I was wondering what reasonable realistic tech advancements it would take in order for a long nuclear war between major power to be possible. That is to say, longer than 6 years in length of regular fighting. I don't mean a nuclear sub nuking a city for the dozenth time 7 years after WWIII. I mean a real war where economies are shifted to military production, tech advancements are made, ect... Of course, you need cities for that, so, I would assume you would need very, very, very impressive AA capability, rendering not only nukes, but the entire combat part of the airforce useless as well. What else?
A Missile shield that more or less makes Missiles useless? The only way you can Nuke somewhere would be literately manually.
You need very advanced and comprehensive ABM, most likely using space-based lasers. Underneath that, you need sufficiently ferocious and long-ranged (and long-extending) SAM & fighter coverage to prevent cruise missiles from bombers. You will also want some way of preventing space nuke detonations, since that stuff is pretty easy and very damaging to both your space-based interception ability and your infrastructure below. In naval terms, you need sufficiently advanced & aggressive ASW and attack subs that no one can get close enough to fire under your ABM coverage with cruise or lob shots. The tech level required for all this is far in advance of current technology and the economic commitment of societies would be enormous. Any systemic or degradable weakness will just be hammered until it's wide open and then your country is toast because of how nukes work.
Potentially a really well developed civil defense system would make it remotely possible with less then magitech AA
I think, it's better to go the opposite way: Еarly nuclear age without opportunity of countervalue аttacs or reliable long-range delivery, and slow production of nuclear weapons, resulting mostly in WW2 style massive operations involving use of small nuclear weapons. Another option would be something like WW3 with nuclear exchange in the beginning, but without total destruction due to insufficient amount of WMD delivery vehicles, with participants retaining somewhat cohesive government and military structure,with tattered remains of armies fighting until total mobilisation kicks in. Something along these lines, albeit rather unrealistically, was depicted in Cuban Missile Crisis: Aftermath, a Blitzkrieg game mod.
A WWIII where it doesn't go nuclear and the Soviets don't immediately overrun West Germany will inevitably turn into a war of industrial attrition between NATO and WP.
Any space-based installations won't last long into a war. The enemy would be capable of easily shooting them down even without the tech boost you are talking about here. Satellites will be helpless like sitting ducks. Also, I think the OP didn't specify a 100% effective anti-nuke shield, only that successful nuclear attacks will be difficult and rare enough to make the war last. Under that viewpoint, a lot of the necessary stuff wouldn't be that far into future-tech terrirory.
Early nuclear age without any ICBMs or SLBMs and very slow nuclear warhead production. Kinda like WW2 in the 50s. Lot's of conventional bomber attacks, massive fighter cover and AA installations. And once in a while a nuclear bomber gets through the defense screens.
Frankly I find it impossible to believe that could happen. If either side had nukes, every large scale air attack could be a nuclear attack that could completely cripple your ability to retaliate. Eventually one side will realize the tremendous risk of not using nukes, and the advantages it could get by launching a sucker punch attack with them. An attrition based industrial war with conventional war is impossible when you have the bomb.
This is mostly doable with modern tech* but requires extensive investment in the following: (In a very incomplete stream of thought way) On the home front: Widespread Hardening and dispersal of both civilian and military infrastructure alike to high degrees. Expansion of industrial infrastructure to cope with the inevitable material losses taken both domestically and militarily. Universal Civil Defense program with sufficient resources in place to facilitate rapid recovery of what assets are hit regardless of damage taken. Widespread education program on the realistic effects of a nuclear war and the skills require to weather such a disaster. Move to a more authoritarian government style to better handle coordination and control in disaster situations without worries about popularity or 'democratic process'. Extensive AA and AM network with overlapping protection and high redundancy to vastly reduce the number of incoming attacks that actually manage to hit Extensive propaganda campaign to make the populace be willing and able to accept any hardships that result without revolting. Encouragement of large families to deal with inevitable casualties both at home and in combat. On the combat front Extensive AA and AM network able to intercept a high percentage of enemy attacks and keep friendlies under its umbrella. Hardening and dispersal of military logistics and combat formations to a high degree. Development of new tactics to deal with sustainable military operations on a nuclear battlefield. The downside is of course that many of these actions can be seen as provocative to any potential enemies and while your busy pouring resources into them your enemy might be instead pouring theirs into the economy..and in the end potentially outpacing you that way instead. If this sounds familiar there is a reason for it...partially. *Safeguard was an example of a fairly effective ABM system...but who's effectiveness degraded quite rapidly due to the after effects of their interceptors detonating playing merry hell with the targeting radar and thus making subsequent interceptions even harder. The key in this example would be to have an ABM network with a high interception rate and one that did not also cause its own effectiveness to degrade over time. Something that may be possible eventually but not with current technology.
And only an idiot would try and do a sucker punch nuke attack, because the enemy, no matter what you did, could easily retaliate in kind or worse.
You seem to be missing out on something. You're both actively launching large scale strategic air and missile attacks against eachother's industry and inferstructure in order to knock the other out of the fight. Every day you're actively penetrating the air space of your enemy to drop munitions on his cities and infer structure. The only reason that ordinance isn't nuclear is because they loaded regular bombs at the air base. One phone call from the enemy command can change all this. Suddenly that missle/bomber wave that had enough firepower to devastate a city can annihilate your entire country from it's cities, infer structure to military bases. Which includes your nuclear deterrence. Now in peace time you'd have the option of having nuclear subs at sea to at as your mobile second strike force...but since your'e fighting an open conventional war, the enemy has the option of actively hunting down the subs and destroying the. So no. Fight a conventional industrialized war against a nuclear power, and you really are setting yourself up to getting yourself blown away in a nuclear first strike. It's like two gangs trying to institutionalize mass fights to the death only using knives when they both have automatic weapons.
No, it doesn't include their nuclear deterrence. Or did you suddenly magic away all of the SSBNs and mobile missiles, not to mention that ICBMs and airfields are located rather far away from cities as a general rule? And there wouldn't be giant raids on cities anyhow. Bombers that weren't reserved for nuclear fights were tasked with going after airfields and the like and there would be no significant air power, on either side, within a month of the conflict's initiation.
By that point, one side or the other will be losing and faced with the prospect of either going nuclear or folding. Guess which one is more likely...
The problem is that the number of successful nuclear attacks required to cripple a modern country is very small. One bad miss of your defenses probably finishes you as a functional economic entity and a 5% failure rate against a suitably large & determined opponent is going to finish you as an industrial civilization.
Yes, that's what this thread is for. What techs could PREVENT a nuclear war from doing that within 6 years?
If nukes are not delivered by missile, they'll be delivered on foot, by vehicle, by boat, by unmanned subs, etc. There's no real tech solution. The only possible means of conducting a "long" (year or two, before the damage is too overwhelming and parts of the national/regional logistics chain start breaking down) nuclear war is if you have both sides self-limiting their strikes to tactical and counterforce/limited countervalue targets. The problem with that is that everyone's posture assumes that half a dozen missiles coming in over the pole are simply the vanguard of a full committment strike. That's why nobody wants to field a "conventional ICBM", as it looks a whole lot like a nuclear ICBM on a radar screen. If you stuck to tactical weapons on a remote battlefield (such as Germany and Northern Europe, for the NATO-WARPACT conflict), you might not invite a retaliatory strike on your homeland, but rather a tactical response in kind. I wouldn't want to bet on it though.
A long war with nuclear warheads is impossible. In the other news, the sun is mostly yellow, the [mostly unpolluted] sea is blue, and some people even claim that they sky is mostly blue, too. Just not in the same shade as the sea.
How about if all the cities are deep underground, and protected by literal Tesla energy-shields, such that knocking one down would require multiple direct hits by high-yield thermonukes? And there would be Mole-tanks!
You've read about the Cold War overkill arsenals, right? It would still be over in 30 minutes from birds flying. Sure, we'd have to go back to Tsar Bomba warheads and Teller would be laughing in his grave, but it's very doable.
By the middle part of the cold war, a full nuclear exchange was expected to last about 42-72 hours, with outlying second strike forces using up their nuclear munitions within the week. Even as our nuclear arsenal has been reduced in sized, it has been upgraded with more modern equipment either to improve accuracy or survivability to make up for the loss in saturation. Even if you have your magi-tech sheilds and such, the issue is that industrialized economies are heavily dependent on specialization. There's only so many people who can do a job before the market becomes oversaturated, and in those cases people tend to congregate in areas with favorable political, economic, social or geographic conditions. For example: Y2K was the best thing that could have happened to the US, because everyone was backing up their financial data in case of the cyber-apocolypse and decided that too much was invested in it to keep on going. Destroying the WTC would have completely destroyed most of the data that firms that used space in those buildings, which would have crippled the US economy and sent the world into a deep recession or depression. But because everyone backed up their data, we had a mild recession instead of a deep depression within the US. So, lets say that just one gets through. Did it hit Salt Lake City? There goes a major hub and warehousing center for interstate commerce in the Western US. Did it hit New Orland? There goes a lot of your oil refining capacity. Dallas-Fort Worth? Congratulations, you've just lost a fourth of your missile building capabilities since TI, Raytheon, and other such companies which either built components or assembled the devices are now so much instant sunshine. Not to mention the fact that the moment something as small as a 10kT device goes off in a major city, the current US Civil Defense structure would be stretched close to breaking point depending on where in the city the bomb went off. (There's a reason it's HS scenario 1.) Time it with a particularly bad wildfires, a hurricane, etc. and you've got a pretty good chance at crippling US federal response in the early stages of the war.
That's the trick. Assuming you can shoot down anything in the air, would t be possible to keep enemy soldiers from rocket range of most of your cities for 6 years?
