November 30th, 2005
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| Milforum's Bouncer | Quote:
Poland on has risked inflaming tensions with Russia when on Friday it released 1,700 highly sensitive Warsaw Pact files, including a war game exercise that envisaged massive nuclear destruction in western Europe and Poland, Financial Times reported.
The new conservative government in Warsaw wants Poland to deal more firmly with its communist past, and Friday’s opening of military files shows it is prepared to incur Moscow’s wrath and confront those Poles who worked closely with the Soviet Union.
Warsaw has already protested to Moscow over plans to build a new Russo-German gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea that bypasses Poland, and over Russian restrictions on Polish meat exports.
Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s defense minister, claimed the country had been “an unwilling ally of the Soviet Union in the cold war” and that being in the Warsaw Pact had put the country in mortal danger.
Sikorski published a map showing Soviet bloc forces planning a “counter-attack” against NATO forces, in which the Soviets would have dropped nuclear bombs along a line from the Dutch coast to Strasbourg, wiping out cities in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.
But the 1979 exercise also showed that Warsaw Pact planners believed such a conflict would have seen NATO target its nuclear bombs along the line of the Vistula river in Poland, to prevent Russian reinforcements reaching the front.
“The Polish army was being asked to take part in an invasion which could have resulted in a nuclear violation of our country,” Sikorsky said. “Poland is a country which would have been bombed out of existence.” He claimed two million Poles would have died in any conflict.
The military files handed over to Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance also included details of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague Spring”.
The release of the documents will reopen questions about the involvement of Polish communist-era politicians and soldiers in the Soviet-bloc alliance, 15 years after the country left the Warsaw Pact.
Poland agreed at that time never to release the Pact’s military files but Sikorski claims it never ratified the agreement. He also said Moscow was not alerted to the fact he intended to make the files public.
“We need to know our own history,” he told journalists in Warsaw. “It’s important for a democracy to know who was the hero and who was the villain. A morality tale has to be told.”
| http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/11/...andfiles.shtml
__________________ "The purpose of fighting is to win. There is no possible victory in defense. The sword is more important than the shield and skill is more important than either. The final weapon is the brain. All else is supplemental." - John Steinbeck |
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