Post by vegalyra on Apr 6, 2019 16:15:19 GMT
Some great thoughts here. This period of time has fascinated me for a long time. I appreciate the book recommendation too, Sulla, I'll have to check that out. I had a non-fiction work when I was younger about comparative NATO and Warsaw Pact air force strengths at the time (mid '80s). I believe it had some hypothetical scenarios of a NATO first strike and a Warsaw Pact first strike (all conventional of course), and it included land forces. I believe it hypothesized that the NATO numerical inferiority in tanks in particular, would be offset by our A-10 and Harrier tank killers. The Harriers would have been deployed in areas away from military airbases due to the VSTOL capability so we'd still have those in the event of air bases being targeted. It was pretty interesting reading for a young teenager. I threw in China in my initial question because of some of the issues that had happened between them and India in the 1970s as well as the Korean DMZ and it's alliance with Pakistan and Albania in Europe in particular. If the Chinese threw in with the USA due to their coolness with the Soviets at the time, Afghanistan might have been an even larger battleground with a massive Chinese push against the USSR. If they had gone in with the Russians instead, I wonder if the USA could have fought a two ocean war like it did during WW2. I think the Chinese probably would have played it safe and stayed out of it altogether though. I imagine it would have worried the Japanese, S. Koreans, and much of SE Asia (the Vietnamese had just repulsed a Chinese invasion in the 1970's).