The North Vietnamese were so underhanded after the Vietnam war that they used the captured F-5C’s as their marquee homeland defense around the capital. That should tell you something about how ridiculously under equipped their forces were by that point. Remember, once the armistice was signed with the Americans the Chinese were licking their chops to move in and install a puppet regime.

And MiGs also attacked ships. That is why the U.S. was able to live fire their early ship-mounted SAM’s during the war.

The Fairey Delta III looks interesting, actually it looks to have a similarity to the AVRO Arrow.

Pity projects could of been merged.

The Avro team originally commissioned the engine design from the Bristol Aero Engines “Olympus” team (same ones that would of provided the Delta III engines) but they couldn’t deliver. The Olympus wouldn’t see production in its after burning form until the Concorde flew, but by that time it was a joint venture of Rolls-Royce and Snecma.

Negative.

If Skyhawk is getting F404 in this fantasy, then so does the A-6 family! 😉

There’s nothing shallow about electromagnetic destruction of your gadgetry nor of the mass death of your infantry and armored brigades through the use of enhanced radiation weapons.

‘Surviving forces’, it might just be worth noting, would have been far keener on abandoning their posts and spending a last few hours with their families rather than playing ‘whose plane looks cooler’ with the opposition over an uninhabitable Europe.

Armageddon is just that – armageddon. Not a place for boys and their toys…

You haven’t read too much on actual nuclear warfare and how limited it actually would be in eradicating an enemy. The effects of nuclear warfare were greatly exaggerated in the West to scare the masses into supporting the military machine. Sure it would sting the Russians to nuke them, but they would of survived well beyond multiple stages of nuclear bombardment. And their reasons for believing in survival were very sound.

These two look interesting as what-ifs

Not much point in running sorties of any kind, offensive or defensive, through a radiation soup, with EMP knocking out most of your systems every few minutes…

That ‘analysis’ deep enough for you?

The Soviets were well rehearsed for nuclear wars to last 5-7 years and to not only survive but perform in massive maneuvers with their surviving air, land, and sea forces across the globe. So I’d say your analysis was vaguely shallow.