I knew I liked Churchill.
We totally could have destroyed Stalin in the 40s, and should have.
Bad idea.
Truman gutted the armed forces, especially the Army, after 1945, to the extent that we had a major problem handling one third world country’s invasion of another in Korea. Britain was in worse shape, and we hadn’t even started building NATO yet. I think it’s ludicrous to think we could have handled the Red Army rolling westward.
The only way such a sneak attack could have worked is if it had decapitated the Soviet system and USSR had disintegrated into chaos. That’s possible, but I think any such attack in 1947 would have been a very bad idea.
Hopefully we would have learned from the Germans, and the French, and their failures. Russia is an unpleasant country to fight a war in the winter.