The Effects of Nuclear War
Chapter IV
CASE 4: A LARGE U.S. ATTACK ON SOVIET MILITARY AND ECONOMIC TARGETS
Recuperation
Production– and with it, standard of living and the number of people production could support —would go down before it went up. Industries would use inventories of supplies for production, then would have to close until supply could be reestablished. Transportation would wind down as petroleum refining was cut off, and petroleum supplies became exhausted or requisitioned by the military. People would be diverted from production by being sick or injured, caring for the sick or injured, or being drafted for military service. What production took place would be far less efficient. Many workers would be debilitated by minor cases of radiation sickness, other illness, malnutrition, psychological shock, and so on. Many would be called on to do tasks for which they lacked the training or the physical strength. Factories would be damaged or could not obtain necessary parts, so industrial processes would have to substitute labor for capital or use shortcuts that would reduce the quality of the product or the efficiency of the process.
If things went well, production would stabilize at a level that made good use of surviving resources, and would recover from there. The Government would increase its control over people and the economy, production of consumer goods would be delayed, many resources would flow to the military, public health would be lower, but sacrifices would pay off. Soviet engineers and plant managers reputedly are skillful at improvising solutions to mechanical problems. Such skills, Government organization and control, and brute force could overcome bottlenecks, use production to expand capacity, and give people austere but adequate food, housing, medical care, and other necessities.
The recovery could go poorly, however. A great many people could require medical care that could not be provided, and would die. The harvest could be lost, and more would die. Starving people would find and eat grain to be planted next year, reducing that crop and causing others to starve. Transportation could collapse, preventing factories from obtaining inputs and making it impossible for their products to be distributed, forcing them to close. Hardening might save key machine tools, but these tools might be buried under tons of rubble or be in intensely radioactive areas, pre eluding their use. The Government might be unable to conduct a detailed resource inventory that could integrate these tools into the economy, or there might be no way of transporting them to a factory that could use them. A war or threat of war, from NATO, China, or both, might divert surviving industry and materials into producing for the war effort and away from the economy. Which way the economy would go is unpredictable, for there are far too many unknowns. But should economic productivity fall precipitously, for whatever reason, the economy could support fewer people, and more would die. Indeed a failure to achieve viability could cause as many Soviet deaths as the attack itself.
In summary, the effects of a large-scale nuclear attack against Soviet military and urban industrial targets would remove that nation from a position of power and influence for the remainder of this century. Soviet fatalities, due to asymmetries in weapons yields and population densities, would be lower than those for the United States. However, there is no evidence that the Soviet economy and its supporting industry would be less severely damaged than their U.S. counterparts. Nor is there any evidence that the Soviets face a lower risk of finding themselves unable to rebuild an industrial society at all.
- Hedrick Smith, The Russians (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977), p. 241.