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Do recall that the Soviets for a good bit had a leg up on rocketry and were more or less neck-and-neck on thermonuclear weapons. When your adversary has interc

Do recall that the Soviets for a good bit had a leg up on rocketry and were more or less neck-and-neck on thermonuclear weapons. When your adversary has intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear weapons aimed at your cities, you do whatever you can to avoid those being used, including whatever espionage you can get away with.

Joker_vD 5y ago
And when the Soviets found themselves in this exact situations, those rascals too had resorted to whatever espionage they could get away with! The nerve of them! In the early 2010 I've read a news story about Czechs finding and declassifying some old military plans from the 1970-ies (desgined in the USSR and then supplied to the rest of Warsaw Pact) which went along the lines of "launch the strategical nuclear strike, then take over the Europe with conventional troops (with possible use of tactical nuclear waeponry)". The story went into some details into how the strike directions in those plans were actually radically different from what NATO at those times expected the Soviets to use, so it was a rather interesting read. And then, in the very last paragraph of the story, it makes an off-hand remark that those plans had an explicit directive in them that they are to be enacted only in the wake of the nuclear attack on a member of the Warsaw Pact. Ah. So those were plans were less of "okay, let's figure out how to set the world ablaze and then rule whatever's left" kind and more of "in case of being nuked: a) nuke back; b) ...try to take over whatever's left, I guess?" kind. Obviously, putting that remark at the beginnig of the story where every reader would read it would lessen the story's intended impression of the scary murderous Reds.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  The plans did indeed exist and Czechoslovak People's Army was expected to fight its way up to French Lyon until it would be utterly decimated by tactical nuclear weapons of the enemy.
a_square_peg 5y ago
> When your adversary has intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear weapons aimed at your cities, you do whatever you can to avoid those being used, including whatever espionage you can get away with. Not saying there's anything wrong with espionage - just saying that Americans seem to have an overly adversarial mentality with severe inability to distinguish the difference between real vs. perceived threats. At least from the interviewed submariners, the Soviets viewed their American counterparts as colleagues whereas the Americans viewed Soviets as enemy. Replying to an American boasting about who was 'winning' during a Soviet-US summit, a commander said through a translator: "tell this young man that when veterans get together, it doesn't matter who won or lost - it's enough that both survived."

Joker_vD 5y ago

And when the Soviets found themselves in this exact situations, those rascals too had resorted to whatever espionage they could get away with! The nerve of them! In the early 2010 I've read a news story about Czechs finding and declassifying some old military plans from the 1970-ies (desgined in the USSR and then supplied to the rest of Warsaw Pact) which went along the lines of "launch the strategical nuclear strike, then take over the Europe with conventional troops (with possible use of tactical nuclear waeponry)". The story went into some details into how the strike directions in those plans were actually radically different from what NATO at those times expected the Soviets to use, so it was a rather interesting read. And then, in the very last paragraph of the story, it makes an off-hand remark that those plans had an explicit directive in them that they are to be enacted only in the wake of the nuclear attack on a member of the Warsaw Pact. Ah. So those were plans were less of "okay, let's figure out how to set the world ablaze and then rule whatever's left" kind and more of "in case of being nuked: a) nuke back; b) ...try to take over whatever's left, I guess?" kind. Obviously, putting that remark at the beginnig of the story where every reader would read it would lessen the story's intended impression of the scary murderous Reds.

inglor_cz 5y ago
The plans did indeed exist and Czechoslovak People's Army was expected to fight its way up to French Lyon until it would be utterly decimated by tactical nuclear weapons of the enemy.

a_square_peg 5y ago

> When your adversary has intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear weapons aimed at your cities, you do whatever you can to avoid those being used, including whatever espionage you can get away with. Not saying there's anything wrong with espionage - just saying that Americans seem to have an overly adversarial mentality with severe inability to distinguish the difference between real vs. perceived threats. At least from the interviewed submariners, the Soviets viewed their American counterparts as colleagues whereas the Americans viewed Soviets as enemy. Replying to an American boasting about who was 'winning' during a Soviet-US summit, a commander said through a translator: "tell this young man that when veterans get together, it doesn't matter who won or lost - it's enough that both survived."