[Skybird]

Its illogical to think the Sowjets would have allowed NATO to wear down their conventional forces and only then when they got bogged down they would have started to try turning the helm around by using nukes.

They would have started with nukes in the first to neutralise those variables where NATO was stronger, namely the techncial and training quality as well as better maintenance rate of its air forces (which were numerically inferior, and very much so, and quiet some pilots from that era voiced doubts in books they later wrote that the technology advantage alone would have compensated for the inferior numbers).

For Germany, there would have been no resuce anyway. In every scenario Germany would have been turned into a total destruction zone, much more complete than after WW2. Even if the Russians would have been thrown back, the price for it would have been the destruction of Germany. I find it hard to consider that as a "rescue".

Many of the modern systems on Western sides got just introduced and where the first generation of their technolgy. Thermals were not as sharp as today, so where NVGs, missiles were not as reliable and deadly. Widepsread equipment like the infamous agile Leopard-1 tank got outgunned by the T-72 big bumms that was dersigned to overocme the Leopard-1, the first Leopard 2s existed in extremely small quantities, the M60A3 was slower than the M1 that repalced it buzt still was the work hors eof the US forces, and the M1 was the first generation M1, not the modern versions of today. NATO would have owned the night, the Pact probably the day.

We never needed to find out how it would have gone, but I take none of the two possible endings as granted. And the centre of Europe always would have been totally destroyed. And nukes used on airfields and harbours would have been the weapons that had opened the war.

And since this is so, a war under no circumstances would ever have made any sense: MAD looming overhead. And both sides knew it.