The nightmare of nuclear war in Europe - a spectre that haunted
the world for half a century - stood revealed yesterday in terrible
detail.
In a historic break with the past, Poland's newly elected
government threw open its top secret Warsaw Pact military archives
- including a 1979 map revealing the Soviet bloc's vision
of a seven-day atomic holocaust between Nato and Warsaw Pact
forces.
The defence minister, Radek Sikorsky, showed off the map at an
emotional press conference.
He described it as a "personally shattering experience", pointing
to a long line of nuclear mushroom clouds neatly stamped along the
Vistula, where Soviet bloc commanders assumed that Nato tactical
nuclear weapons would rain down to block reinforcements arriving
from Russia.
About two million Polish civilians would die in such a war, and the
country would be all but wiped off the face of the Earth, he
said.
On the map, western Europe lay beneath a chilling overlay of large
red mushroom clouds: Warsaw Pact nuclear strikes, using giant
warheads to compensate for their relative lack of
precision.....
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