Yesterday’s London Telegraph tells a story of a war that might have been, but thankfully never was:
The nightmare of nuclear war in Europe – a spectre that haunted the world for half a century – stood revealed yesterday in terrible detail.
In a historic break with the past, Poland’s newly elected government threw open its top secret Warsaw Pact military archives – including a 1979 map revealing the Soviet bloc’s vision of a seven-day atomic holocaust between Nato and Warsaw Pact forces.
(…..)
About two million Polish civilians would die in such a war, and the country would be all but wiped off the face of the Earth, he said.
On the map, western Europe lay beneath a chilling overlay of large red mushroom clouds: Warsaw Pact nuclear strikes, using giant warheads to compensate for their relative lack of precision.
Soviet bombs rain down on cities from northern Denmark down to Brussels, the political headquarters of Nato. Large red clouds blot out cities such as Hamburg, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich and Baden Baden, Haarlem, Antwerp and Charleroi, above the Franco-Belgian border.
On the map, smaller blue mushroom clouds showed expected Nato targets – most of them relatively precise attacks – including strikes on Warsaw and Prague.
Throughout the later years of the Cold War, the left implored Americans to believe that the Soviets no longer had abandoned its expansionist, militaristic past and was truly interested in detente. And yet, here in the midst of detente and the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, we see the Soviet military seriously contemplating a survivable nuclear war that would have destroyed Europe completely. It also shows the contempt the Soviets had for their “Socialist allies” in Poland.
Remember this map next time someone tries to re-write the history of the 20th Century:
H/T: Varifrank
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