archibald
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The PRC was standing on the edge of an abyss. And Mao said "let's make a Great Leap Forward"
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Post by archibald on Sept 20, 2020 5:38:51 GMT
This very one, yes. Common, Soviet ASM were massively overkill, too !
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lordroel
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Post by lordroel on Sept 20, 2020 9:09:11 GMT
This very one, yes. Common, Soviet ASM were massively overkill, too ! But most of them where not nuclear armed, just launched in massive follows to overwhelm the enemy ship i assume. |
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Post by simon darkshade on Sept 20, 2020 11:56:33 GMT
Quite a few were nuclear armed as part of the first salvo strategy.
The reason why no other state went down the Soviet path is that they did not need to. The West were the side with the large number of surface vessels after WW2 and an overwhelming carrier fleet. There wasn't a Soviet surface fleet that needed to be fought and defeated worth its name until the mid 1970s. Even then, the preferred Western anti-ship weapons were SSNs and carrier aircraft, particularly nuclear armed ones. The RN solution to the Sverdlov challenge of the 1950s were nuclear armed Buccaneer, after all.
Consider the geography of the NATO powers compared to the Soviet Union. They had far more access to the oceans and possessed copious warm water ports. There wasn't a need for sea denial, but sea control.
In the 1980s, we do see USAF squadrons of B-52Gs armed with Harpoons in both major oceans, but that is still considerably different from the Soviets
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