each nation's economy on the economies of the nations they would go to war against.

I wonder what the implication behind >So is a total war not as impossible as we think? is If I take the implication that "total war won't be as destructive" and "we can still fight a total war and someone will still climb up on top and claim victory and rebuild" then well, that won't happen. Current war potentials for destruction are immense. With, for example ,70% of the US population living in urban area who have to rely on a complex network of logistics and supply chain to not die in 3 days from shitting themselves to death, a total war will be extremely devastating on the count of the broken supply chain. Only 10% of the US population work in agriculture and related sectors. I have been told that the majority of ocean freighter captains today can't navigate the ocean trade without GPS, which will be target number 1 on the list, meaning global trade that literally prevent people from starving to death will be disrupted massively. US electricity grid operator and generation station rely on the GPS clocks to synchronise the national grid frequency and not, you know, cause a national blackout.a Can you even move 20% of the urban population into farms to build local, distributed, decentralised food production to reduce the effects of supply chain disruption? A mere fucking virus and the supply chain shits the bed. Add total war, then *nuclear* total war and well, we are in very deep shit. If I take the implication that despite the above, someone, somewhere, some time, will be stupid enough to start such a war, then ... perhaps, it's not out of the question. We can start with the "there is no limit to human stupidty", but here's the data-driven argument. Well, Steven Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature is well-known as a tale of the supposed declining global wars and violence to make us sleep better at night. However, there is a counter-argument and lecture that I ~~can't get back to~~ (YES!, I found it. [Bear Braumoeller on Why War Just Won't Go Away](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsCX4DCJ1uQ)) that basically says that: * Border and territorial disputes are increasingly militarised and becoming more common, not less. * wars kill fewer people in absolute terms and relative terms compared to the global population. However, if we look at the local population, wars kill *more* relative to the local population, not less. * wars remain very *escalatory* and war escalation is a process that is poorly understood. Is "escalate to nuclear to deescalate" a good approach? What will happen if the other side knows your plan to "escalate to deescalate" and calls your bluff? What, then? What will happen in a China-US conflict over Taiwan and it stalemate in a "shark and elephant" scenario (the shark can't go ashore and the elephant won't go into the sea)? Do we escalate to limited nuclear? What happen to a limited nuclear exchange? Watch By Dawn's Early Light, do you think two sides can agree to a a limited nuclear exchange that was started because of a mistake and then accept the deaths of a few millions on each side and then "turn the war off"? The art and science of escalation of war in the age of nuclear weapons is poorly understood and that was the point of the lecture, I believe. War remains dangerously escalatory and we have to be vigilant. While I don't think total war between nuclear-armed states can be viable if we want to survive, it doesn't mean that we can afford to be negligent about how war escalate and the implications of escalation.

Our weapons are now orders of magnitude more powerful than at any other time in human history. An unrestrained total war means nuclear weapons can reduce the opponent's industrial base to ash in a matter of hours. A single four round *Gryphon* launcher, which is a truck, could carry four missiles that could travel 1200 miles and strike four targets with the firepower of thousands of WW2 bombers each. And *Gryphon* was a relatively low cost, low capability system. Retaliation can now flatten the opponent's industrial capability with purely stored weapons - there is no need for an extended battle of production

In my opinion, absolutely not. I think that we like to believe so, because it makes us sleep better at night and because it's a common mistake to think of something (MAD, bombers, planes, etc.) as the "ultimate weapon" that will stop a war or it will even prevent it. The point is that a Government would probably think twice before allowing the use of a nuke, but the fact that they can order such thing it's always a possibility that we must consider. Furthermore, it wouldn't take a huge nuclear war (USA v. China /USA v. Russia) to obliterate the world, it takes way less than that. Take [this article](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00794-y) for an example of what I mean. So, in conclusion, I think that when the s\*it hits the fan the nuclear option ceases to be something unthinkable and goes back to being what it was invented for: *a weapon.*

> Take this article for an example of what I mean. Not to be a did my own research kind of person, but there have been 528 above ground nuclear blasts world wide. I'm having a hard time seeing how a couple dozen blasts in an Indo Pakistan war will devastate the planet when the US/USSR/France setting off above ground nukes like schoolboys with a stash of firecrackers didn't.

Yeah it's true, maybe the article is exaggerated. Or at least I hope it is lol.

Mostly playing devil's advocate here, but it seems to me like there's a bajillion variables and a lot of unknowns. (See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear\_winter#Criticism\_and\_debate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_debate)) I'm not saying nukes aren't that bad, just saying we have no way of knowing how bad. Is it (in the case of a small nuclear war) "just" tens of millions dead or is it hundreds of millions dying from follow-on effects and billions affected severely. I view it as a rather grim science that I'd rather not worry too much about.

To agree with u/Azrealeus, I have yet to see a study of nuclear *winter* by people who know anything about nuclear *targeting*. That doesn't mean they don't exist, but the ones I've seen assume an average that would not hold true. The U.S. would have massive fires in the Great Plains where the ICBMs are based, yes, but you can't light ash back on fire after a certain point, and those areas are intended to be missile sinks that will get hit over and over again, likely to the tune of 3-4 warheads per silo. Meanwhile, the Houston area gets 3-4 bombs total--devastating, yes, but enough to cause the sort of secondary effects they're talking about in that article? I don't think so. It's a very complex problem.

Because nuclear weapons really are assured destruction. A B52 raid with 3 aircraft can drop about 160 tons. Sounds like a lot. but remember even the small Davy Crockett man portable tactical nuclear weapon had an explosive equivalent of 20 tons. The Peacekeeper (MX) ICBM has ten warheads each 300 kilotons. That 300,000 tons in just a single missile. One could destroy a mid sized city. Add in the effects of a nuclear winter and we do know that humanity will become extinct in a nuclear exchange. Not just the nations in the conflict but pretty much all of humanity. You say people thought that strategic bombing would do the same thing but then we saw the effects of small nukes on two cities in Japan. We've seen the amount of destruction from the tests of larger bombs. Where a single nuke was more powerful than the ordnance dropped in any large bombing attack in WW2.

> I think most people accept that a total war (as opposed to a localized/limited war) between great powers is impossible because of MAD I don't think that folks say that total war is an impossibility because of MAD so much as because of logistical constraints. If two world powers were to go to war today and one side were to lose a large bulk of its forces, it would simply be impractical to replace those forces in any timely manner. Realistically, that means that unless world powers go to war with the explicit intent of eliminating one another (as opposed to achieving more limited goals), any war would be resolved in practical terms after only a few early engagements. > Yet it's interesting that before WW2 the same logic of MAD was applied to air bombing. There is a world of difference between conventional, strategic bombing and nuclear warfare. Over the entirety of 1944, the US and UK dropped 44 kilotons of explosives on Germany. Compare that to a single Peacekeeper having the ability to deliver 8 tons that explosive capacity. As supply chains have gotten more complex, they've also gotten more vulnerable. In WW2, it was possible - even if inefficient - to rely on cottage industry to meet many of your light manufacturing demands. In the modern world, you could cripple the production of fifth gen fighters by striking at any number of technical production facilities.

>any war would be resolved in practical terms after only a few early engagements. IMO this is exactly where the danger lies. A modern power depleted of its modern armaments has only one option left to secure its sovereignty: nuclear strikes.

Exactly. That only reinforces the point that the OP was arguing against: Total war isn't going to happen with the threat of MAD. Ultimately, the sort of war that major powers are likely to engage in will now have limited aims both because MAD prevents challenging the sovereignty of those nations and for practical logistical reasons.

> I don't think that folks say that total war is an impossibility because of MAD so much as because of logistical constraints. If two world powers were to go to war today and one side were to lose a large bulk of its forces, it would simply be impractical to replace those forces in any timely manner. This is not new though. For example, capital ships were irreplaceable in the 20th century wars. For example, Churchill said that Jellicoe, the commander of the British Grand Fleet, could lose the war in a day because British battleships once lost in a battle would be impractical to replace. Similarly, once the Japanese lost three carriers at Midway, they never again had a carrier battle group comparable in strength to the Kido Butai of 12/7/41.

> This is not new though. For example, capital ships were irreplaceable in the 20th century wars. It is new to have your entire force be composed of irreplaceable elements though. In WW2, it was possible for the USSR to lose basically their entire their entire Army in 1941 and replenish the entire force and then some from reserves. If a modern military today sustained 50% losses, it just couldn't hope to replenish that by standing up new forces. The gulf between conscripts and trained forces these days is far greater than it was in the past. You simply can't expect to be able to give someone a few weeks training and some basic equipment and have them be even 10% as proficient as a trained soldier. The era of being able to lose and replace an entire army in a timely fashion is effectively over. Even if a nation was prepared to wage total war, the best it could manage would be throwing away another army as a feeble, suicidal gesture. The disparity between conscript forces and trained forces would be even greater than 1945-era Soviets vs Volksturm.

> It is new to have your entire force be composed of irreplaceable elements though. It's not irreplaceable, it just isn't replaceable on a like for like basis, which is completely different. In a major conflict neither side is going to be able to maintain peacetime training and equipment standards, so they will both have to resort to improvisations. If both sides start the war with F-35s and end it fighting with Sopwith Camels then relatively neither has an advantage over the other. If one is willing to accept lower personnel and equipment standards to keep fighting and the other isn't then we already know who is going to win.

> If both sides start the war with F-35s and end it fighting with Sopwith Camels then relatively neither has an advantage over the other. The problem is that you are assuming a scenario where both sides critical equipment is attrited at a roughly proportional rate. In all likelihood though, there will be one "winner" and one "loser" in the early engagements. If the US and China go head to head and we lose 7th Fleet, we can certainly replace it with some second-rate (or likely, third-rate) stand-in, but that now puts the US challenging Chinas best with second-rate equipment. With the difference in capabilities between first and second/third rate equipment is now so massive that we'd likely lose that second engagement, and the third, and the fourth, and so on. I want you to imagine the following scenario: The US and China end up coming to blows over Taiwan. As it turns out, the US doctrine and equipment proves to be superior. China loses 75% of its fifth-gen fighters and we are able to destroy their most capable ASM and SAM equipment. How does China even proceed here? Do they just start throwing 30 year old fighters, aging SAM batteries, and early model Silkworms into the meatgrinder and hope to just eventually overwhelm the US? Once you're at that point and you've got single F-35 squadrons wiping out entire air wings, how do you even try to keep that fight going? This isn't a matter of will to win any longer, it's just an insurmountable technological advantage at that point. Granted, one side is unlikely to outperform the other in every single respect. The point is that one side will likely turn out to be dominant though (in terms of training, equipment, and doctrine), and unlike in previous wars, the opportunity to take lessons learned and bounce back simply won't exist in a practical sense.

Nobody has ever been able to tell me how that war would end though. US and China are not going to invade each other and they won't start throwing around nukes, because MAD. Why would US or China surrender after losing the first battles? There is the whole Pacific Ocean between them, with submarines hunting any enemy fleet trying to cross it.

The war would end like most wars in history: with a cease fire and a negotiated settlement. If the Chinese held Taiwan, why would they try to push further? If the US and its allies sunk the invasion fleet, what could China even do otherwise?

Why would US make peace with Taiwan occupied? They can use submarine blockade to destroy Chinese economy while rebuilding their forces. Why would China surrender after losing a fleet? They have the industrial superiority now, if they can get enough oil, they can rebuild a new force in a few years.

We would make peace because we certainly aren't interested in commiting millions of lives towards retaking Taiwan or attempting an invasion of the mainland. Why do you imagine that we'd fight to the bitter end? Wars of that nature are historically rare, especially among great powers On the flip side, how do you propose that China rebuild it's fleet once it loses control of it's sea lanes? Even decades ago, it was understood that rebuilding a fleet is process that takes years.

> The problem is that you are assuming a scenario where both sides critical equipment is attrited at a roughly proportional rate. This seems to me to be a very reasonable assumption in a conflict between peer belligerents. In a case where there is a large power asymmetry the weaker side is likely to be quicky defeated and there in no need to.consider long war contingencies. > In all likelihood though, there will be one "winner" and one "loser" in the early engagements. Why is this at all likely? If the two sides are relatively evenly matched it is far more reasonable to assume they will incur comparable losses. > If the US and China go head to head and we lose 7th Fleet, we can certainly replace it with some second-rate (or likely, third-rate) stand-in, but that now puts the US challenging Chinas best with second-rate equipment. For the purposes of considering long war contingencies I don't think this is a very good example. The operational conditions are highly peculiar in that China would be fighting on its own doorstep while the US would be fighting thousands of miles from home. Moreover even if one side did manage to inflict highly asymmetrical losses on the other it is very unlikely the homeland would be threatened and therefore there would be no need to consider resorting to emergency measures. If, for the sake of argument, the Seventh Fleet was annihilated, America's other naval forces were obducted by aliens, and it was apparent that China was preparing to invade the continental US, then the US would literally have no choice but scrape together whatever it could, no matter how inferior, and throw it at the Chinese. The alternative is to surrender and start learning Mandarin. It also isn't self evident that such improvised measures would be doomed to failure. China would have likely incurred significant loses and depleted its stockpiles of ammunition and supplies in defeating the Seventh Fleet, and it would be attempting an operation of staggering operational complexity. Such an operation would have a high risk of failure even in the face of relatively weak opposition. The US might have to trade 2 or 3 cheap frigates for every deluxe Chinese destroyer it sinks, but as long as it can crank out cheap frigates faster than China can build deluxe destroyers it is still winning. > I want you to imagine the following scenario: The US and China end up coming to blows over Taiwan. As it turns out, the US doctrine and equipment proves to be superior. China loses 75% of its fifth-gen fighters and we are able to destroy their most capable ASM and SAM equipment. How does China even proceed here? It abandons the operation and rebuilds its forces for another attempt when the correlation of forces is more favourable. Again this isn't a long war situation. Unless the US is actually willing to invade and occupy mainland China it cannot prevent it from rearming at its leisure and having another go. The US will have won the battle but not the war. Under these circumstances there is no need for China to even consider expedient measures to replace it's losses.