Soviet War Plan during the Cold War?

Hi there,

My knowledge on the Cold War is relatively limited, so please be gentle.

From reading certain sites, this one in particular, it would seem the Soviets were destined to do two things if a war with the West broke out:

1. On one hand, pour every tank available though the Fulda gap in the general direction of the Rhine, and perhaps even the Channel and Atlantic coasts.

2. On the other, release every tactical nuclear, chemical and biological at hand at the enemy.

For me, these two just doesn't add up. I case of war I could understand they would want to conquer Europe. Likewise destroy it. But why try to do both at the same time? Seems awfully contra-dictionary.

Why send thousands of tanks into a burnt landscape with nothing but radiation, germs and gas pockets left in it?


Guess the same thing could be said about the Soviet navy. On one hand it was supposed to blockade Europe from US help from the sea, on the other, it was supposed to launch nuclear missiles against every port on the East Coast minutes after the war broke out?

I guess someone with a deeper understanding here could help me understand this? :)
 
I never understood the Soviet strategy either...

Their war plan was never actually a viable option to ensure domination over Europe. It was just so brutal, that if it was carried out, would lead to an all out nuclear war with strategic weapons. A war, which noone would win, as soon as the "missile gap" (which was actually a reverse missile gap) was closed.

The best war plan for the Soviets may have been to attack using only conventional weapons, no chem/bio/nukes into W. Germany, making it clear their objective was the Rhine and not beyond that.
With the correct diplomatic work such a plan may have created the necessary ground within NATO for the argument against using nukes to stop the Soviets. After all using nukes to stop the Soviets meant that fallout and retaliatory Soviet strikes would destroy Western France, Western Germany and all of Holland & Belgium.
So the argument of some NATO countries may very well have been:
"We either stop them with conventional weapons or we lose while trying, in which case the Soviets will stop on the Rhine, sparing a large chunk of Europe from total destruction."

The novel "Red Army" describes a war outcome in this context.

What many forget is that Germany was not the only front the Soviets had their minds set on. Within the context of a purely conventionally fought WWIII, the Soviet Union would have been able to attack other countries as well and conquer them / place them in its sphere of influence.
Turkey and Greece are two nice example. I can see Greece losing its northern half if Soviet troops started puring in from Bulgaria.
The Soviets could also settle old matters with Yugoslavia or try to turn Albania way from China and into their sphere again.
Norway as a NATO partner would be attacked as well and could have even been conquered with air-landed troops and if the Soviet Navy lived long enough. The Soviets may have also tried to grab Austria.
Japan would also come under attack.

The situation in the Middle East is also unclear, but who's to say the Soviets may not have tried something against Iran in the 70s, during a NATO-Soviet Union war? The problem in the Middle East is not pushing it too far, because of the Israelis, who would definitely not hesitate long to use nukes.

As long as the war does not go nuclear and the Soviet Union keep the initiative, they can cause lots of trouble around the periphery of the Warsaw Pact and some of NATOs positions were simply undefendable without nukes.
 
EVERY Soviet plan involved saturating Europe and the US with nukes.

Conversely, NATO's plan involved nuking Soviet assembly areas.

In the case of a war, this would have ended up as a general exchange either way.

EDIT: It's important to keep in mind that the USSR didn't want to conquer Europe. What they feared the most was NATO forces building up and invading the Soviet Union a la Barbarossa.

Also, the USSR knew that even with a vastly larger stockpile, NATO had more than enough weapons to level every Soviet city and destroy every Soviet army.
 
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The Soviet plan would have involved a use of nuclear weapons in any first strike, and was a purely offensive one. The USSR's problem here was that it never developed actual superiority in quantity and quality in terms of its nuclear arsenal over the USA until the late 1970s/1980s, by which the USSR's degeneration was too far advanced for the plans to matter very much. I would say that at least part of the reason these plans are obscure is the USSR was very aware of its weaknesses, much moreso than the NATO factions who distorted Soviet strength from genuine fear and attempts to reap political advantages. Naturally the Soviets were never interested in starting a war which would have been short, one-sided, and produced a total Soviet collapse.

The Soviets also had a relative disadvantage, strategically speaking, in that they chose to try to make modern technology feasible on the grand scale, that is multiple army groups equipped with the most modern weapons of their time. This meant their armies were relatively more rigid than Western armies, and Soviet actions in any war were correspondingly much more predictable.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
If they wanna keep it conventional, targets were Hamburg, the Fulda Gap, and Norway. I think Clancy was on to something when he suggested Iceland, but that's only feasible almost too late in USSR's lifetime.
 
If they wanna keep it conventional, targets were Hamburg, the Fulda Gap, and Norway. I think Clancy was on to something when he suggested Iceland, but that's only feasible almost too late in USSR's lifetime.

The idea behind Iceland was to leave a gap in detection networks blocking the route Soviet subs had to take to sink convoys.

IIRC, nukes aside, the WARPACs idea was to force their way into Germany in the center, leaving NATO's northern forces seperated.

However, at the very least NATO perceived themselves as being militarily weak, so I imagine if the Soviets try a "Bolt out of the Blue" they just end up with NATO (and France) nuking the assembly areas.
 
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