2. PLANS FOR ARMAGEDDON
Soviet military doctrine held that the USSR could win a nuclear war
with America. There was no secret about this. Chief of the General
Staff Nikolai Ogarkov, no less, wrote in one of his booklets:
Soviet military strategy proceeds from the viewpoint that if the
Soviet Union should be thrust into a nuclear war, the Soviet
people and their armed forces need to be prepared for the most
severe and protracted trial. The Soviet Union and the fraternal
socialist states in this case, compared with the imperialist states,
will be in possession of definite advantages: the established just
goals of the war and the advanced character of their social and
state systems. This creates for them the objective possibility of
achieving victory.^1As leader of the Warsaw Pact, the USSR advocated communism
and proclaimed its spread to be inevitable. It offered assistance to
allied states which accepted its primacy in the ‘world communist
movement’ and to forces and parties that were engaged in an ‘anti-
imperialist struggle’. It depicted America as militarist and imperialist
in intention and practice. At the same time it professed a commitment
to peace and suggested that the worldwide growth in Soviet armed
power and political influence rendered world war less likely. But Oga-
rkov repeated that if such a war were to start, the USSR had the
capacity to emerge as the victor.
Whereas in public he endorsed the idea of a winnable campaign
and prepared for a ‘limited’ nuclear conflict, he privately rejected all
this as gravely unrealistic. He concluded that the USSR had no choice
but to ready itself for an all-out war with America. His deputy, Sergei
Akhromeev, disagreed and wanted to prepare for a less than total
conflict – he conducted a study of how Moscow might use its SS-20
missiles in an emergency. Politburo member and Defence Minister
Dmitri Ustinov, who had served Stalin himself as People’s Commissar