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PRESS RELEASE: 23 May 2000
SECRET PLAN FOR NUCLEAR WAR
IN EUROPE PUBLISHED
1964 WARSAW PACT PLAN AIMED
AT TAKING LYON IN 9 DAYS
The Warsaw Pact's 1964 plan for war in Europe—the most recent
of only two such war plans ever released from either side of the
NATO-Warsaw Pact confrontation—reaches the public domain for the
first time this week on a Zurich-based World Wide Web site created
by an innovative international consortium of scholars, the Parallel
History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (PHP).
Prepared by the Soviet General Staff and found in the Czech
military archives in Prague, the war plan (written in Russian)
assumes an initial NATO strike quickly repulsed with a Soviet-led
offensive into western Europe, as far as the Lyon area of France
within nine days, and most strikingly, the routine use of nuclear
weapons by both sides.
The Web publication of the war plan also includes an extensive
secret study prepared in 1964 by the chief of Soviet military
intelligence, Gen. Ivashutin, detailing the strategic reasoning
behind the plan and Soviet thinking on nuclear weapons, and the only
previous Soviet bloc war plan in the public domain, a 1951 document
found in the Polish military archives, together with commentaries by
the PHP coordinator, Dr. Vojtech Mastny, and other experts.
The war plan was declassified by the Czech government at the
PHP's request, and the Ivashutin document was photocopied by the
late Russian historian, Gen. Volkogonov, from the Soviet military
archives, and was located by the PHP in his papers deposited at the
Library of Congress.
The web site, http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php,
is the inaugural publication of the PHP, an inter-national
consortium of scholars dedicated to the release of new documents
from the Cold War era and the analysis of their significance for
present security issues.
The Soviet military doctrine, as explained in Gen. Ivashutin's
study, assumed that:
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NATO's defensive preparations were a sham (p. 15), only a
swift offensive operation could guarantee success for the Warsaw
Pact (pp. 24-25),
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the operation was feasible regardless of Europe's nuclear
devastation (pp. 18-23),
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technically superior Soviet air defenses could destroy
incoming NATO missiles before these could cause unacceptable
damage (pp. 7-9),
-
the Soviet Union could prevail in a war because of the
West's greater vulnerability to nuclear devastation (pp. 4-5).
The documents show the shortcomings of the concept of deterrence
on which the Western strategy to prevent a Soviet surprise attack
was based. While they give no evidence of an intention to launch
such an attack, they show how the vast buildup and growing
sophistication of nuclear weapons supposedly required for deterrence
encouraged the military to believe that these could be effectively
used in an offensive war. The Soviet plan is eloquent testimony of
this dangerous illusion.
Visit the PHP website at http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php
to read the documents in the original and in English translation,
find out more about the PHP's other activities, and link with
related websites featuring hundreds of other important Cold War
documents. This is the beginning of online publication of new
sources documenting the military aspects of the Cold War, analyzed
and interpreted to help understand their meaning in our time.
The website is part of the International Relations and Security
Network (ISN), operated by the Swiss Center for Security Studies and
Conflict Research at ETH Zurich as a major Swiss contribution to
NATO's Partnership for Peace, and is prepared in cooperation with
the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental research institute
in Washington.
For interviews, contact the Project Coordinator at at Mst3696@aol.com.
PARALLEL HISTORY PROJECT ON NATO AND THE WARSAW
PACT (PHP)
Sponsored by the Center for Security Studies and Conflict Research
of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich,
the National Security Archive at the George Washington University in
Washington, DC,
and the Institute of Military Studies in Vienna
In association with the Cold War International History Project of
the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC, Hannah Arendt Institute
for Research on Totalitarianism, Dresden, Institute of Political
Studies, Warsaw, Cold War Research Group, Sofia, Institute of
International Relations, Prague, Cold War History Research Center,
Budapest,
Affiliated with the Partnership for Peace |