Sources for the State of Nuclear Arms for the US and Soviet Union (Cold War)

B-29_Bomber

B-29_Bomber

Banned
I'm in the middle of planning a paper that asks two questions: If WWIII had started conventionally (1945-91) was nuclear escalation inevitable? And, If nuclear war DID happen what would be the effects of such a conflict? And I would cover these questions for each decade during the cold war.

What I want as sources (preferably scholarly) is the nature of each side's nuclear launch vehicles (both bombers and missiles), what their plans were for all their nukes upon the advent of WWIII (both conventional and nuclear).

I'm also going to compare nuclear weapons to that of chemical weapons during the interwar period and WWII so some sources on that would be very helpful.

Also, online sources would be preferable. Thank you for your assistance.
 
marathag

marathag

Banned
By the late '60s, a War in Europe would have gone to full exchange quickly, as Warsaw Pact plans had TacNukes, Chem and Bio from Day One, and US was any NBC use would be replied with our 'special' weapons. As IRBMs fly, ICBMs follow as the USSR had Perimeter/Dead Hand active.

'Dead Hand' you ask? It's like that bit at the end of _Dr. Strangelove_
Soviets were deathly afraid of a decapitation strike, and their early alert network wasn't as good as the US BMEWS
 

Apollo 20

For the Cuban Missile Crisis, there is such a paper. Google Cuban Missile Crisis Order of Battle to find it. The website fas.org should also be helpful.

Note, though, that by the mid-1970s, these questions became somewhat academic as the stockpiles reached levels on both sides such that the outcome of any large-scale nuclear conflict would have been completely devastating to both sides since there were enough weapons to destroy anything in the US, the USSR and Europe that could even arguably be called a target.
 

Dunning Kruger

A lot of the later stuff is still classified so you have to look at sources from the time, contrast with what we know now, and kind of extrapolate the reality of the situation. That said, here are some sources I have looked at for my TL that might be useful to your project - most are either online or available at local libraries. I would aggressively review the bibliographies to find additional and better sources as you see fit.
  • The Cold War International History Project is an interesting website with a lot of good working papers and the like
  • Rand has a lot of papers that discuss these topics on their website. Its worth perusing their website for old documents - one of them actually does a hypothetical conventional war circa 1987.
  • Brown, Anthony "Operation: World War III" is a fairly exhaustive discussion of Operation Dropshot which was a war plan in the late 50s.
  • Collins "US/Soviet Military Balance" was a pretty good source data, updated every 5 years, although the Soviet numbers were inflated IRRC
  • The CBO has a number of papers looking at relative force balances at various points in time during the Cold War
  • 7 days to the Rhine discusses Soviet war plans in the 60s. You can find it on a web search as well as a couple of additional war plans.
  • IIRC, David Millers "The Cold War: A Military History" is pretty good.
  • Strategic Geography: NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the Superpowers by Hugh Faringdon is pretty good although it might be too tangential for you. It has a lot of content on the various fronts and how geography would affect it (north German Plain versus, Fulda Gap, Thrace versus Eastern Turkey, Norway, etc.
I dont know what year in school you are in and how much time you are devoting to this. But you might want to narrow the focus a bit. You could easily write a 1,000 page paper on the topic, as you portray it, and still find yourself being superficial on many key areas. You could easily get 100 pages for a scenario in 1950, another 100 for 1962, another 100 for 1973, and another 100 for 1983. And that's just asking the question as to whether it goes nuclear and providing the relative force levels. I also think you will struggle with the after effects of a nuclear war. It gets really speculative very quickly and is really, really conditional on how the war began and was conducted before going nuclear. Depending on how you handle the first half, with the right sources, you could probably construct a short to medium length paper that addresses the issues reasonably well. Just my 2 cents - good luck with however you proceed.
 
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