Comment by BoxOfRain
2 hours ago
Map Men did a great video on the reverse of this, classified Soviet-made maps of Britain which were all labelled in Polish! They were in some cases more accurate than the British OS maps of the era which did not print some features around military bases, but they did make mistakes too.
I thought it was quite interesting, I'm too young to remember the Cold War but it's always described to me in terms of nuclear warfare and mutually assured destruction. The quality of the Soviet maps suggests the mentality of a conquering adversary rather than a destroying one though, as though they intended to occupy the territory they were mapping rather than nuke it.
> They were in some cases more accurate than the British OS maps of the era which did not print some features around military bases,
Not so much more accurate ('classified' features aside), as more detailed: The soviet maps included such things as bridge weight limits...... After all, if trying to invade you need to know if the local bridges can support a T-62 tank.
the Cold War started before MAD became a thing. Had the USSR and NATO started a conflict in 1949, nukes would still have to be delivered by (slow, fragile, at heavy risk of interception) plane. ICBMs arrived in the late '50s, and submarine launches in the '60s, at which point MAD became a thing; but even later, all sides largely continued to operate like a conflict would follow traditional engagement patterns, when it came to the basics of planning. Nobody stopped, say, spying activities just because "eh, we'll nuke them all anyway" - if anything, because this allowed for targeted activities that ensured MAD would not get triggered.
The Soviets had a "no first strike" doctrine because they perceived themselves to be the stronger force on the continent. They had a huge standing army and massive numbers of armored vehicles and expected to be able to roll through the fudla gap and across western Europe as they had done through Eastern Europe in the final stages of WWII.
NATO, on the other hand, expected to be overrun by the soviets and used the threat of nuclear counterattack to keep them from trying it. The Soviets built up their own nuclear deterrent to prevent NATO from responding with nukes (the MAD).
If the US/NATO nuclear threat wasn't credible and the NATO armies were no match for the soviet army, then western Europe became a pawn for the soviets, leading the western allies to also invest in conventional arms.
In short: the argument for the conventional forces was that the nuclear threat wasn't really credible because nobody would choose to end the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg-UqIIvang
in absence of giant oceans that's the only way to make buffer