Is a Non-Nuclear World War Possible?

[heydaralon]

Nuclear wars are fine. You just gotta make sure the person you nuke doesn't have nukes too. We got it right once. We just need to find someone else like Japan.

[Smitty-48]

Bear in mind, there's no massive Soviet Horde threatening to overrun the Free World here, even if you are in a theater war with the Russians in Europe, it's not going to be for the fate of Europe and free peoples everywhere, it's going to be over something which is important to the Russians, maybe to America's NATO allies in Eastern Europe, but not actually important at all to the American public back in the CONUS, it's not even going to be important to the Western Europeans, there's only three things to fight over, the Baltic States, Ukraine, or the South Caucasus, which one of those things are Americans prepared to put their children into the nuclear fire over?

Your going to put Pearl Harbor into the nuclear crossfire, just to keep the Georgians from being overrun by the Russians? Rly? Can you even tell the difference between a Georgian and a Russian?

[Okeefenokee]

Give it a few more generations, once the brits are gone, and we might be willing to glass some little island and add a star to the flag as a final symbolic gesture.

[Smitty-48]

Don't get me wrong, I do think there are scenarios where America nukes the world in a massive retaliation profile, but almost all of them are related to a catastrophic failure of the Russian early warning system resulting in a Russian launch on false warning and America being confronted by a massive number of inbounds over the pole out of the blue.

[ssu]

I have never been able to fully understand why Hitler didn't use chemical weapons in WW2. I imagine his personal experience was what kept him from doing so when all was lost. (I'd like to read up on that so any suggestions??) Still, the fact that he didn't is hard believe. It had to have been discussed and decided against almost unanimously by the general staff. WWII was a war of extinction, not a squabble over international sea lanes or a warm water port in the Black Sea.

Did someone already answer this from the OP to kybkh?

There's several reasons for this and not only the distaste of Hitler for the weapons.

- Germans thought that the allies had a similar chemical weapons arsenal as the Germans... which they actually hadn't.
- Without air superiority it is extremely difficult to use chemical weapons in the weapons-of-mass-destruction style.
- Using artillery fire CW shots would be basically just tactical. Wouldn't do much. Only would give the enemy the
excuse to use CW against the Germans. And think about those 1000 plane bombing raids with perhaps the last
hundred or so dropping CW into the cities (basically the way people thought the gas weapon would be used).