Here’s how the USSR planned to survive an all-out nuclear war with NATO and march its soldiers into the heart of a scorched Europe
DECLASSIFIED military plans reveal the terrifying strategy the USSR was ready to adopt in the case of an all-out war with the West.
Seven Days to the River Rhine was a top-secret military simulation developed by the USSR and its allies at the height of the Cold War – and details of the plans are sure to chill you to the bone.
NATO’s military rivals, led by the then-USSR, were known as the Warsaw Pact, a group of communist Eastern European countries who pooled weapons and resources in preparation for a nuclear war.
The Cold War allies had planned out a number of chilling military scenarios, which would have been deployed in the event of a nuclear first strike by NATO.
One such World War 3 strategy, declassified by the Polish government in 2005, outlined how the Soviet alliance could have marched across Europe to conquer the continent in just one week.
The Seven Days to the River Rhine plans assumed that NATO would attack by launching a nuclear bombardment aimed at Eastern Europe, with the aim of blocking a Soviet advancement from the east.
NATO’s Warsaw Pact rivals planned to respond with an immediate nuclear counter strike aimed at West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark, before launching a ground offensive into Europe.
Interestingly, the plans suggest that Britain and France would be spared from the nuclear attacks – possibly to avoid the USSR exposing itself to a counter barrage from Europe’s two nuclear powers.
The chilling strategy detailed how the USSR planned to bomb Northern Italy with 500-kiloton bombs to soften the country up for advancing Hungarian soldiers.
And Stuttgart, Munich and Nuremberg in Germany were to be destroyed completely by nuclear weapons, allowing Czech and Hungarian forces to conquer the irradiated remains.
The objective would then be to take over most of Western Europe using conventional armies, with Soviet soldiers forced to march through the irradiated wasteland as they advanced.
Although most of the invasion force would die in the invasion, military bosses predicted that Soviet armies could reach Germany’s River Rhine within seven days from the initial attack.
Chillingly, the plans suggested that Poland, a key player in the Warsaw Pact, would have essentially been wiped off the map in the following conflict – resulting the death of at least 2 million Polish civilians.
And additional plans suggest that Soviet soldiers would have reached Lyon within nine days – a goal which many military bosses believe would have been almost impossible.
If the nightmare scenario had come true, most of Europe would be razed to the ground, with civilian and military populations decimated by the nuclear conflict.
Soviet generals would then have been willing to march their soldiers through a nuclear wasteland, knowing that almost all would die of radiation poisoning as a result.
The unthinkable plans were eventually shelved after the Cold War came to an end, although they do offer a chilling glimpse into the realities of a terrifying nuclear conflict.
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