No, at the very least we would have been able to attack Soviet cities from bases in China and Japan that the >Germans couldn’t hit.
No, main Soviet industrial centers were far beyond the range of any bombers, from Europe or from China. Also, bombing a city does far less to reduce military production than capturing it (look at figures for Germany 1944-1945).
I’m not sure about this since the goal would be to create a hole for your tanks to exploit so you could encircle >the enemy.
So you suggest using American nukes ( dozen in 1946), dropping them on Soviet tanks, from strategic bombers that hardly can hit a target smaller that city, to gain a modest tactical advantage (bringing two battalions of tank destroyers will have the same effect )? Using such brilliant plans USA would have surely lost WWIII.
I’m far from an expert on tank battles, but my impression is that what you really want to do is encircle the enemy tanks to cut them off from supplies. Being able to punch a small hole in enemy defenses would be extremely helpful. My impression was also that strategic bombers had difficulty hitting targets because of interference from anti air defenses and enemy aircraft, and this wouldn’t have been a problem when attacking targets in the field under conditions under which the U.S. had air superiority.
Encirclement operation works on much bigger scale, “small hole” here is tens of kilometers wide, through a defence line that is also tens of kilometers in depth. Using nukes against tanks makes no sense unless numbers of nukes and tanks are comparable.
Poor accuracy of strategic bombing was because of high altitude. On low altitude these bombers are very easy targets for anti-aircraft artillery (Soviet divisions had lots of it), and dropping nuke is a suicide mission.
No, main Soviet industrial centers were far beyond the range of any bombers, from Europe or from China. Also, bombing a city does far less to reduce military production than capturing it (look at figures for Germany 1944-1945).
So you suggest using American nukes ( dozen in 1946), dropping them on Soviet tanks, from strategic bombers that hardly can hit a target smaller that city, to gain a modest tactical advantage (bringing two battalions of tank destroyers will have the same effect )? Using such brilliant plans USA would have surely lost WWIII.
I’m far from an expert on tank battles, but my impression is that what you really want to do is encircle the enemy tanks to cut them off from supplies. Being able to punch a small hole in enemy defenses would be extremely helpful. My impression was also that strategic bombers had difficulty hitting targets because of interference from anti air defenses and enemy aircraft, and this wouldn’t have been a problem when attacking targets in the field under conditions under which the U.S. had air superiority.
Encirclement operation works on much bigger scale, “small hole” here is tens of kilometers wide, through a defence line that is also tens of kilometers in depth. Using nukes against tanks makes no sense unless numbers of nukes and tanks are comparable.
Poor accuracy of strategic bombing was because of high altitude. On low altitude these bombers are very easy targets for anti-aircraft artillery (Soviet divisions had lots of it), and dropping nuke is a suicide mission.