https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b8LLcdBaQc

I now rather wonder if it was as “real” as many of us thought it was. What damn sense does it make to “take over the world”, when the next step is “Run it, dumbass…”?

Well…yes. That was the plan the Soviets had. Take over the world (which was inevitable in the original Marxist formulation, once the correct conditions had been achieved) and run it “by and for the workers”. Lenin in particular was completely oblivious to the difficulties involved in administration though to be fair Marx/Engels didn’t really cover it either.

The problem is the Communists were and are a millenarian cult, especially in the original “World Revolution” variant. Once the Communists had a country this scared the crap out of the western capitalist nations and leadership. This was actually *tempered* by Stalin, who’s major theoretical innovation was “Socialism in One Country” which permitted them to not immediately go out and attempt to overthrow other territories (and possibly lose) when the World Revolution approach failed. But they all believed that it had to grow eventually or be killed by the capitalists.

Many of the Soviets, particularly in the upper echelons, really did believe in the Marxist/Leninist project right up to the end. They understood there were problems but not the essential intellectual bankruptcy of the ideology. At the top they didn’t see the details very well…and for them the system often appeared to be working. They had the dacha and the comfortable clothes, surely the workers could see their stressful and responsible positions made it necessary to have a few luxuries, etc. If that wasn’t enough, the secret police and its network of informers make it more likely that they wouldn’t examine the situation too closely or talk about it.

It reminds me a bit of the theory of the hydraulic empires, rotting from the inside but still standing until external factors push them over.

No matter how nuts it gets, I don’t think that we’re going to hit that degree of opposition again for quite awhile–And, to some degree, I now rather wonder if it was as “real” as many of us thought it was. What damn sense does it make to “take over the world”, when the next step is “Run it, dumbass…”? Sure, there were totalitarians like Stalin that it appealed to, but the thing was, once he was dead, the mass of the Soviet Communist Party was more concerned with getting a car and a dacha out in the country to drive to than they were with lording it over the peasants of South America. The truth is, you can only extract so much pleasure out of being “The Man”, and then it’s just a huge pain in the ass, and more trouble than it’s worth. I met an East German who’d come to the US after the wall came down, and you should have heard him bitch about trying to keep things running in various African assignments. After a tour with the guys who were opposing the South Africans in Namibia, his attitudes towards Africans and Communists were not too far removed from what you might expect out of your typical KKK member. As he put it, it took them two years, but his illusions about the “brotherhood of man/the working class” were totally shattered. He had nothing good to say about the experience, and if you’d have asked him, he’d have given the whole place over to the Boers and helped them load the helicopters to do what the Argentines did to their “urban guerrillas”.

ALCMs and such are replacements for flying manned bombers all the way to the targets, not for replacing ICBMs. Cruise missiles, like bombers, take a relatively long time to reach the target and are not too hard to shoot down. What they are “best” for is peeling away the outer layers of air defense.

What Dr. Pournelle was discussing was the possibility of moving the ICBM part of the deterrent into mobile launch platforms so as to make them hard to locate and destroy. Lots of plans have been discussed over the years, either moving them around like a shell game (air-mobile) or actually making it possible to launch in the air (air-launched). This would be different than cruise missiles in that they would fly ballistic paths like ICBMs and SLBMs, making them much harder to intercept and capable of carrying larger warheads.

THAT is what would have cost 150 Billion USD back in the 60s, when that was real money. For air-mobile you would have to design and build suitable transport aircraft in sufficient numbers to keep a large fraction of the deterrent shuffling around at all times and be able to launch when landed. You’d probably want to give it rough field capability (they couldn’t nuke every flat field in North America), which jacks the cost up more. If you want to air launch, add more zeros to the bill. The transports would have to be able to launch an ICBM/SLBM equivalent in the air, with a reasonable chance of the crew and aircraft surviving. SAC crews were willing to fly suicide missions, but it works better if you have clearly tried to make it survivable. And if you go that way you have just committed yourself to flying lots of aircraft all the time carrying missiles and the various issues that can cause (check the history of SAC airborne alerts accidents and they were flying a small fraction of the missions these schemes would). And then there are the targeting issues.

Had the Cold War gone in a different direction it might have been worth it. Fortunately we didn’t have to go that far.

Pack basing = shielded by enemy fratricide?

It was indeed a terrible system, but it was more like 3 years from first acceptance to decommissioning. The 702nd Wing was indeed only fully operational for a month but was at partial strength and capable of launching before then (not that they would have hit anything).

“2. B-52 in the modern mode a stand-off attack system.”

Yup. The ALCM and related missiles would be part of a stand-off system but incomplete for air-basing. The other part though would be reviving Chrome Dome and the other continuous aerial patrol plans, and in those it would be expensive to have a significant part of the nuclear deterrent in the air at all times.

“3. Sneak attack “out of the blue” without any warning never was seen as a real world concept. You would have five days or so too disperse your assets as best you can. Curtis Le May said so.”

And LeMay was an authority of the inner thoughts of the Soviet leadership? Defence planners generally work on the possible, not just the probable. A sneak attack was seen as possible, especially given our lack of knowledge of the actual state of Soviet nuclear systems then.

As a more general principle you have to consider extreme scenarios in planning as they often push on your assumptions and reveal weaknesses that can be exploited elsewhere.

“4. One secret it is reputed that Pollard gave away was the patrol positions of American Ohio class SLBM submarines. Knowing those positions would greatly facilitate an attack by Soviet subs and destroy “one leg” of the triad.”

To which the answer was to improve the targeting systems so you can accurately hit a target with low CEP with a boomer anywhere in the correct hemisphere. You then give the boomer captains much more room to wander in and quiet attack subs to keep an ear on them. This is less of an issue now, but then the SLBMs were generally targetted on the softer targets like cities where being only close was just as “good” (countervalue). This was justification for the land based missiles which were sufficiently accurate to be used in a counterforce role. And if they weren’t accurate, you made them bigger, whjch was harder to do with SLBM warheads.

2. B-52 in the modern mode a stand-off attack system.

3. Sneak attack “out of the blue” without any warning never was seen as a real world concept. You would have five days or so too disperse your assets as best you can. Curtis Le May said so.

4. One secret it is reputed that Pollard gave away was the patrol positions of American Ohio class SLBM submarines. Knowing those positions would greatly facilitate an attack by Soviet subs and destroy “one leg” of the triad.