Soviet bloc invades Yugoslavia in 1949-50

"Yet whatever the tensions in Korea, Washington's attention was not concentrated on that area. If Central Intelligence indicated the possibility of an aggression in Korea, it also indicated an equal possibility at a number of other points in the world. As a matter of fact, when Connors's telephone call reached his superior, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the Assistant Secretary was at the house of the columnist Joseph Alsop, where the conversation centered on the threat to Yugoslavia resulting from the build-up of the Romanian and Bulgarian armies." https://archive.org/stream/crucialdecadeame006464mbp#page/n165/mode/2up

I know it's very unlikely, but suppose the Soviet Union (through satellite troops acting at the "request of the healthy elements in the Yugoslav Communist Party") did invade Yugoslavia in 1949-50? Stalin might reason "the imperialists are not going to start a third world war over it, and it will teach all the potentially disloyal elements in the Peoples' Democracies a lesson once and for all."
 
IIRC didn't Stalin try to have Tito assassinated on several occasions? If that were to succeed he could perhaps order the Romanians and Bulgarians in under the pretext of saving Yugoslavia from blatant Western aggression and destabilisation attempts that regrettably saw Comrade Tito give his life.
 
If I remember correctly this was the PoD for a World War III scenario written in the early Cold War, "The War We Do Not Want."
 
IIRC didn't Stalin try to have Tito assassinated on several occasions? If that were to succeed he could perhaps order the Romanians and Bulgarians in under the pretext of saving Yugoslavia from blatant Western aggression and destabilisation attempts that regrettably saw Comrade Tito give his life.


To Joseph Stalin: Stop sending people to kill me! We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle... If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send a very fast working one to Moscow and I certainly won't have to send another.
  • Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 592.


This sums up I think how that attempt is going to go. Stalin maybe be nuts but no one can deny he wasn't stupid.
 
If this occurs in 1949, then it may reveal the shortcomings of US defense policy a year earlier. The Korean War from the very start starkly lit the errors in strategic doctrine and investment in defense. A 1949 war crisis undercuts Sec Def Louis Johnson sooner & starts the shift back to reliance on conventional ground forces.
 
If this occurs in 1949, then it may reveal the shortcomings of US defense policy a year earlier. The Korean War from the very start starkly lit the errors in strategic doctrine and investment in defense. A 1949 war crisis undercuts Sec Def Louis Johnson sooner & starts the shift back to reliance on conventional ground forces.

I would rather think it would start the Korean War buildup a year earlier. Korean War build-up wasn't a case of shifting reliance from nuclear deterrence to conventional forces - it was a massive build-up of both nuclear and conventional forces including tactical nuclear weapons.
 
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