Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, western scholars have learned much about the former USSR’s economy, politics, state security, military capabilities and more.
Have western researchers or former Soviet insiders ever found even a scintilla of evidence to confirm long-standing western fears that the Soviet leadership had seriously contemplated launching a massive air-ground war against NATO?
Admittedly, “serious” is a nebulous term, but I am not talking war gaming or posturing. I’m talking about coming very, very close to actually waging all-out war.
The closest is probably the cuban missile crisis , the sov’s knew they had no real chance of stopping the states from taking Cuba , but their plan was to take west berlin in retaliation , which would have been the balloon going up.
But they had plans for, and we had plans for the defense from an attack through the Fulda Gap into Germany. Read any of the myriad novels set in this scenario for details. Never got even close to attempting it, of course. But the plans were there. Both sides had a vested interest in keeping the “enemy” as dangerous as possible.
There’s also the story of Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, who in 1983 had to make a quick decision about whether or not the five incoming missiles his computers were telling him about were, in fact, real.
That was indeed the day in 1983 that the world should have come to come to an end by all rights. Instead, the military commander that would probably have initiated a Mutually Assured Destruction response based systems and procedures called in for a replacement. Col. Stanislav Petrov was that replacement ignored his training and procedures and refused to report it for what he was seeing. He cut the Soviet chain of command short to prevent mutual nuclear annihilation that day.
The U.S. always thought that the Cuban Missile Crisis was the real risk in nuclear terms. It wasn’t until Soviet documents were declassified in 1998 that we found out that we were seconds away from complete destruction two decades later.
Both the US and USSR had any number of offensive/defensive military contingencies, but I’m wondering if recent findings–leaked internal Soviet documents, meomoirs of high-ranking Soviet strategists–have authoritatively answered whether the USSR had seriously considered unleashing a lightning air-ground attack on NATO.
Most Americans will remember Pentagon and Capitol Hill hawks repeatedly warning of that scenario. I’m wondering if subsequent findings give any credibility to those assertions.