19th
Out With the Old, In With the Nuclear
I’m endlessly fascinated with everything about the Cold War (favorite Cold War Wikipedia article), and have lately been reading up on some aspects of it that I never really gave much thought to.
For instance: the Soviet Nuclear Weapons Doctrine. It was originally quite a bit different from what we would traditionally think any country’s nuclear doctrine would be (“don’t use nukes unless you really don’t like being alive” - which is more in line what the US doctrine was). The difference was this: The Russians didn’t see a war with nuclear weapons as a last ditch effort to be avoided at all costs because it would clearly be the end of the world. They saw nukes as tactical artillery for a long time - meaning that they could launch some nukes to force a break in the defense line of their enemy and rush through that fortified line and destroy shit from the inside. That’s what they had done in WWII (although obviously without nuclear weapons) and that’s what they assumed would be the continued strategy of war.
