In A Sea of Rusting Tanks, War Nerd, Gary Brecher cites a (translated) interview with “ex-Soviet general Matvey Burlakov, the last commander of the Soviet Southern and Western Forces, HQ’d in Hungary”:
“The height of the Cold War was the early 1980s. All they [the Soviet leaders] had to do was give the signal and everything would have gone off. Everything was battle-ready. The shells were in the tanks. They just had to be loaded and fired.”If you get the impression the General was pretty confident about his chances, you’re right. He says if the Soviet leaders had just given the word, “We would have burned and destroyed everything they [NATO] had.”
After he says that, it’s like Burlakov gets a little nervous that he might be sounding too aggressive, because he adds, “I mean military targets, not civilians.”
Now that bit, about how they wouldn’t have targeted civilians, is classic bullshit.
It gets much, much scarier:
Burlakov is not too respectful, to put it mildly, about the West German military: “We had a sea of tanks on the [Soviet] Western Group. Three tank armies! And what did the [West] Germans have? The [German] workweek ends Friday and then you wouldn’t find anyone, not a minister or a soldier. Just guards. By the time they realized what was happening, we would have burned up their tanks and looted their armories.”There you see it again, that obsession with tanks. The conventional wisdom right now is that the MBT’s day is ending, but luckily we never saw what would happen if those three tank armies had poured through the Fulda Gap on some fine Sunday morning. (You definitely get the feeling that the plan involved attacking on a weekend, don’t you?) With Soviet soldiers at the controls, and Soviet air support limiting USAF missions, a T-72 would have been a totally different machine from the Arab-crewed junkers littering the Middle East.
Of course it all depended on striking first. So would the Soviet Army have sucker-punched us? Burlakov says, “Of course! What else? Wait for them to strike us?”
The journalist asks again, like just to make sure: “We [the Soviets] would have struck first?” and the General says again, “Of course!”
And he makes it real clear that he’s not just talking about conventional first strikes. The interviewer says, “But [Soviet] Foreign Minister Gromyko said that the USSR would not use nuclear weapons first!”
I love Burlakov’s answer: “He said one thing and we [the Soviet staff] thought another. We are the ones responsible for wars.”
Now, if I could just find a copy of the original interview…