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Rincon -> Nuclear War (4/2/2020 9:27:14 PM)
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Apocalypse Now?
Cold War Fact: Russia Planned to Attack NATO with Hundreds of Nuclear Weapons
This is a plan for the end of the world, dated 1970.
But would any of this actually have happened? Just because the Warsaw Pact planned for atomic war didn’t mean the war was any more likely than if it hadn’t planned at all, right? Surely this was a case of “thinking about the unthinkable.”
Some historians insist that the Soviet Union had a “fairy-tale” mindset when it came to a hypothetical war in Europe and the use of nuclear weapons. It’s also worth noting that the United States has done all the same insane planning. America’s Single Integrated Operational Plan had thousands of nukes annihilating the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China.
But it’s possible to believe that the Soviet leadership did think realistically about atomic weapons and had no illusions about their dangers. Consider that the Soviets never exported nuclear weapons, except to China, and kept nukes out of the hands of Fidel Castro when they decided he was “unstable.”
It’s possible that in formulating these plans, the Soviets caught a brief glance at the realities of atomic combat—and that may have made them even more determined to avoid all-out war.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/cold-war-fact-russia-planned-attack-nato-hundreds-nuclear-weapons-27407
Interesting to note that we normally see the URSS as doing the first attack, but in fact, they were expecting that the first blow would come instead from NATO:
According to documents unearthed in the Czech Republic, Soviet generals “fully expected Western ‘imperialists’ to make the first nuclear strike.” The Soviets and their allies determined they should stage preemptive atomic attacks if war were imminent.
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