This current Russian invasion of Ukraine has got me thinking back to what a Warsaw Pact/Soviet invasion of NATO would look like, and also what NATO planners expected such an invasion might look like.

I know about the de-classified and very optimistic Soviet battle plan "Seven Days to the River Rhine from 1979. The Warsaw Pact always had a conventional troop advantage in Europe, while at various points NATO had a nuclear advantage (in particularly in the period before ICBMs) because it was simply much harder for Soviet forces to deliver a nuclear strike on very distant American targets, while the Americans could put missiles and bomber squadrons and subs much closer to Soviet targets.

My favorite professor in college was an Early Modern German historian raised in Bonn, and he off hand mentioned that which bank of the Rhine you lived on during his childhood said something about your politics. I can't remember exactly what he said, but something like if you were conservative you might live on the left bank because you thought NATO troops would potentially stop a Soviet invasion from crossing the River Rhine, but probably not prevent them from reaching the River. My professor said this was because if the Warsaw Pact militaries carried out a conventional attack (or a conventional attack supplemented by "tactical" rather than "strategic" nuclear weapons), "everyone knew" a Soviet invasion would have great success in the first phase (across the flat North German plain and likely also the Fulda gap into southern Germany) and that NATO forces in Germany for the most part were just meant to delay a Warsaw Pact invasion while other NATO powers (mainly the U.S.) mobilized, rather than stop the invasion outright. He also said that "everyone knew" that the best chance that NATO would have to rally their forces, stop the Soviet attack, and begin the NATO counterattack would be at the Rhine River. While this part does make sense as a possibility to me, the part about choosing which side of the river to live on based on this potential plan of attack struck me as a little absurd—but a lot of parts of the Cold War seem a little bit absurd, so I could never rule it out.

I guess I'm curious about three things:

• 1. What would Warsaw Pact conventional attack/conventional attack-supplemented by tactical nukes have looked like according to Soviet war planners (especially in periods other than around the 1979 "Seven Days to the River Rhine" plan)? A minor question here is did Soviet thinkers really expect Americans to make a first strike attack as this "War is Boring" blog post says of a 1970 plan and was also a feature of the "Seven Days" plan, or was that just a convenient pretext for war planning?
• 2. What was NATO's war planning about a conventional war in Europe? How did they plan to offset the Soviet Union’s vast numerical advantage in continental Europe without resorting to nuclear weapons? Or did NATO planners assume that any major conventional conflict would inevitable escalate to a full nuclear war? One article in the National Interest I read stated, "What made the Soviet Union’s warfighting doctrine so different from NATO’s is that Moscow believed nuclear weapons would only be one part of the fighting, and not even necessarily the decisive factor," and therefore the Soviets had more detailed post-nuclear strike battle plans in from 1960's onward while NATO powers did not.
• 3. And finally what was the popular thinking at the time, particularly in Germany, which almost certainly would bear the brunt of any such war? Did people really have a sense that Left Bank of the Rhine was really safer than the Right Bank? Did this perception vary based on which FRG party one supported?