by escotregen » Tue Nov 29, 2005 4:08 pm
If this was the Warsaw Pact version of the WW3 strategy it was most certainly not an accurate portrayal of what the USSR had in mind. The comradeship spirit between the communist USSR and her Warsaw Pact subject-states did not extend to actually trusting them. After al,l the subject states' peoples had a naughty tendency to revolt at times against dictatorship such as in Poland in the 50s and again in the 80s.
In the 1970s when I ran into 'a wee bit of bother' on the East/West Berlin border crossing, there was not an East German troop or polizia in sight; it was all manned by USSR troops. This was in response to the earlier, tragic, abortive popular revolt in adjacent Czhechlovakia (spelling?). The USSR tanks beat the flower-holding people that time too.
Poland, like the U.K. was nothing more than a pawn in the USA and USSR cold war. One of the reputed plans to leak out after the collapse of the USSR was that there was a de facto understanding that if land war broke out on the European Continent and was escalating, the West would quickly use nuclear at battlefield level.
If this happened, the next stage would be for the USSR to retaliate with battlefield nuclear. If this had no result (either armistice or surrender from the West) there one one more 'final safety check' (No wonder the system was called MAD; Mutual Assured Destruction).
The final "look, we are really serious about this" stage would be for the USSR to obliterate the UK. At that point the USA was to decide whether it too was "really serious" or whether just to lift it's ball and go home.
Presumably, there was an equivalent sacrificial country on the Warsaw Pact side for the USA to play with. But we don't know, because our side 'won' and it's the winners who get to write the history.
One alternative scenario was the much feared 'first strike' that those dastardly Commies were always going to launch. In this case the whole of the UK, Faslane included, had to be fried for the first course in WW3. This was because the UK was the USA's nuclear aircraft carrier and essential to the USA's first strike capacity.
Of course most Cold War commentators probably now conclude that the USSR never had the type of nuclear preponderance that rendered it capable of a 'first strike'; it is now argued to be a fiction used by the USA to keep the UK onside... a bit like Tony Blair's use of the mythical 45 minutes WMD in Iraq to keep the UK public online?
) Any artist's who are HG members?
