Poland risks Russia's wrath with Soviet nuclear attack map

[IndianaGreen]

The Cold War was a sham! All of the "agressive moves" by the USSR were in fact responses to a US/NATO attack:

the map showed how Warsaw Pact forces would have responded to an attack by the Nato alliance.

Poland risks Russia's wrath with Soviet nuclear attack map

· Defence chief reveals old Warsaw Pact plans
· UK spared as European cities faced destruction

Nicholas Watt in Warsaw
Saturday November 26, 2005
The Guardian

Poland's new rightwing government yesterday risked a damaging confrontation with Russia when it published a Warsaw Pact map showing detailed plans for Soviet nuclear strikes against western Europe.

Poland threw open the doors of its military archives to show how most of Europe would have been laid to waste in a nuclear conflagration between east and west. Dating from 1979, when presidents Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev were discussing detente, the map showed how Warsaw Pact forces would have responded to an attack by the Nato alliance.

A series of red mushroom clouds over western Europe show that Soviet nuclear weapons strikes would have been launched at Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium if Nato had struck first. Red clouds are drawn over the then German capital, Bonn, and other key German cities such as the financial centre of Frankfurt, Cologne, Stuttgart, Munich and the strategically important northern port of Hamburg. Brussels, the political headquarters of Nato, is also targeted. Blue mushroom clouds, representing the expected Nato nuclear strikes, are drawn over cities in the eastern bloc, including Warsaw and the then Czechoslovakian capital, Prague. France would have escaped attack, possibly because it is not a member of Nato's integrated structure. Britain, which has always been at the heart of Nato, would also have been spared, suggesting Moscow wanted to stop at the Rhine to avoid overstretching its forces. The exercise, entitled Seven Days to the River Rhine, indicated Warsaw Pact forces aimed to reach the Franco-German border within a week of a Nato attack.

Standing next to the fading map in Warsaw yesterday, Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish defence minister, said: "The objective of the exercise on this map is to take over most of western Europe - all of Germany, Belgium and Denmark."

Mr Sikorski, who made a name for himself working for the rightwing American Enterprise Institute thinktank in Washington, made clear he was prepared for a backlash from Russia, whose president, Vladimir Putin, has lamented the demise of the Soviet Union.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,2763,1651315,00.html

[madrchsod]

1. what`s new about that?

the polish defense minister? oh yes i see he was a darling of the aei. i doubt putin cares

[enigma000]

2. oh, I guess we we the bad guys after all

OTOH, "Seven Days to the River Rhine" doesn't sound like a defensive strategy to me.

[Earth_First]

4. You're right...

sounds more like a cheap Hollywood film to me.

[bemildred]

3. This sounds like provocative drivel to me.

The US plan was always to use nukes, there was no way to "win" otherwise.

OTOH, the notion that the USSR had ambitions to invade and occupy Europe, nuclear armed Europe, defended by nuclear armed occupying US troops, has always looked pretty silly to me.

[Stella_Artois]

5. They didn't want Europe

But they sure as hell didn't want the next war to be fought in their country.

Thats why they took eastern Europe as a buffer, and adopted an offensive military doctorine.

[bemildred]

7. It's kinda like N. Korea or Hizbullah ...

With all those artillery pieces aimed at sensitive areas.
It's an effective deterrent.

All I have to offer is the idea that maybe "trust building" measures and detente was a better strategy that encirclement and constant red-baiting. In the larger sense, an effective nuclear deterrent is all you need to protect yourself and your friends, or as good as it gets, anyway.

[David__77]

6. So this confirms that Soviets' "no first strike" pledge.

Personally, I think that the Soviets lost out not because Reagan was so bellicose, but because the Soviets weren't bellicose enough to match him. That's the lie of the rightist "history"--"Reagan forced the Soviets to spend themselves to death with armaments and this collapsed their economy."

No. The Soviets were stupid and made to many weapons--they needed only to maintain enough ICBMs to ensure mutually-assured destruction, and state their intention to use them readily if Western attack seemed imminent.

[bemildred]

8. The soviets lost out for the same reason we are now "losing out".

Political corruption, decadence, and imperial rot.
The people who ran the place were incompetent and corrupt.
When that goes on long enough, things stop working.

[daleo]

9. Also, Russians tired of sending their sons to the slaughter in Afghanistan

Which is another parallel.

[bemildred]

10. Yes. It is too little noticed in the West that the USSR

fell from within when the RUSSIAN people rebelled at the cost of maintaining the "Communist" empire. I'm really curious to see how it's going to work out here.

[David__77]

12. That's an interesting analysis.

I have always believed that the Russian people benefited from the maintenance of the "people's democracies" in east Europe because they received many goods at preferential prices, while the Soviet "allies" had to put up with sub-standard Soviet imports. Even Putin laments the collapse of Russian influence, not because he supports any sort of socialist ideal, but because it did mean a lowering of Russian living standards and certainly prestige.

[bemildred]

13. Try Johnathan Schell's "The Unconquerable World" for an alternative POV.

The truth of course is that everything happens at once, it
was both internal politics in the Russian SSR and what was
occurring in the East European satrapies, and the bleeding
of resources and morale in Afghanistan, and so on. In another
sense you can say that the USSR's imperial government lost
legitimacy, there were no longer enough people believing the
Communist revolutionary bullshit, and things just stop working
when that the public stops believing. Much the same sort of
thing is ocurring here, but the Mighty Wurlitzer spins on,
obscuring the decay with noise and pompous rhetoric.

[Psephos]

11. Read The Gulag Archipelago and then see if you feel the same about USSR

Maybe after that you can bone up on the Ukraine famine, for more insight into the nature of that regime. You may find what the USSR did to its own people in the Ural Mountains nuclear disaster instructive, too.

Finally, take a look at what Orwell had to say about those who soft-pedaled the Soviet regime in the West.

Look, I'm not trying to be annoying, but sometimes you have to call a spade a spade. This has nothing to do with Ray-gun or the repugs, it has everything to do with a mechanized, brutal totalitarian state so large it covered nine time zones.

These guys say Stalin alone was good for 13,000,000 deaths of his own people. http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html The KGB was knocking on doors at midnight right up until the state self-destructed. So was the Stasi, and the rest of the secret police apparatus in the communist bloc states.

The idea that the Soviet regime did not consider the use of first-strike nukes is beyond laughable.

My girlfriend was born in USSR. If you think all that stuff was made up, you need to read this book:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684831074/102-9897190-5359369?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance

Peace.

[bemildred]

14. It is not correct that one must be a fan of the USSR

if one thinks the Cold War was stupid or that
it was deliberately stoked and maintained by
provocative US policies. Jimmy Carter got a
serious hole torn in his ass for trying to
make peace with the Soviets and dispose of some
of the nukes. Trying to make the US safer can
get you in big trouble if it involves less
defense spending.