You just don't get it. According to the left's revisionist history, the threat of the Soviet Union was just propaganda of the American military industrial complex. Nothing there. Move along.
Posted at 2007-01-04 06:15:36 [PermaLink]"Now, for better or for worse, Canadians can take it for granted they're safe at night.
Only until we realize that there's oil to be had up north. (Damn our education system, it keeps telling us all the oil is in the Middle East.)
Re the War Plan; so what? Like we didn't have NATO invasion plans for the USSR? That's what strategists do for a living.
I'd have been incredulous if the Soviets had NOT had invasion plans! Both sides ALSO had frequent war games simulating invasion...and they did that for what, 50 years?
Having grown up during the worst of the Cold War, I look back at my life and realize that there really wasn't a time (until very recently)that I wasn't under the threat of vaporization.
That particular map doesn't show much. The real eye-opener was back in the early 90's when the Germans got to open up archives in the former East Germany and revealed the scope of Soviet treachery. Those archives revealed that the Soviets were on a permanent 72-hours-to-war footing on the basis that if conditions could be made right, Red Army tanks would surge into West Germany preceded by multiple tactical nuclear strikes all across western Europe, mostly from gravity bombs delivered by F/A bombers flying fast and low. Soviet planners knew that virtually none of these planes would return, and that only a fraction would even deliver their payloads, but they also knew that if 200 planes hit the frontier at 600 knots and 500 feet off the deck, they could could hammer the west pretty hard in the first hour. Enough so that NATO would be in chaos, and Soviet armour would be looking over the English Channel in just a few days. It proved that the Soviets were lying through their teeth when they said they wouldn't use nukes first, and it also proved that fools like Trudeau who wanted a closer relationship with Mother Russia were just that-fools.
Posted at 2007-01-04 12:57:57 [PermaLink]Per Bill Greenwood's and DaninVan's comment:
I'd be VERY surprised if there were NATO OFFENSIVE plans that called for an invasion of East Germany, never mind Czechoslovakia, Poland, or the USSR.
Not to say that they didn't exist, but I'd be surprised. NATO forces weren't configured for offensive operations (the layer cake deployment meant that you'd have had incredibly weak flanks for one thing), and NATO forces simply didn't practice offensive operations for most of its history. (Indeed, one could argue that, depending on the nationality, some didn't practice it at all.)
Conversely, Soviet forces practiced and optimized for offensive, rather than defensive, operations.
Exactly the point. The Soviets planned around the fact that they were trying to create ripe conditions for invasion. Meanwhile, the West planned solely for the day when the Soviets were likely to invade. There never was an option to overrun Poland and Czechoslovakia with western nukes and armor, except in the hope of halting a nuclear fronted Soviet attack.
Posted at 2007-01-05 21:59:01 [PermaLink]It would be charitable to pass over pointing out that the western peace movement, we see yet again, actually brought war closer and that it was those who favored a strong, active defense who helped keep the peace.
It's really a shame I'm not so charitable. Those who weren't pro-Moscow were sincere, well-meaning...and idiots.