The specter of a major military confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact loomed large throughout the Cold War. This hypothetical conflict, which could have had dramatic consequences for all of humanity, captivated the minds of many people – academics, political analysts, novelists, filmmakers… – who imagined how it could have developed.
The opening of the files in the former communist countries and the declassification of information by NATO have been shedding light on how the strategists of both sides imagined a hypothetical Third World War.
In 2005 began to glimpse what they had thought. That year, Poland declassified one of the most striking documents in this regard. It was a Warsaw Pact war plan, dated 1979, the title of which was a statement of intent: Seven Days to the Rhine. As a quick summary, the USSR and its Eastern European allies would attack West Germany (the Republic Federal, RFA) with the aim of reaching the Franco-German border in just one week.
Picked up by international media such as The Guardian, the declassification of the plan was done with a government of the conservative Law and Justice party. The then Defense Minister, Rados?aw Sikorski, justified it by assuring that bringing these documents to light was “crucial to educate the country about the way in which Poland was an involuntary ally of the USSR in the Cold War.”
Curiously, the Seven Days to the Rhine plan is mentioned in the third season of the Jack Ryan series, released in 2022, although the writers of that production have adapted it very freely: they leave aside that it is a document of the Warsaw Pact and become a strategy of Russian ultranationalist sectors.
Getting back to reality, it should be noted that great powers do not usually make war plans in which they present themselves as aggressors, and Seven Days to the Rhine was no exception. The casus belli raised was a NATO nuclear attack, preparatory to an invasion of Poland. The Soviet response would be just as forceful: launch atomic missiles at key cities in Western Europe.
The targets of that retaliation could be divided into two categories. In the first place, there would be political or economic centers such as Bonn (the capital of the FRG at the time), Frankfurt, Munich or Brussels (NATO headquarters). Attacking those cities would serve to cause the collapse of the member countries of the Atlantic Alliance. The second class of targets included cities like Antwerp, Hamburg, or any major port where reinforcements from the US or Britain might land.
In the aforementioned lists of objectives, British or French cities were not contemplated. Moscow’s intention was not to provoke a nuclear response from those countries. Neither did they want to promote an exchange with the US of strategic missile launches, which would result in the mutual destruction of the contenders.
The calculation proposed by the Warsaw Pact can be considered somewhat optimistic, since it is hard to believe that Washington, Paris or London would not have responded to an attack with weapons of mass destruction against their allies. NATO’s own doctrine spoke of an armed retaliation based on the type of aggression suffered.
Parallel to the missile launch, the land invasion would begin with the aim of reaching the Rhine in a week. The nuclear attack on Poland made it difficult to send reinforcements to East Germany (GDR), so only the Warsaw Pact forces could be counted on already prepared in the GDR and Czechoslovakia. These contingents were considered the best forces in the Eastern bloc, so despite everything, the Kremlin saw such a quick operation as feasible.
If the Rhine was reached in seven days, the Warsaw Pact saw the surrender of western Germany as more than possible. Following the calculations of the Eastern bloc, with the capitulation of Bonn, the rest of the NATO countries would not want to continue with hostilities. As a culmination to the musings of the Soviet planners, it was considered that, by breaking the fighting spirit of the allies, the risk of an outright nuclear war would also be reduced.
The advance of the Warsaw Pact was raised on two fronts: the north and the south. The first axis would be the responsibility of the Red Army troops in the GDR –known as the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany–. They were between 338,000 and 380,000 soldiers (their number varied throughout the eighties), and they had some 4,200 tanks, 8,200 armored vehicles, 690 combat planes and some 3,600 artillery pieces. They were considered the best Soviet units.
The Group of Soviet Forces would be supported by the East German Army, which NATO viewed as the most effective fighting force among the USSR’s Warsaw Pact allies.
These troops – mostly armored and mechanized units – would take advantage of the northern German plains to make a rapid advance towards the Rhine. In front of them they would find an amalgamation of FRG units: British, Dutch, Belgian… They were not expected to those NATO troops put up a lot of resistance.
The advance on the southern flank would be carried out by the Central Group of Forces. That formation was made up of the 85,000 Red Army soldiers stationed in Czechoslovakia, supported by some 1,500 tanks and 300 combat aircraft.
On that front, the Warsaw Pact allies were represented by the Czechoslovaks, who were seen by Westerners as a capable army. However, the Soviets were wary of his loyalty after the Prague Spring.
The southern flank was the shortest route to the Rhine –about 193 kilometers–, but with a much more complicated orography, which favored defense from the north. In addition, the NATO contingents present there were stronger forces than in the north, as was the case with the bulk of the US forces on German soil and the better equipped divisions of the Bundeswehr (the FRG Armed Forces).
The Soviet tank advance would be supported by airborne assaults to capture bridges over the Weser and Rhine rivers. In addition, these paratroopers and special forces would also attack airfields and other key installations.
This operational plan is reminiscent of what was seen in the first days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, when Putin’s troops tried to control the Gostomel airfield, vital to bring reinforcements for a direct assault on Kiev.
Another point of Seven days to the Rhine that can be remembered from what has been seen these months in Ukraine is the secondary role that the Soviets gave to aviation. Eastern bloc strategists gave the air force a secondary role in a lightning campaign. They considered it a waste of time to undertake missions that required longer planning and execution, such as the suppression of NATO air defenses.
Of course, NATO also had its own plans for a war against the Warsaw Pact. His doctrine for that conflict became known as Forward Defense. In this case, too, the enemy was the aggressor, and various options were being considered to defend Western Europe from a full-scale invasion.
Between the end of the 1970s and the entire following decade, NATO established four axes for its defense against an attack by the Warsaw Pact: achieving air superiority, keeping maritime lines open to bring reinforcements to Europe, defending territorial integrity at all costs. West Germany and resort to the use of nuclear weapons only as a last resort.
In other words, the key to the Advanced Defense of the Atlantic Alliance was to keep the front line as close as possible to what was called, at that time, the inter-German border (the separation between the FRG and the GDR). Politically, a defense in depth that would have led to the abandonment of much of West German territory was not acceptable.
NATO was fully aware that it could not quantitatively compete against the Warsaw Pact troops, and hoped to rely on the technological superiority of its weapons. As part of that qualitative advantage, in the first place, Western countries relied on their air forces to balance the scales against the tank and armored columns of the Warsaw Pact.
Second, in the 1980s, armor entered NATO service, which was expected to counter any armored advantage of the Warsaw Pact. Their names will be familiar to anyone who has followed the arms shipment to Ukraine.
For example, the US provided the backbone of its mechanized forces with Abrams tanks and Bradley armored personnel carriers, while German-built Leopard 2 main battle tanks became the armored fist of many countries in the world. Atlantic Alliance.
In addition, the US developed its own doctrine for this hypothetical war, known as the Airland Battle, where ground forces would aggressively maneuver in close coordination with aircraft to hinder enemy advance and allow time for reinforcements to arrive. from the other side of the Atlantic. That strategy proved its effectiveness in 1991 when US troops crushed the Iraqi army.
At sea, and in a kind of modernized version of the Battle of the Atlantic, anti-submarine tactics would be essential to ensure the arrival of convoys from the US and Canada. In addition, NATO also relied on its superiority in that environment to carry out more offensive actions.
For example, the use of two US aircraft carriers (and their respective battle groups) from the Norwegian Sea was contemplated to attack Soviet bases further north and isolate ballistic submarines. Thus, Moscow would be forced to divert forces from Germany. There was also thought to block the naval forces of the Warsaw Pact in the Baltic and prevent an invasion of Denmark.
NATO’s great dilemma was what to do if its conventional troops could not contain the Warsaw Pact offensive. In the first decades of the Cold War, it was assumed that nuclear weapons would be the immediate response to end the numerical superiority of the USSR and its allies.
That nuclear response implied launching weapons on the NATO territory itself occupied by the Warsaw Pact (mainly western Germany). Towards the end of the sixties, a change was proposed that considered giving a response based on what the first enemy offensive would have been like (only a conventional attack or responding with the arsenal of mass destruction if it had been used).
In any case, the analysts of the period agreed that, in the event that the troops of the communist block surpassed those of the Alliance, the use of tactical weapons against the enemy forces would be resorted to. The risk of that scenario was that it would lead to an escalation with strategic arsenals, and the war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would end in an apocalypse for all of humanity.
