Soviet plan for WW3 nuclear attack unearthed
Pastor Dale Morgan
Soviet plan for WW3 nuclear attack unearthed*
By Henry Samuel in Paris
Last Updated: 4:24pm BST 20/09/2007
Chilling Soviet plans to launch massive nuclear strikes in Europe
followed by a ground offensive in Germany and southern France have been
unearthed by a Nato historian.
Soviet troops in Hungary
Soviet troops were to storm across Europe
According to scenarios drafted in 1964, Warsaw Pact forces planned to
use 131 tactical nuclear missiles and bombs to sideline NATO armaments
and destroy Western Europe’s political and communications centres, in
the event of an “imperialist” strike.
In an alarming insight into the “Doctor Strangelove” mindset of Soviet
strategists, the Czechoslovak People’s Army, CSLA, was then expected to
immediately march over deadly radioactive landscape and invade
Nuremburg, Stuttgart and Munich, then bastions of West Germany.
On the ninth day the troops would take Lyon, south eastern France.
Soviet reinforcements would then continue the offensive towards the
Pyrenees in the west.
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Historian Petr Lunak from NATO’s information office in Brussels, found
the 17-page Warsaw Pact plan while sifting through declassified
communist-era documents in Prague’s military archives.
“Russians outlined the general (war) plan, while the (leaders of)
individual Warsaw Pact armies prepared precise military blueprints, with
details on front lines, deployment of troops and arms,” said Mr Lunak.
The text, written in Russian and entitled CSLA Plan of Action for a War
Period, was signed by the Czech defence minister of the time and carried
president Antonin Novotny’s stamp of approval.
According to Mr Lunak, the plan was still an option until 1986, three
years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It was shelved by Vaclav Havel in 1990 when he was elected Czech president.
While most Western planners were convinced that any first strike would
lead to total mutual destruction, the plan - written in matter-of-fact
language - shows that Warsaw Pact nations presumed a massive ground war
would follow nuclear attacks.
Mr Lunak described the military plans as “fairy tale” thinking based on
World War II warfare: “They (the Soviets) really planned to send ground
troops out in the field and have them fight for a few days until they
died from radiation,” he said.
The final draft of the invasion plan was completed under Soviet
Communist Party chief Nikita Khrushchev, shortly after the 1961 Cuban
missile crisis, when the United States and the Soviet Union had teetered
on the brink of war.
According to the Prague documents, Moscow’s commanders fully expected
western “imperialists” to make the first nuclear strike.
Mr Lunak includes the plans, as well as interviews with Czech generals
of the time in his book, Planning the Unthinkable: Czechoslovak War
Plans, 1950-1990.
The first English translation of the text was published earlier this
month by the Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security, which
analyses and publishes declassified NATO and Warsaw Pact archives.
Vojtech Mastny, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive in
Washington, D.C., who coordinates the project, said the 1964 document is
the first such detailed war plan to come to light. “There’s no doubt
that the plan would have been used if the green light was given from
above - the political leadership of the communist bloc,” he said.