Oh, I was a bit busy this weekend with the Spielemesse Essen around...
Very well done. This one is almost identical to the sketch I sent to Jack as basis of my nuke-map. Just your map is much more elaborate.
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@Chipperback
Thank you very much for the explanation.
If the Soviets tried to land on the German North Sea Coast, then they don't deserve anything else but defeat...
Besides, clever to push the task of mapping to poor Alvin. ;-)
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@Zalter:
The map you proposed is very misleading on two points: 1. It shows Austria divided in occupation zones wheras all foreign troops left Austria after the Staatsvertrag of 1955.
2. It shows the "lost territories" in the East as part of the Soviet zone which implies they are part of the GDR.
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It is hard to believe, but not impossible. Actually, if I understand Chipperback correctly, the speedy advance only occurs in the South, anyways. Further North, the Soviet gamble doesn't pay off so well.
Opposite to what we West-Germans preferred to believe, NATO plays the game flexibly and doesn't stick to "Vorneverteidigung", interdicting entry into the FRG at all costs. This is key to their success in the way of inflicting heavy losses on the WP forces.
I agree with Austria. Whereas they would grab everything in the North and East very quickly, I do not imagine a conquest of Tyrolia, Carinthia and the more mountaineous parts of the states of Salzburg and Styria to be very easy, especially if some American forces pushed out off Bavaria reinforce the Austrians.
But Bavaria is in most places a different kind of thing. Once the WP comes down the Bavarian Forest at the FRG/CSSR-Border, the land is in many places only slightly hilly, with few obstacles in terms of large cities or large rivers, but good West-German roads. At the Western end of Bavaria, when approaching Baden-Württemberg, the picture changes again.
On the matter of refugees, that is an interesting point. I am quite sure that borders for German citizens would have been closed earlier already. And fleeing to any other place within Germany doesn't make that much sense, and 1980s Germans were aware of that. So as this is no surprise attack, whoever tries to relocate to, say, somewhere more rural, or West of the Rhine, would probably have done so already prior to the war. So I put the number of 20 million people
on the road, though often quoted, during the actual campaign at disposition. Nevertheless, there would still be a few millions of us running around like a headless chicken.
That is the question in how far WW3 is a place for sanity, but you are of course right about the German dilemma. The question is "better dead than red" or the other way round.
In any case, I do not believe that there is much of a leeway when it comes to decision-making for the FRG-government here once the cold war has gone hot. It would just cling to the vain hope that the WP is stopped and pushed back without nuclear escalation.
No chemical weapons is a bit overrated. Though it was not as central to doctrine as in the WP. Quick check in Wikipedia provides:
"The U.S. began stockpile reductions in the 1980s, removing some outdated munitions and destroying its entire stock of BZ beginning in 1988. In 1986 President
Ronald Reagan made an agreement with Chancellor
Helmut Kohl to remove the U.S. stockpile of chemicals weapons from Germany. As part of Operation Steel Box, in July 1990, two ships were loaded with over 100,000 shells containing GB and VX taken from US Army weapons storage depots such as Miesau and then-classified ammunition FSTS (Forward Storage/Transportation Sites) and transported from Bremerhaven Germany to Johnston Atoll in the Pacific.
[20]"
On a less reliable note, as I live only a few km away from the British ammunition storage Muna Wulfen in Northrhine-Westphalia, there has been persistent rumor that there where chemical weapons stored there during the cold war.
Thus, in 1984, NATO could have applied some of the big C in return.
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Concerning "spooks", a as non-Native speaker of English, I also have only heard of the British series which quite clearly refers to espionage.
. I had never, until now, heard it used as a slang term for a spy/intellegence agent, which is why the term jumped out at me when it was used. Enough said - it's done - on with the story!