28 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
for leaders at the central and regional levels. Underground facilities
existed at Sharapovo and Chekhov for the supreme leadership.^19
The USSR’s General Staff and high command kept secret a report
from the Main Intelligence Administration (GRU) that wartime con-
tamination of the environment would be a planetary catastrophe.
Warsaw Pact countries would suffer devastating damage regardless of
the harm they wreaked upon America and Western Europe. The infor-
mation was so disturbing that it was thought prudent to withhold it
from most generals. The priority was to hold on to their confidence.
The Pact’s commander-in-chief, Marshal Kulikov, threatened to force
the chief researcher, Lieutenant Colonel Vitali Tsygichko, into retire-
ment unless he agreed to soften his findings. Although Tsygichko
stood his ground, he had no authority to compel the dissemination of
his work. He concluded that the high command recoiled from the
challenge to revise conventional doctrine and shuddered at the pos-
sibility of a reduced budget for the armed forces. They imposed a rigid
conservatism. In arranging military exercises, they insisted on the
assumption that the Pact’s armies would deftly circumvent balloon-
shaped areas of nuclear radiation. This was pie-in-the-sky thinking as
commanders trained the armed forces, from top to bottom, to be ready
to ‘attack to the thunder of nuclear strikes’.^20
The Warsaw Pact’s plans detailed only the initial operations in any
war with NATO. According to Jaruzelski, the defence of East Germany
received much attention. Allowance was made that if NATO started an
offensive, their conventional forces might succeed in advancing forty
miles. This might take three or four days, and Polish forces were
expected to join the Soviet Army in halting the attack. It was not
excluded that NATO might start simultaneous operations further
south, perhaps starting from Greece or through the Caucasus. The
Warsaw Pact counter-planned for its armies to fight their way to
the Rhine. The campaign was expected to take ten to fifteen days.
Resistance would crumble. The tanks of the Soviet Army and its allies
would push back and defeat the invader. Jaruzelski saw that such a war
would inevitably lead to the use of more than conventional weaponry.
He was always sceptical about what he heard from the USSR’s high
command: ‘When we thought about this, it occurred to us even at that
time that this was not realistic! NATO would certainly use its nuclear
weapons, and then we would use ours. The prediction was for several
hundred nuclear explosions in this limited area. It was absurd!’^21
General Tadeusz Pióro of the Polish army shared this assessment;