[Skybird]

It never made sense to me to assume a nuclear war between the US and the USSR would have escalated in increasingly intense phases. Why would you sacrifice your conventional forces first, and not before they are already lethally wound up you take the other side out by nukes? If the USSR and the US would have gone for each other's throat, the escalation would have been at the very beginning: decapacitating with the aim to mutilate the other'S military capabilities, airfields, nuclear silos, C3I, from the very start on. The Russians would not have invaded Europe conventionally first - why would they have wanted it that way...? They knew that they would have crushed NATO so seriously by their superior numbers that NATO would have had no other chance than to fall back to the nuclear option (thats why NATO formulated its nuclear doctrine and reserved the right to use nukes first - because it expected to not being able to stop the Sovjets conventionally). Why would the Sovjets have wanted to wait for that...? "Let us poke pencils into NATO's eyes until we got them so furious that they strike us with nukies, and when they do then we retaliate!" That does not just sound stupid - that is stupid.

They would have sent waves of nukes first - and if surviving that, THEN would have sent the conventional troops. I even imagine it possible that there never would have been a conventional follow-on invasion. There is no reward in taking that risk after you had turned the loot of your conquest into radiating rubble, with living cadavers crawling in the ruins. What would be the gain? The Sovjest were no religious fanatics fantasizing about fulfilling divine intentions, they believed in a scientific rational, even in war, also regarding social systems. Divinity had no place in that.