The Daily Telegraph has a story on how the U. S. S. R. envisioned a nuclear war in 1979. The newly elected Polish government opened its military archives to reveal a 1979 map of “the Soviet bloc's vision of a seven-day atomic holocaust between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces.”

From the news article: “On the map, western Europe lay beneath a chilling overlay of large red mushroom clouds: Warsaw Pact nuclear strikes, using giant warheads to compensate for their relative lack of precision . . . . Smaller blue mushroom clouds showed expected NATO targets - most of them relatively precise attacks - including strikes on Warsaw and Prague.” The Daily Telegraph has an English version of the map.

It is a chilling document that reveals how close Europe and the world came to disaster.

By way of GeoCarta.