WMD in MC; negative values

[Hans Boersma]

Thanks for the response gentlemen. For me it is an issue how the AI acts in a scenario; indeed in H2H this could be solved easily with house rules.

Regardless how realistic / believable things are, I think it would be good if a scenario designer would be able to moderate chem/nuke use independent from each other. Though they're both labelled WMD, in the ladder of escalation nukes hold a very different position from chemical weapons. With the use of tactical nukes things could very quickly spiral out of control into a mass nuclear exchange, or so it was (and is) thought. This means that the question of using chems or nukes is not quite of the same gravity, which means linking their usage is not necessarily plausible.

As I understand it NATO deliberately did not proclaim a no first use policy on tactical nukes; it was thought they would be needed to compensate for the perceived imbalance in conventional forces. If WP would manage to catch NATO forces off-guard, the use of tactical nukes would probably be asked for after as much as a few days. Whether they would actually be used is another thing of course — but that's exactly the what-if area in which our scenarios exist. Indeed government(s) would decide over the use of nuclear weapons, but since nukes are in the game, so is at least that part of the political factor.

Regarding chemical weapons I understand NATO (or rather the US) had some limited stocks intended to "discourage" chem use by the other side — for retaliatory use only, in other words. If not anything else the size of US chem stocks against those held by the WP alone would be a strong incentive not to use them first.

Hans