Permanently Deleted
I’m more curious what a “First Strike” on the Russian homeland would have looked like in 1945, given what a “First Strike” into China from North Korea did to MacArthur in 1954.
Hell, has anyone consulted on the consequences of a “First Strike” on Hawaii by Japan four years earlier? Or a “First Strike” into Poland, by Germany, a few years before that? While we’re on the subject of “smoking gun becomes mushroom cloud”, what’s up with Iraq and the surrounding Middle East states, atm? Are they all groovy?
Not to mention that Western forces were depleted at the time on the account of, y’know, fighting the Axis powers.
I mean, its the same tired “Stalin shouldn’t have stopped at Berlin” argument turned on its head. Trying to tell an entire planet that’s exhausted itself through total war for the last ten years “Please do one more war, just bigger this time!” is as insane now as it was back then.
Nobody was in a position to wage a ground war across the entirety of Europe and the Middle East for a second time. The theory that the Allies (minus Russia, China, and all their regional partners) could have put troops into the center of Moscow in time to stop a test of the RD-1 is… just crazy wish fulfillment. That’s not even assuming a post-war Europe heavily tilted towards Soviet Russia as a savior rather than a villain… So many of these pundits think Europeans see the USSR through a post-1980s lens. They’ve got no sense of history.
Not to mention the US literally did not have the capability to deploy anymore nukes at that point. The “Stalin shouldn’t have stopped at Berlin” meme is predicated on this because one of the main reasons the USSR did stop was because they had no way of knowing if the US had more nukes.
“Stalin shouldn’t have stopped at Berlin” argument turned on its head.
My dad once unironically said “we should have kept going into Russia” to me whilest watching “Patton”, because apparently Patton suggested that once. I was baffled and had no retort. He doesn’t know I’m a commie and I’m fixin to keep it that way honestly.
It’s also fed by that American-centric narrative that Allied victory in WWII was overwhelmingly due to American forces with English, French, and Russian forces as background characters. So they assume Russian troops were neither necessary for Allied victory nor an impediment to America.
