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The USSR ran an exercise in 1984 that led off with a US first strike carried out with B-52s, followed by an ICBM strike. The defenders got their asses kicked--had it been a real war, the USSR would not have gotten a shot off.

Source please?

68 posted on 07/28/2006 2:58:12 PM PDT by Paul Ross (We cannot be for lawful ordinances and for an alien conspiracy at one and the same moment.-Cicero)

It got mentioned in passing in Adelphi Paper 226, Land Attack Cruise Missiles (it's in one of the footnotes), and Bruce Blair gave it a detailed discussion in The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War. When you read between the lines, it's apparent that the Soviet general staff modified the exercise on the fly to bring it to a "successful" conclusion, and that they tweaked their 1988 exercise to ensure that things went more "normally" and smoothly--i.e., that it didn't result in very visible debacle--and they still had some serious problems.