The Second World War has not yet ended, and a new clash of the world's leading powers looms on the horizon. The Soviet Union, which made the greatest contribution to the defeat of Hitlerite Germany, as the victor began to impose its own order in the occupied Eastern Europe. But this time the USSR acted under the slogan: "We are not going to wait until they attack us, as it was in 1941" …
After the war, communist and pro-communist parties came to power in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Yugoslavia. This provoked irritation in the West, resulting in the Fulton speech of the former British Prime Minister and die-hard anti-communist Winston Churchill, delivered in the United States on March 5, 1946. It marked the beginning of the Cold War between East and West, which miraculously did not escalate into a third world war.
Nuclear club of the West
On July 17, 1945, in Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin, the third and last conference of the "Big Three" - the heads of the USSR, the USA and Great Britain: Joseph Stalin, Harry Truman and Winston Churchill - opened. It had to solve the issues of the post-war structure of Europe. Truman put off the opening of the conference in every possible way, timed it to the test of the world's first atomic bomb, scheduled for mid-July.
On July 16, an atomic charge was successfully detonated in the New Mexico desert. “We have developed the most terrible weapon in the history of mankind,” Truman wrote in his Potsdam diary. When he shared this news with Churchill, he was delighted and advised Truman to inform the Soviet leader about the creation of a weapon of unprecedented power, so that he would become more agreeable in negotiations. On July 24, 1945, Truman, in an informal setting, decided to stun Stalin with the news of the miracle weapon. At the same time, Churchill, as if by chance, paused at the door to observe the reaction of the Soviet leader. Imagine their disappointment when Stalin, after listening to Truman, did not ask him a single question and warmly said goodbye to him until the next day! Churchill decided that the Soviet leader did not understand what was at stake. It never occurred to him or the President of the United Statesthat Stalin remained so unperturbed, since he was well informed by intelligence about the "Manhattan Project", as the work on the creation of atomic weapons was called in the United States. But on the same day, Stalin called the head of the Soviet atomic project, academician Igor Kurchatov, and asked to speed up the work on the creation of the Soviet bomb. If Western analysts were convinced that it would take the USSR a decade and a half to create nuclear weapons, then in reality the first Soviet atomic bomb was detonated on August 29, 1949 at a test site in the Semipalatinsk region of Kazakhstan. But on the same day, Stalin called the head of the Soviet atomic project, academician Igor Kurchatov, and asked to speed up the work on the creation of the Soviet bomb. If Western analysts were convinced that it would take the USSR a decade and a half to create nuclear weapons, then in reality the first Soviet atomic bomb was detonated on August 29, 1949 at a test site in the Semipalatinsk region of Kazakhstan. But on the same day, Stalin called the head of the Soviet atomic project, academician Igor Kurchatov, and asked to speed up work on the creation of the Soviet bomb. If Western analysts were sure that it would take the USSR a decade and a half to create nuclear weapons, then in reality the first Soviet atomic bomb was detonated on August 29, 1949 at a test site in the Semipalatinsk region of Kazakhstan.
According to the memoirs of the Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov, Stalin, talking about his conversation with Truman, noticed that the Americans "are filling their own worth."
During the Potsdam Conference, the Soviet delegation achieved almost all of the goals set. A camp of socialist states emerged in eastern Europe. And a few years after the creation of the NATO military organization by the West, the countries of the "socialist commonwealth" united their armed forces within the Warsaw Pact Organization. From the west, the USSR was reliably covered.
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Incinerate immediately
Having become the only owner of atomic weapons, which showed their monstrous destructive power in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, politicians and the military in the United States began to consider the possibilities with their help to crush the hated Soviet Union. Already in August 1945, the development of a plan for a war with the USSR with the use of atomic weapons - "Totality" began. The targets of the atomic bombings in this regard were 20 large industrial centers of the Union. Its implementation was hampered by the presence of thousands of Soviet tanks in Eastern Europe, which, according to the calculations of the American military, could crush the whole of Western Europe up to the English Channel in a few days.
But the outbreak of the cold war between the recent allies in the anti-Hitler coalition found and threw new logs into the smoldering fire of mutual enmity. The Berlin Crisis of 1948, the Hungarian Crisis of 1956, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 …
In the latter case, the USSR and the USA were one step away from an exchange of nuclear strikes. The Soviet Union, under the conditions of increased secrecy, brought missiles with nuclear warheads to Cuba, capable of covering a significant part of the territory of the United States. But aerial footage allowed Washington to locate Soviet missile positions on Freedom Island. The armed forces of both countries were put on high alert. Only the prudence of the heads of state John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev made it possible to save the world from atomic Armageddon.
Another case, fraught with the possible death of human civilization, took place in November 1983. Then the NATO countries started large-scale military exercises Able Archer 83 near the borders of the Soviet Union. According to the plan of the exercises, their troops were alerted to DEFCON 1 ("the war is inevitable and can start at any moment"). Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, American troops were in readiness a step lower - DEFCON 2 ("extremely high probability of war"). Only the operational work of the intelligence services of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries, which established that NATO exercises did not imply escalation into a war, made it possible to stop it.
Nevertheless, the cannibalistic plans for a war against the USSR and its allies with the use of nuclear weapons, involving the death of the majority of the population, were regularly developed by the headquarters of the US and NATO armies.
We will show you Kuzkin's mother
In the Soviet Union, such plans appeared regularly on the tables of leaders. They can be judged only by indirect evidence. No wonder Nikita Khrushchev promised to show America "Kuzka's mother." The same Cuban missile crisis was probably the result of the implementation by the Soviet Union of the first part of the next plan for a victorious war with the United States.
Here is how Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, Chief of the General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces in 1977-1984, told Ambassador-at-Large of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs Oleg Grinevsky about one of the scenarios of hostilities: “We are not going to wait until we are attacked, as it was in 1941. We ourselves will launch an offensive if we are forced to do this and we discover the first signs of the beginning of a NATO nuclear attack … Therefore, in our military exercises, we are practicing offensive operations … We will deliver dozens, and if necessary, hundreds of nuclear strikes. The goal is to hack into deeply echeloned NATO defenses at a depth of 100 km along the front line. After that, tanks will go - the shock army groups of five fronts will begin an offensive on West Germany.
Within 13-15 days, our troops must occupy the territory of West Germany, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and reach the border with France. There is a regrouping of troops and, if Europe is still able to resist, the second stage of the operation begins with the forces of two newly created fronts. One strikes in the direction of Normandy, the other goes to the border with Spain. 30-35 days are given for this operation to withdraw France from the war."
After the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, former Soviet allies made public documents revealing some details of the preparation of the Soviet bloc for a possible war with NATO. One of them assumed in its first days to bombard Western Europe with atomic charges with a total capacity of 7.5 megatons in TNT equivalent. This is 500 times more than the power of the bomb dropped by the Americans on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, which killed 90 to 166 thousand people.
Wars are planned by those who have the opportunity to hide from them in reinforced concrete bunkers, sunk tens and hundreds of meters into the ground. And those who are forced to implement these plans, the war ruthlessly kills. And if humanity still exists, it is only because the leaders of the world powers realized, like US President General Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, that there can be no winners in an atomic war.
However, the "sword of Damocles" of the atomic war still hangs over human civilization.
Magazine: Mysteries of History №30. Author: Leonid Budarin