Ever Wonder How They Would Have Done it?
September 21st, 2007 by xformed
For those in uniform during the Cold War, I ask a rhetorical question: Did you ever wonder how the Soviets planned to attack Europe?
No more do you have to lay awake at night and guess: Historian Petr Lunak found the paperwork…
From the UK Telegraph:
Soviet plan for WW3 nuclear attack unearthed
By Henry Samuel in Paris
Last Updated: 4:24pm BST 20/09/2007Chilling Soviet plans to launch massive nuclear strikes in Europe followed by a ground offensive in Germany and southern France have been unearthed by a Nato historian.
According to scenarios drafted in 1964, Warsaw Pact forces planned to use 131 tactical nuclear missiles and bombs to sideline NATO armaments and destroy Western Europe’s political and communications centres, in the event of an “imperialist†strike.
In an alarming insight into the “Doctor Strangelove†mindset of Soviet strategists, the Czechoslovak People’s Army, CSLA, was then expected to immediately march over deadly radioactive landscape and invade Nuremburg, Stuttgart and Munich, then bastions of West Germany.
On the ninth day the troops would take Lyon, south eastern France.
Soviet reinforcements would then continue the offensive towards the Pyrenees in the west.
[…]
When was this the plan? For a while:
[…]
According to Mr Lunak, the plan was still an option until 1986, three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.It was shelved by Vaclav Havel in 1990 when he was elected Czech president.
[…]
Rest easy jow, knowing we won that war.
H/T: Little Green Footballs commenter NJDhockeyfan
This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Geo-Political, History, Military, Military History, Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
September 21st, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Not only did I wonder — I wrote my thesis on it, focusing on the TNF side of operations and building a pretty elaborate first strike model in PeachCalc (“Between Scylla and Charybdis: U.S. and Soviet Theater Nuclear Forces and Strategy 1945-1985”). All UNCLAS/open source material too – raised a more than a few eyebrows around campus. Still have it on a bunch of WordStar floppies.
My numbers were a little less as I used MIRV’d SS-20’s (3 x 150kt warheads) for the brunt of my first strike. Of course, we were no less sanguine as far back as Operation CARTE BLANCHE in the late 50s that gamed out using tac nukes (a ton of ’em) to stop a Soviet offensive. When the results leaked to the local German presses, the anti-nuke faction formed (“Kampf dem Atomtod”) and the rest, as they say, was history.
– SJS