Thread: World War Three

Originally Posted by dalem

They did. He killed them.

Only slightly toungue-in-cheek, here is my answer to a similar question posed on another message forum:

"Stalin killed early and killed often. Then he killed some more. In between killings he'd usually break things up with a light killing, or perhaps an insurance killing, just in case. When he wasn't killing people, he'd generally be reflecting on his last killing, or planning his next. And then, aside from all that, there were the killings that he encouraged others he put in positions of power to do. Then later on he'd kill them too."

Stalin was the comet fragment that caused the extinction of everything Russia could have been.

-dale

But why couldn't they kill him? That's what I want to know. How did Stalin survive and beat them?

Originally Posted by Blademaster

But why couldn't they kill him? That's what I want to know. How did Stalin survive and beat them?

Ahh, I see. Well, some of it was luck, early on. But Stalin, even as a young man, was so ruthless that he inspired tremendous fear in anyone thinking about going against him. Tremendous fear. And he also found ruthless people to be his right hand man for awhile before he killed them too.

A very good book about Stalin is
Radzinsky's "Stalin"

It falls into the category of "extremely readable and entertaining", but as one of the reviews notes, must be read with a grain of salt. It is very dramatic and sensationalistic, but it is one of the books that can give you an idea of the kind of man and monster Stalin was.

I should add that this is the wrong book to read for Soviet history but it is the right book to read about the personality and history of the man who directed much of it.

-dale

Originally Posted by antelope

9 pages to the thread and only two answers to a good speculative question.

The next world war if it comes will be nuclear. Conventional wars are warm up exercises when two nuclear powers are involved against each other. When a nuclear armed country goes to war against a non-nuclear armed country the war stays conventional because the deaths of their own soldiers isn't as important as the bad PR the leaders who don't actually fight would get if they used their nuclear weapons.

If it isn't worth a nuclear bomb, it isn't worth your life.

I still don't see how this wasn;t covered to your satisfaction.

-dale

Originally Posted by Blademaster

But why couldn't they kill him? That's what I want to know. How did Stalin survive and beat them?

Stalin was also the head of the secret police, meaning that he often learns of the acts against him before his enemies could put it together.

Originally Posted by dalem

Any incoming president has to weigh the cost/benefit of altering national defense policies like that. There is inertia and momentum behind these policies - some good, and some bad. If you start making those kinds of changes then you telegraph uncertainty to the enemy, and that is NEVER a good thing.

I don't know how old you are lwarmonger, but none of this was merely theoretical: The Sovs STATED they were going to expand their sphere of influence, by force if necessary. They had already demonstrated their willingness to keep where they had ended WWII and take more of what they wanted (see any history of the Cold War for details) and there was every reason to believe they meant more of it. Once we decided that keeping Western Europe free was worth doing, we said we would do that. When the conventional balance looked like it had swung the Sov's way, we said we'd nuke their forces if they came over to play.

They said they were coming, we said we'd stop them, and eventually we said we'd use nukes. We HAD to be serious about that, and because we were, the Sovs took us seriously. So a whole lot of prestige and everything else was locked into us standing firm. For a President to come onstage and say "we will not nuke your tanks" would have been like waving red meat in front of a starving dog.

-dale

That was our policy before it became clear that the Soviet Union had matched our nuclear capability. Then it became our policy to build up conventional forces to be able to defeat the Warsaw Pact by non-nuclear means, because using nuclear weapons had become suicidal. Hence the arms build up in the late 70's and 80's.

Originally Posted by dalem

I don't know how old you are lwarmonger,

I'm 20.

Originally Posted by lwarmonger

I'm 20.

I've got a car older than you.

If a world war to happen again, I don't think it is guaranteed to go nuclear. A lot can still be done by conventional forces, and as long as no nuclear capable nations are in danger of being conquered, there is no reason to commit national suicide over a conventional defeat. If a nation is soundly defeated conventionally, then the victor can force them to the negotiating table in order to gain concessions in the secondary theaters of war. This can be done without conquering the homeland of a nuclear capable state.