As my father pointed out, the concerns were really academic; if the Soviets did invade Western Europe, US war plans in the 1950s and 1960s involved so liberal a use of tactical and operational nuclear weapons that you wouldn't be safe anywhere between Bonn and Berlin. Victory measured out in teaspoons and kilotons.
[1] As opposed to his heavy mortar platoons, one of whom managed to nearly drop a round on the command tent during an exercise after a private failed to understand the operation of a compass. At least, that was his excuse....
Addendum: I should point out that pretty much every warplan the US came up with in the 1950s was a variation on "use nucs to slow down the Soviets until the Turkish military can mobilize." It wasn't until the professionalization of Western European forces, public hostility towards turning Europe into a smoking crater, and the use of game theory to describe how mobilization could become nuclear escalation that nuclear weapons as a standard battlefield play went away.
However, the Soviets never took the operational and tactical use of nuclear weapons out of their play book; Soviet blitz doctrine in the late 1980s still envisioned using widespread nuclear attacks to soften up NATO forces or deny ground in the face of NATO attacks.
F if i know how Norway manages to spend that much on military, when there is a constant complaint about it being underfunded.
Btw, i think you need to roll the next 7-8 into one before matching the US troop numbers. Nuts.
Well, nowadays Russia considers "limited nuclear strikes" a form of de-escalation: http://thebulletin.org/why-russia-calls-limited-nuclear-stri...
-Kurt Vonnegut
Even Khrushchev, who had a lot of blood on his hands, couldn't sleep for days after he had been briefed on what a nuclear war would actually mean - he only calmed down once he realised that the things would never be used by either side.
When in some era (I think, it was in Reagan's era, maybe a little later), the Generals where thinking, that a third world war could be limited to some territory (meaning: Middle Europe/Germany) and thus would not be the end of the world -- it was a void feeling for many people, that knew, what that could mean for Germany -- to be the designated place of nuclear destruction for the bigger nations.
In deed, it was a surreal time for the whole world it was. That is also one reason, that many in the 90s believed now humanity would rest in peace ....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GJttnC8PoA
It goes through the details of what would happen if a 1MT bomb exploded the center London - which is, of course, completely catastrophic. Then it calmly mentions that London would have probably been hit by at least 30 bombs...
Wiki: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game Clip here (first airburst over Kent): http://youtu.be/WcmZ1vhoqkY
Well .. _I_ never thought that.
MAD is great theory, but it's got some some really bad failure modes.
People actually paid significant parts of their yearly salary to build, stock and maintain nuclear bomb shelters in their backyards...in places like Ohio.
Something like this [1] was just seen as mildly eccentric, not something that would get you institutionalized with severe paranoia.
1 - http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-1970s-undergro...
People, large numbers of them, actually believed (and it may have been true) that extinction-level global war was an accidental launch away.
What's even more interesting is the long-term vestiges of these ideas have hung around, but without nuclear war being on the horizon they've morphed and latched onto other scenarios: a Republican-Democrat civil war, the Rapture, Zombie invasion, Disease outbreak, etc. These aren't just old shelters, these are brand new.
http://alpinesurvival.com/survival-shelters-for-sale.html
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/archi...
Though, I'm always struck with how everybody wants to outfit their end-of-the-world bunkers with modern living room entertainment centers complete with cable TV, wi-fi and comfortable home-office.
In any other scenario, somebody who spends millions of dollars to build 7,500 sq ft of underground EMP shielded comfortable living area with hidden and barricaded entrance, independent filtered air and water and multiple years of emergency food [2] would be dragged into emergency psychiatric care.
But instead these scenarios are talked about openly on major news networks, reviewed in popular magazines, and I can buy these supplies commercial and off-the-shelf -- there's industries that exist to do nothing but feed this demand!
2 - http://www.costco.com/32,000-Total-Servings-4-Person-1-Year-...
For a while I stood sentry at a post that, I always felt, was a candidate for attack. At least, we had a bomb shelter and drilled on relocating, and living in that thing.
At 03:00 on cold mornings I wondered if, looking up, I'd see the re-entry glow on a warhead.
Memories of that existential state make a really good wellspring for writers of horror fiction.
Considering the Cuba Missile Crisis, perhaps that wasn't an entirely unreasonable expectation...
Reminds me of a fascinating (and rather depressing) alternative history of the missile crisis I read a while ago. I couldn't stop reading: http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=...
'it' being what? Preparing for fallout is not crazy. Joining a cult is crazy.
See "Doomsday Preppers"[1][2]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Preppers
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=doomsday+preppe...
Duck and cover wasn't bizarre, in context: it's a way to survive a nuclear explosion that isn't in one's lap.
Public shelter drills, also: if one expects one's country to be bombed, then knowing where one's nearest shelter is makes sense.
Emergency food supplies are also useful for things like earthquakes and other natural disasters where you might have to stay put for awhile but you won't be able to make it to the grocery store either. You might need a week of food instead of a year, but if you don't have one and your neighbor does you'd probably be grateful if he shares.
Alternatively, you could just eat it and reduce your food expenses to less than $84 a month.
https://www.lds.org/topics/food-storage?lang=eng
(Devout Mormons are supposed to maintain a stockpile of food. I suspect Costco get much of their custom for this preparedness pack from members of the LDS ...)
Why would people who compulsively believe the world is about to end then spend all their money on emergency shelters, food and guns not?
Why would chickens be sufficient? In winter the temperature a small distance underground is reliably stable, and warmer than temperature above ground. They likely would have been able to get a good idea of what the operating temperature would be and what they would need to offset it. Luckily, the heat output of a chicken is also reliably measured/estimated.
On the other hand, the whole notion of creating a nuclear mine is completely bad. No way to justify that.
Sure there is. Like this ..
We need to be able to destroy a lot of Russian tanks, and logistic tail.
We'd like to be able to do this when they are beyond artillery range.
Rockets are unreliable. Airplanes can be shot down.
Thus, nuclear land mine.
Reminds me of an old RPG called Paranoia, which featured nuclear hand grenade bombs. I never realised that weapons similar to that joke actually existed!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
When they tested them, the bats incinerated an Air Force base.
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Da...
Some parts are true. The rest are too close to being true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Muni...
His point is to illustrate the depths of depravity to which cold-war weapons designers were allowed to dive. What is yours?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...
Look, just read this wikipedia entry about the British Blue Peacock nuclear device, and boggle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock
Yes. It's a chicken-heated atomic landmine. Not a joke: it was a Real Thing.
And so was this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_%28nuclear_device...
The M-29 Davy Crockett tactical nuclear recoilless rifle. (Jeep-mounted, no PALs, the rocket's flight range was less than its lethal radius of effect: the crew were supposed to fire it over a hill then dive under their jeep for cover.)
People not only imagined these things, they built them and deployed them in the stone-cold expectation of using them in anger.