"Operation Unthinkable: 'Russia: Threat to Western Civilization,'" British War Cabinet, Joint Planning Staff [Draft and Final Reports: 22 May, 8 June,
Thanks to Lum for posting this today. I haven't had a chance to more than peruse it this morning but I am sure a bunch of you wargamers will find this pretty interesting. At first thought it sounds like a pretty cool what if game or scenario. What if Russia had chosen to ally with Japan? Can't wait to read this tonight.
"Operation Unthinkable"
"Operation Unthinkable"
4 Comments:
Weird. I'm a big fan of what-if analysis. This one, though, doesn't mention nuclear weapons in the first eight pages. That absence must imply that nuclear weapons are posited not to exist. It's considered good practice in such analyses to state your variations from historical reality up front, and not make the reader guess.
Lots of other absences and omissions are factually challengable relative to real history, given that the analysis purports to be of the historical situation as of the stated dates.
Not well done.
Hm. I would suspect the reason theat nuclear weapons aren't mentioned has something to do with the fact very few peoeple knew about the Manhatten project, and at this date the Trinity test hadn't taken place so no one was sure how effective the weapon was.
So Jwilly are you claiming that this is fake document?
I have no idea. The content would be more believable if it'd been made up as a game-basis than if it was historical, so I'd lean in that direction.
How could an historical analysis of an alliance between Russia and Japan not discuss the plain facts that:
1. They hated each other.
2. The Japanese at that stage of the war would bring relatively little of value to the partnership, given that they had no oil, no iron, no aluminum, no copper, no tanks, few AA guns, few ships and few planes.
3. It would be easy to practically isolate them from each other, so that their "allied" state would be irrelevant. All that it would take would be the mining and staking-out of Vladivostok harbor by sub-packs. Neither the Russians nor the Japanese had effective anti-submarine capabilities in the Sea of Japan as of the proposed dates.
Etc.
Well if the plan was an anti-American one, it would have been ideal: a major problem for Japan was their lack of resources, which the Soviet Union had in plenty, while the Soviet Union's navy in the east was... well, not the most impressive. The only way for the US to reach the Soviets rear, presumably less defended than a potential European front, was across the Pacific. Maybe the incentive for such an alliance wasn't huge, but the reasons against it are fairly weak too - neither the Soviets or Japan had much interest in the others' primary theater (Europe and East Asia, respecitvely). It seems very unlikely, but so would the Molotov-Ribbentrop had it not actually happened, especially since the Soviets and Germany had a greater conflict of interest than the Soviets and Japan.
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