"Chad Irby" wrote
Fred J. McCall wrote:

I always considered that they'd paste such things with persistent
chemicals, instead. Kill all the depots that way. While we sometimes
claim that we would go nuclear in the face of a chemical attack, would
we really have done it?

I'm unconvinced we would have done so against the Soviet Union.

If the USSR was into the realm of dropping planeloads of chemicals on
depots and such, it's hard to imagine that the war wouldn't have crossed
into the "screw 'em, what have we got ready to launch?" phase.

They built tactical nukes for a *reason*, you know.

A not very well thought out reason. Unless you are willing to detail nuclear
targeting to an SF sergeant or a FAC, aside from some rear-area logistics
and transportation targets, the intended target set was either too fleeting
or too close to FLOT. The weapon release/target authorization cycle was just
too long. Then there was the memorable phrase that "West German villages
averaged 3KT apart".

What made the Red Tide recede were things like Pave Mover, the associated
strike weapons systems and US training and doctrine that resulted in US arms
able to move_lots_faster than the Sovs' system of command and control. That
last is interesting because during the sixties and seventies, much of the
literature credited the Soviet system of battle drills as delivering a very
flexible and fast responding tactical instrument to Soviet commanders. Then
it came to light that most of those "battle drills" were practiced by crowds
of Soviet soldiers running up and down hillsides chanting "tank, tank,
tank..." (OK, I made that last part up but the running part was true).

I have a book called "Measuring Military Power" (Joshua Epstein) from that
era that tried to calculate war-fighting ability, taking into account the
short lifetimes of Soviet-era equipment. What Epstein missed was that if the
aircraft and tank engines had 500 hour lives then not much training got
done, just Gun Decked. False reporting gave the Soviets (and western intel
shops) wildly optimistic views of Soviet readiness states that started to
evaporate in Afghanistan.