Actually i never mentioned anything about the German ports on the Baltic sea,but you have to assume that the baltic sea would have been heavily mined by the russian navy and the ports themselves would be heavily bombed by the russian airforce.What i did say was that with france as a communist country even if they did not outright join in the fighting that there was a very good chance that they would deny the Americans and British access to their ports making resupplying and reinforcing their armies incredibly difficult.
As for the whole nuclear umbrella theory i don`t deny that the whole reason the soviets never invaded Western Europe was the threat of nuclear war.I just stated that with no chance to resupply their armies and defeat more than likely staring them in the face that America would either have to abandon europe to the Russians or go nuclear a lot earlier due to being unable to defeat the russsians in a conventional military battle.
But what I was saying was that the whole war would never start in the first place, until 1949 the US had a nuclear monopoly, and no country would go up against that.
I don't see any reason that under these circumstances both France and Italy wouldn't try to play both Superpowers off against each other to maintain their own independence as communist nations, just like Yugoslavia. By 1949 this would be the accepted mode of things.
In any case, most historical analysis I've read says that Stalin had no designs on Western Europe. He wanted to establish the Comintern as a littoral of buffer states against German aggression, and considering what had just happened in the two World Wars, he had good reason.
Stalin recognized from the beginning, however, that Russia would never be able to hold all of Western Europe even if it did conquer it, since maintaining the Comintern was almost bankrupting her anyway, (and eventually did). He threatened the West constantly, yes, but that was a diplomatic ploy, much like the old dog chasing the car joke.
