The Cold War, a 'frozen' conflict lasting from roughly 1947-1991, pitted the world's two great powers and their allies against one another. Hanging against the backdrop of this was the hellish destruction of WWII, and the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation following the successful detonation of a Soviet atomic bomb in 1949. It was the specter than haunted my parents and my grandparents generation. I however, was born after the war ended, just missing the end of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. So other than the continuing existence of nuclear weapons, I didn't grow up in the shadow of ICBM's trained on my home.
However, while there's lot's of talk about the Cold War going "hot" most of those scenarios refer to the sudden, terrifying appearance of a mushroom cloud over some city in the US. There's another scenario though, one where the bombs don't drop and mechanized forces backed up by missiles and satellites tear into each other across the European continent.
It seems, that Soviet plans all revolved around fears of a NATO nuclear first strike attack on the Soviet Union. In response, the Soviet Union would launch a limited nuclear strike of it's own to disrupt the ability of NATO forces to defend themselves while aiming to drive to the Rhine to force a diplomatic solution. Interestingly, it seems the USSR never contemplated a nuclear first strike against NATO, with one notable exception. They were were so confident of their conventional superiority that they expected to win any war on the ground which would cause NATO to launch it's own first strike against them.
Assessing the Soviet superiority in both mechanized warfare and troop strength (if not necessarily technology) it seems likely that the USSR with it's limited objectives and local superiority could have won a conventional WWIII in Europe. At least that was the fear.
There was a brief period in the 80s and 90s where this fear was assessed in fiction. I've been musing on that since last year when WWIII was trending on Twitter, and had been meaning to read some of the fiction around that. I settled on two books which, I feel, outlined the beliefs in Western (or at least American) fiction best. The first is by the most popular technothriller writer of the 80s and 90s, Tom Clancy with his classic Red Storm Rising which chronicles a war in the late 80s between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Secondly, I'm reading Red Army by Ralph Peters which, well, chronicles the same. Thirdly, I'll be reading a modern take on a war between the Russians and Europe, Red Metal by Mark Greaney.
That will be my big reading project for the start of 2021, and it will be an interesting comparison in the techno thriller genre. Same themes, different stories, and very different ideas. Stay tuned!
Before I go though, I'd just like to recommend the Fuldapocalypse blog which regularly reviews this kind of fiction and gives you some interesting insights into the genre as a whole. And if you want to know more about the Cold War in general, you should definitely check out the Cold War channel on YouTube for the work they do on exploring this conflict! Well worth your time for fact or fiction!
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