Posted on 11/09/2014 10:16:24 AM PST by sukhoi-30mki
Winston Churchill urged the United States to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union to win the Cold War, a newly released document reveals.
The previously unseen memorandum from the FBI archives details how Britain’s wartime leader made his views known to a visiting American politician in 1947.
Churchill believed a pre-emptive strike on Stalin’s Russia might be the only way to stop Communism conquering the West.
The note, written by an FBI agent, reports that Churchill urged Right-wing Republican Senator Styles Bridges to persuade President Harry Truman to launch a nuclear attack which would ‘wipe out’ the Kremlin and make the Soviet Union a ‘very easy problem’ to deal with.
The Russians would have been defenceless against a nuclear attack at that time – they did not successfully test their own atomic bomb until 1949.
Britain and the Soviet Union had been allies in the Second World War until 1945, the year Churchill lost office as Prime Minister. But he was one of the first international statesmen to recognise the post-war threat posed by the USSR, and in 1946 made a famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, about an ‘iron curtain’ having descended across Europe as Joseph Stalin consolidated his grip on the eastern half of the continent.
The FBI document shows Churchill’s belligerence towards Britain’s former wartime ally ran so deep that he was prepared to tolerate the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Soviet civilians in a nuclear strike.
The memo claims Churchill ‘stated that the only salvation for the civilisation of the world would be if the President of the United States would declare Russia to be imperilling world peace and attack Russia’. The note continues: ‘He pointed out that if an atomic bomb could be dropped on the Kremlin, wiping it o
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This would have been an even worse idea in 1945. The American people just would not understand the need, if there was such, to attack an ally.
We also had very few A bombs then. While a Bomb will take out whatever you use it one, you can use it on only one target. An army spread out over many thousands of square miles is not a good target.
The probable result of us attacking USSR in 1945 would be our being thrown back, with massive losses, across the Channel, and quite possibly losing Britain too.
In 1945 the US had 2M troops in Europe, the Red Army numbering upwards of 6M.
Not a good idea.
I’ve seen numbers for Soviet murders up to 60M. Nobody knows the actual number, of course, but I suspect the higher ones are inaccurate.
I base this on the censuses of USSR before and after Stalin as compared to those of the USA for the same period. It just doesn’t make sense to me that tens of millions of people could be murdered during this period, in addition to those dying in the War, and still have the population growth they did.
1926: 148M.
1951: 182M.
Their birthrate was no doubt high in this period, but FTM people don’t reproduce like rabbits under extreme conditions of deprivation, for both physical and psychological reasons.
I quite agree.
However, if you’re planning launch aggressive pre-emptive wars against world powers, as others on this thread seem to think we should have, you had better not follow any such policy.
What is comes down to is the USA isn’t set up to be a world conqueror, regardless of what “progressives” think. The people would not have stood for a war against USSR in 1945 or 1947. It just wasn’t in the realm of possibility, no matter how theoretically wise it might have been.
I think it’s reasonable to point out that we got the same result. Took 50 years longer, but all it cost us was a whole bunch of money for the Cold War.
Difficult how to know how it would have turned out. The Russians were in pretty bad shape after WWII and probably vulnerable. The Germans had hurt them pretty badly. At the same time our economy was doing okay.
Then again, it was another war “over there.” Could we have sustained another war — economically and politically?
Also, we have learned in recent years that defeating the enemy is the easier part and rebuilding is the difficult part. Although Germany and Japan have done very well since the war.
General Patton took everything into consideration and was confident we could have beat them. I’ll go with Patton.
Also, unlike the Germans, we could have gotten a lot of Russians and Ukrainians to fight on our side.
My looking shows that Obama’s real physical father was a Indonesian communist cult guru by the name of Muhammud Subuh. He was part of mama’s early wonder lust life. Most other mentioned men were mama Stanley Ann’s communist parents fellow travelers from Hawaii and Chicago. The covered up and sealed true history of Obama has many years of trail. Look Subuh up to see a very good father-son resemblance.
My looking shows that Obama’s real physical father was a Indonesian communist cult guru by the name of Muhammud Subuh. He was part of mama’s early wonder lust life. Most other mentioned men were mama Stanley Ann’s communist parents fellow travelers from Hawaii and Chicago. The covered up and sealed true history of Obama has many years of trail. Look Subuh up to see a very good father-son resemblance.
At the end of the war the U.S. had some 8 to 12 million people in the various branches
Yes, we Brits had it so easy in WW2........
Don’t forget the huge British lend lease to the USSR as well. We supplied thousands upon thousands of tanks, vehicles, weapons and material, as well as even having an RAF squadron fighting for the Soviets on the Eastern Front!. Canada also supplied the USSR.
The Soviets could not have mobilised in 1941/2 without the American-British lend lease.
Great points.
And after Germany surrendered, the British were planning on doing what they could in the invasion of Japan.
The Soviets were opportunists when it came to Japan.
That’s exactly right.
Russia had no intention of helping Britain, and Germany’s losses had nothing to do with fate (a Greco-Roman concept from idolatry).
This is deja vu for me. In high school in 1974 I wrote a paper on gunboat diplomacy and how it could have worked after WWII to get the USSR out of Eastern Europe by threatening them with nuclear weapons. We already knew the USSR was perfidious and a nuclear threat would have gotten them out of Germany, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. I think the threat would have been enough, but an actual nuke would have sufficed if they didn’t move. I’m glad I was not the only one to see this obvious approach. Sadly, only Churchill had the guts to do this.
Absolute nonsense! If the USA was 100% mobilized to fight the Soviets, maybe we could have won a conventional war? We had nowhere near enough troops in Europe to beat the Russians in 1945. The US Army had 80 combat divisions. The Russians had hundreds of divisions. Even if we had the troops, millions of American soldiers would have been killed in action. It would have been a bloodbath.
Patton was confident of a win. He included using German Army units in his calculations plus superior air support.
I’m not advocating that, only stating what Patton thought.
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