Joseph Stalin was given rat poison (warfin) by Beria, one of a group in the high command (which included Kruschev) according to findings by USA and Russia in 2003 (Joseph Stalin - Wikipedia). My question is whether Stalin had plans drawn for WWIII at the time of his death. This may be better placed in GB, but perhaps some facts can be adduced by SD members which give evidence that he had.
I have never heard that Stalin considered provoking a WW3
with its very likely nuclear exchange. I doubt that he did
consider it, knowing that as bad as WW2 was, a nuclear WW3
would have been much worse, incurring greater risk of actual
destruction of the state which had such a close call in 1941.
As for the rat poison plot I am sick of conspiracy threads.
Stalin may have been the most well-protected human being in
world history, and I believe he would have been more rather
than less vigilant in the special case of the members of the leadership
echelon just below him, especially including his KGB chief.
It rather depends on what you mean by “World War III”, but if you mean a large scale invasion of Western Europe, then, yes, Stalin had plans prepared. So did all the Soviet leaders after Stalin.
And the western European nations and the US had plans for possible invasions of the USSR or defense against a Soviet first strike. There’s almost certainly a set of plans somewhere in the Pentagon updated this year for strategic and campaign level goals for an invasion of Russia. Or an invasion of China. Or an invasion of Liberia. Or any major world hotspot (and some not-so-major places, too).
If you mean were there plans for an imminent large scale Soviet invasion of western Europe, there don’t seem to have been, and it doesn’t seem likely. Stalin may have been brutal, but he wasn’t stupid.
There’s no way the USA produced findings related to Stalin’s death, they don’t let a lot of scholars into those archives. In fact, Stalin’s death is still shrouded in relative mystery, but the most common story is not that he was killed, but that he got sick and, not trained or incentivized to demonstrate personal initiative, people were reluctant to step up and act when they might have saved him. The rat poison story is in all likelihood bogus. As for planning for WW III, I’m sure both the Soviets and the Americans had some contingency plans made up, they’d be stupid if they did not have such plans. Presumably they were not planning to strike first, because we would have found out if they did.