The Effects of Nuclear War
Chapter IV
CASE 3: A COUNTERFORCE ATTACK AGAINST THE SOVIET UNION
Recuperation
As in the United States, economic viability would not be threatened. The key question, which would begin to be answered in the shelter period, is how appropriate Soviet emergency plans are and how rapidly planning mistakes could be corrected. Major shifts, and the inefficiencies that accompany them, would be inevitable. To what extent could planning minimize them? Could a command economy do better under the circumstances than a mixed economy? The Soviet Union’s long experience with central planning would mean that the changes would involve details within the existing system rather than changing from one economic system to another.
In the U.S.S.R., as in the United States, the crop loss caused by the attack would depend on season, fallout deposition, which crops were hit by fallout, and so on. Similarly, the amount of food reserves would vary with the season. The immediate goal for agriculture would be to send adequate food supplies to cities. Presumably, the Government would try to meet this goal by tightening controls rather than by giving farmers more capitalistic incentives. For a moderate attack like this one, with little physical damage, controls would probably work.
It is questionable whether adequate labor would be available for agriculture. Depending on the situation, millions of men might be mobilized into the Army. On the other hand the Soviets have well-established procedures for getting military personnel, factory workers, and others to help with harvests; moreover, following a nuclear attack, some workers in nonessential industries would be out of work, and could be sent to farms. The large number of farmers (perhaps 35 to 40 percent of the Soviet work force is in agriculture, compared to 2 or 3 percent in the United States), the fallout contaminating some farmland, and accepting more exposure to radiation would increase the Soviet population’s exposure to radiation.
If a year’s crop were lost, would there be austerity, short rations, or starvation? How much surplus food is there? In particular, would there be enough to maintain a livestock industry, or would meat be seen as a nonessential consumer good and feed grains diverted for human use?
As in the United States, the attack would create many burdens for the Soviet economy. Military expenditures would probably increase; people injured by the attack would need care, and fewer people would be alive and well to care for them; major changes in the economy would cause inefficiencies; lowered public health standards would increase early production at the expense of later health burdens.
The Soviet Union would not face certain problems that a market economy faces. The legal and financial devices supporting production – money, credit, contracts, and ownership of productive resources — would be far less important than in the United States. Instead, Soviet production would be guided by a central plan. There are reports that contingency planning has been done for postwar recuperation; such contingency plans (or the peacetime plan if there are no applicable contingency plans) would have to be adjusted to take account of the actual availability of surviving workers and economic assets. Without doubt such adjustments would be made, though there would be some waste and inefficiency.