The Paper Trail
New details about Soviet Cold War intentions
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Warsaw Pact. Newly declassified papers from former Communist states shed fresh light on the inner workings of the Soviet Union's Cold War alliance with its eastern European satellites and its plans for war. U.S. News spoke with Malcolm Byrne, coauthor of A Cardboard Castle? An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact 1955-1991, about the finds.
What was most surprising about the papers?
These military plans and after-action reports show how unrealistic the Soviets were in planning for conflicts that included nuclear launches. Military planners assumed that cities like Munich, Vienna, and other major urban centers would be obliterated by nuclear weapons, yet within a matter of days they assumed that Warsaw Pact forces would be able to sweep through those areas with no ill effects. It's very clear that they completely glossed over the reality of what it would mean to be marching through a nuclear wasteland. It's only in 1987--after the Chernobyl accident--that a Polish leader was able to openly say to the Kremlin that "one shouldn't imagine being able to enjoy a cup of coffee in Paris six days after a nuclear exchange."
Did the Soviets expect a war?
They were not planning to overrun western Europe so it could fall under Communist domination, but their plans to initiate a nuclear strike were pre-emptive. In that hair-trigger environment, if your information isn't perfect, you may push the button before it is really justified. It was surprising to see that the potential for miscalculation and nuclear disaster was so high.
How good was their intelligence?
Penetration of the western military was unusually high, and they had a lot of very specific intelligence about NATO's thinking. That should have told them that NATO's planning was defensive, but their ideology predisposed them to assume that capitalist states were aggressive and that NATO was on the verge of a strike at any moment. Their ideology, in part, explains why they ignored the findings of their own intelligence establishment.
Where did the other pact states stand?
Over the years there was a tremendous amount of jockeying and maneuvering and outright dissension among virtually all the allied states, which wasn't as clear before. Some states were concerned about the financial burden; others were concerned about the Soviet strategy, which called for eastern Europe to be the central battleground for a conflict. The prime directive was to defend the Soviet Union and not the Soviet bloc.
That intention was very clear, and the allies weren't very happy about it. Keep in mind, the only time that these forces were used wasn't to fight the West but to crack down on its own people, in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in particular.
This story appears in the May 30, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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