How the West Almost Turned the Cold War Hot
When nuclear war was anything but unthinkable
After six long years of war, victory was not as satisfying as it could have been for Winston Churchill.
On the one hand, his country had accomplished something remarkable. It had endured the long, lonely period in 1940 and 1941 when German bombs rained down on the UK, the only nation left in opposition to the Nazis. It had fought the Axis in North Africa, Italy, France, and finally Germany. It had managed a tricky alliance with two larger powers. And in the end, it had achieved a victory over Germany that few would have predicted in the dark days of 1940.
Despite these accomplishments, Churchill still had disappointments. Franklin Roosevelt, his old ally, died in the last weeks of the war, and had been replaced by Harry Truman, whom Churchill did not know or trust. The course of negotiations in the final months of the war made it clear that British power was waning. It was obvious that the United States and Soviet Union would rule over a bipolar world and that the UK would not be their equal in power or influence.
Churchill realized as the war came to a close that he would never achieve some of his key war aims. The British, after all, had entered the war to protect Poland from outside aggression, and it was obvious that the Soviets would not allow Poland to be free or democratic. All of the sacrifices that British soldiers had made for Poland seemed to be in vain. More generally, Churchill did not trust Stalin to be fair or honest in the negotiations over Europe’s future. In fact, he had already begun to violate the promises he had made just a few months earlier, at Yalta.
So rather than enjoy the satisfaction of victory over Nazi Germany, Churchill asked his military leadership to begin planning the next war — against the Soviet Union.
In April 1945, before the Nazis had even surrendered, rumors spread through bombed-out Berlin that the British and Americans were thinking of joining forces with the Germans to fight against the Soviets. Those chaotic days were full of wild speculation, but British generals in London were indeed coming up with such a plan. It was called Operation Unthinkable.
The plan went like this: in just a couple of months, on July 1, 1945, the British and American armies would, with the “full assistance from the Polish armed forces and… German manpower and what remains of German industrial capacity,” attack Soviet positions in Eastern Europe. The goal was a “square deal for Poland,” but the planners understood that a “quick success” might not be easy to achieve. They wrote that whether to capitulate to the Western powers was “for the Russians to decide. If they want total war, they are in a position to have it.”
The whole plan was built on a series of shaky assumptions: that the American and British publics would support extending an already long war by attacking an allied nation, that American and British soldiers would be willing to carry out such an attack, that the Polish and German forces would prove helpful, and that the Soviets might stop short of total war once attacked.
The planners did acknowledge one reality: that Soviet soldiers outnumbered British and Americans in Europe by almost three to one. The plan, such as it was, seemed designed to use surprise to achieve a quick victory over the USSR. But the authors warned: “Even if all goes according to plan, we shall not have achieved, from the military point of view, a lasting result. The military power of Russia will not be broken and it will be open to her to recommence the conflict at any time she sees fit.”
If Operation Unthinkable seems like a bad idea to you, then you agree with the British Chiefs of Staff, who rejected the idea of engaging in a massive tank battle on the plains of Central Europe. They understood that the Americans were still fighting Japan and would therefore not be interested in joining another war and that offensive operations against Russia had a pretty bad historical track record. The risk of continued world war was just too great.
There were a few prominent Americans who, like Churchill, anticipated conflict with the Soviets — most significantly General George Patton, who was so eager for war that he daydreamed about manufacturing “incidents” that would lead to hostilities — but there was no real appetite for it at the highest levels.
Something changed, however, when the Americans detonated their first atomic bomb in mid-July. The new weapon made it possible for people to envision a different kind of war against the Soviets. What if, instead of launching a doomed land invasion of Soviet territory, the Americans and British could control the USSR with the threat of atomic bombs?
American planners understood that several simultaneous races were underway in the late 1940s. The Americans had to build up their atomic stockpile after the war ended (the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings had used up two of America’s three usable a-bombs). They also did not yet have bombers capable of reaching many major Soviet cities, without which the nuclear threat was empty. And they knew the Soviets were working feverishly on their own bomb; the American nuclear monopoly would not last forever.
So the question was: if their bomb stockpiles and bomber fleets allowed it, should the United States launch preemptive nuclear strikes against Soviet targets before Stalin got the bomb?
Churchill, unsurprisingly, liked the idea. He made a shockingly cavalier statement soon after the Potsdam Conference in July: “If the Russians insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev and so on…”
Some American military planners embraced the idea, as well. Right after Potsdam, they came up with something called “Plan Totality,” which envisioned a nuclear strike on more than a dozen Soviet cities.
Some historians think Totality was more of a bluff than a plan, something to intimidate the Soviets out of trying anything reckless against the Americans. But the Americans kept dreaming of a nuclear assault on the USSR. A few weeks the United States had accepted the Japanese surrender, American generals were sending around target lists of Soviet cities and drawing maps of the “coverage” their bombers could achieve over Russian skies.
By the end of September, 1945, American planners had a list of 15 “first priority targets,” based on industrial production, that they would destroy in a “minimum” attack. An “optimum” strike package would obliterate 66 Soviet cities with three warheads each. Assuming that some planes would be shot down and some bombs would miss their targets, the planners decided that the United States would need between 128 and 466 warheads (those numbers were later revised downward to 73 and 179, respectively).
All these British and American plans for war against the Soviet Union emerged before the end of 1945, many of them before the war against Germany and Japan was even over. They demonstrate exactly how little trust there was between the allies even as they collaborated on the battlefield.
The possibility of a land war between former allies dissipated pretty quickly as American troops returned home and the British public ousted Churchill’s Tories from the majority in Parliament. The possibility of an atomic first strike, however, remained quite real as tensions mounted between the United States and the USSR. In 1947, War Plan Broiler envisioned obliterating 24 Soviet cities. 1948’s Halfmoon and its revision, 1949’s Trojan, called for destroying 70 cities with 133 warheads.
The problem with many of these schemes was that the American supply of nuclear weapons could not keep pace with the plans. The United States stockpile only exceeded 50 nuclear bombs in 1948.
The closest the Americans came to carrying out these plans was in 1948, when the Soviets blockaded Berlin. Soon after, Harry Truman moved B-29s to England, but they weren’t actually configured to carry atomic weapons. It was a bluff, and Stalin, through his spy network, probably knew that. The McMahon Act, passed right after the end of World War II, prohibited the deployment of American atomic weapons outside of American borders. The Americans chose a daring airlift of crucial supplies to Berlin instead of all-out war. Then, in August 1949, the first Soviet atomic test closed the Americans’ first strike window. Now a nuclear attack would provoke a response in kind.
Even if they were never carried out, British and American plans for war against the Soviet Union show how volatile the situation was at the end of World War II. British and American officials were willing to contemplate causing millions, perhaps tens of millions, of deaths to curb Soviet ambitions in Europe.
In the long run, a hot war with the USSR — and especially the use of nuclear weapons, especially on civilian targets — became, well, unthinkable. But, for four years, it wasn’t, and had some of these plans gone into effect, we’d be living in a very different world.
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