Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25626-20151023184552/@comment-21519-20151024055503

Where to begin. . ..

I guess I'm sticking with my earlier notion that the best option the Soviets have is to turn US allies. They'll lose the nuclear war, if it drags on, because their stockpile is so much smaller than ours (though it's not quite clear that anyone in NATO is aware of this; perhaps they'll try to bluff their way past the point where they can't keep up anymore). They can't win the conventional war, because if the Red Army ever gets to the point where a decisive battlefield victory seems imminent, a flight of B-29s will swoop in and kick over the game board, so to speak. So diplomacy is their best option, at least as far as I can see.

I actually wonder if that was what they had in mind from the beginning. In Stalin's comments after his first strike, he responds to Truman's comments after his own first strike in such a way that he seems to be inviting the US to say "All right, you hit our allies and we hit yours, let's call it even and get back to what we'd been doing before." To which the British, French, and West German response would be "You mean you're going to let him get away with that? Well fuck you, then!" It didn't work then, but if he goes to work on the allies directly, who knows.

Whatever else happens, there will be no NATO strongholds within Soviet territory. As the atomic stockpile dwindles, someone will surely have the presence of mind to set aside three or four warheads in reserve against such a possibility. A great truism of international security in the last seventy years is that nuclear powers are occupation-proof.

Someone moving against Stalin from within is an intriguing possibility. I find it hard to imagine we'll get a Russian version of TLO. Stalin has been so powerful for so long that anyone with even moderate government experience has spent his entire career looking over his shoulder. Such people are ill-equipped to lead a sudden regime change in the middle of an already mortally dangerous crisis. That's not to say someone won't try and fail, though I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone close to the halls of power at this time who would dare try.

If the French leadership has indeed been decapitated, de Gaulle is really the only Frenchman with the stature to try to put the pieces back together. It's possible he'll remain committed to NATO, but it strikes me as rather more likely that he'll sue for a separate peace in exchange for the Soviets recognizing French neutrality--including hanging any active Marxist insurgencies out to dry.

I've wondered about the Atlee/Churchill thing. On the one hand, the Parliamentary Labour Party had happily gone into coalition all through WWII for the sake of national unity; for the Tories to fail to reciprocate now would be an outrage. On the other, between MwIH and BA, I'm getting the distinct impression that HT holds Atlee in low regard. Not as low as Adenauer: both stories saw major characters go well out of their ways to talk about what a lame-oid he is, and only grudgingly give him credit for the courage needed to remain in a concentration camp rather than compromise his pro-democratic convictions. But the only reason we have an Atlee article at all is to document name-drops where someone talks about how he's screwed up. He was a great peacetime PM, but if he bungles the war now, or is perceived as doing so, Brits from all walks of life will soon be saying "You know, there is a much better option still available."

However: A Liberal PM delayed a general election for the duration of WWI. A Conservative PM delayed a general election for the duration of WWII. With those precedents in place, no one can say boo about a Labour PM delaying a general election for the duration of WWIII. Even were that not so, he wouldn't be due to call one for quite some time yet. And a snap election in the middle of a world war seems absurd. So if he's replaced by Churchill, it will have to be because he loses a confidence vote. Either that, or there's a coalition agreement in which Labour gives up way, way more than it could possibly be expected to.

I'm now quite convinced that there's no realistic way for the UK to complete its nuclear program on the OTL schedule, which had the first warhead ready in 1952. The country's taken way too many body hits to keep that pace. However, if HT decides there's dramatic potential in having a third nuclear combatant suddenly emerge, he just might hand-wave the problems away. It would require considerably less hand-waving than Featherston's nuclear-capable CSA did, and HT didn't let that stop him.

That's all from me for the moment.