Civil Defense Perspectives September 2010 Volume 26 No. 6
In the popular American view, the embodiment of evil is Adolf Hitler, and the Bad Guys in movies such as Indiana Jones are portrayed as Nazis. Hitler caused World War II, with some help from Imperial Japan, but the Axis was vanquished by the valiant Allies. We had the Nuremberg Trials, hunted down an odd surviving Nazi, and remain vigilant for the reemergence of some neo-Nazis in places like Idaho or at Tea Parties. Now that the Cold War is also over, the world is safe for liberal democracy.
What If It Isn’t True?
Intelligence analyst Viktor Suvorov, who defected from the Soviet Union to the United Kingdom in 1978, presents a startling revisionist view in his 2008 book The Chief Culprit. If he is correct, then we have failed to learn critical historical lessons—with potentially fatal consequences.
Suvorov joined the Soviet Army at age 11. In 7 years of military boarding school, he was taught situation analysis—drawing crucial conclusions from fragmentary data. Then he went to the topmost secret Soviet military academy. He was taught “to trust no one, to question every fact, to verify every piece of data. It is easy to repeat known facts. It is much more difficult to find something that nobody knows.” He was taught to look for the internal logic of everything.
Suvorov noticed a striking anomaly. The Soviet press always hid anything negative until it could no longer be covered up. There were no reports of monstrous Soviet defeats in 1942 in the Crimea, Leningrad, and Rzhev. But after the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Communist propaganda blared out, in tens of thousands of articles and radio and TV broadcasts, reports of Soviet ineptitude and unpreparedness: obsolete tanks, airplanes that were “flying coffins,” and Stalin’s stupidity in trusting Hitler.
And while there was enormous worldwide publicity about the German attack on Poland on Sep 1, 1939, with tanks mowing down Polish cavalry, there was not one word about the first Blitzkrieg on Aug 19, 1939. This one occurred in Mongolia. In a surprise attack, the Red Army delivered an unprecedented crushing defeat to the entire Japanese Sixth Army. About this astonishing feat, involving 53,000 Soviet troops in contrast to the 1.6 million German soldiers in Poland, Stalin ordered—silence.
In 1941, Soviet armaments were in fact awesome in both quantity and technologic superiority. Suvorov could think of only one example in which a person or nation would try to prove itself stupid and unfit for a fight. Imagine a murderer in court trying to convince a jury that he was not guilty of a crime because he was mentally challenged, blind, and too weak to raise an ax, and possessed only a broken gun with no bullets.
Research on the subject of this more than 70-year-old history was extremely difficult. There are still 215,000 “special folders” in the Kremlin archives to which no one has access, Suvorov writes. One of his most useful sources was archives of German military intelligence, sequestered in Moscow, which contained maps of German and Soviet troop deployments. They were mirror images: both were deployed for a surprise attack, in undefendable positions vulnerable to enemy encirclement.
The Chief Culprit
Stalin’s goal was worldwide Communist revolution. An early attempt to foment workers’ uprisings in Germany failed. One provocateur, Agent 007, captured by German authorities, wrote Mein Kampf while imprisoned. The book’s chief admirer and most careful scholar was Josef Stalin. Ignoring Hitler’s expressed ambition to seek Lebensraum to the east—knowing that tiny, resource-deprived Germany could never defeat mighty Russia—Stalin helped bring his unwitting pawn to power, and rearmed Germany despite the Treaty of Versailles.
Hitler’s fatal error was the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact to divide Poland, which Suvorov calls the “Moscow Pact to Start World War II.” Germany marched in, and Britain and France declared war, as they had promised, and as Stalin (but not Hitler) knew they would. Stalin’s troops just stood on the border, until Hitler’s tanks were out of fuel and mired in the mud. Despite Stalin’s atrocities in Poland, which rivaled or exceeded Hitler’s, Britain and France treated Stalin as an ally, and Hitler got sole credit for starting the war.
The plan, Suvorov writes, was to let Germany exhaust itself while weakening the western Allies, and then for the Soviets to roll over Germany to “liberate” the whole of Europe. It failed, because when Stalin moved a little too close to the Rumanian oil fields, Hitler figured out what was happening. With absolutely no warning or preparation, Germany suddenly invaded Russia. The invasion was doomed from the start, but was at the time the best available course for Germany. Hitler’s troops annihilated tens of divisions of the Red Army, and destroyed strategic reserves and most of the ammunition factories. Russia still beat Hitler—with only the remaining 15% of its ammunition.
After the war, many Nazi concentration camps were not shut down, but simply incorporated into the GULAG. The 25% death rate in the Communist Buchenwald was even higher than the 20% under Nazi rule. Stalin, however, was not tried at Nuremberg. He was our ally—and there was a Soviet prosecutor, who managed to keep proof of the secret Soviet-German pact out of the evidence.
Stalin ultimately lost World War II, no thanks to Western Allies. In 1945, writes Suvorov, tens of millions of square kilometers lay at Stalin’s feet, but Hitler had wiped out the best part of the male Soviet population. There was no one to harvest the crops in the fields, and famine killed a million people in 1946 and 1947. No census was conducted until 1959, after Stalin’s death.
“Stalin had sentenced Europe to death, but could not carry out the execution,” Suvorov states.
“The Soviet Union was created for war and conquest. It was not adapted for peacetime. It could either spread over the entire planet and kill off all normal life, or die.” Stalin immediately began preparing for World War III. He punished entire peoples and nations—Volga Germans, Chechens, Tatars, and others.
The Soviet Union was apparently crushed in 1991 by the burden of its military expenditures. But is the dream of Communist world domination dead? If we follow Suvorov’s method, we will ignore the soothing rhetoric of politicians, and instead count the hardware and analyze its deployment.
Mightier than the Sword
In hell, Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler reminisce.
“If I had had but a single tank, I would have won at Waterloo,” Napoleon said.
“A single jet bomber would have made all the difference at Verdun,” the Kaiser muses.
“All I needed was Pravda,” said Hitler. “Had I controlled Pravda, the Russians would not know to this day that I lost the war.”
Petr Beckmann, Hammer and Tickle, 1980
Publication Schedule
The last issue that we mailed was July 2010. Though we somehow managed to meet a bimonthly deadline for more than 25 years, the battle over “healthcare reform” and the 2010 election were major distractions. We intend to catch up gradually, mailing an “old” issue with the current one.
Work on our project to distribute RadStickers to first responders continues, thanks to the indefatigable efforts of our Special Projects Director Stephen Jones.
Preparation for War?
In case you blinked while the following were covered in the press (or not):
Chinese Stealth Fighter. U.S. intelligence apparently underestimated the speed at which the Chinese were developing the J-20, a fifth-generation stealth fighter, which evidently uses technology transfers made under the Clinton Administration. The J-20, scheduled for deployment by 2017, is comparable to the U.S. F-22, production of which has been halted. The U.S. is switching to the more advanced F-35, but deployment status is uncertain, owing to cost overruns. China is also quickly developing faster and quieter submarines, long-range cruise missiles, and possibly a more robust jet engine so it can challenge the F-35 (F. Michael Maloof, G2 Bulletin 1/17/11).
Iranian Strategic Weapons. With aid from Russia and China, Iran is reportedly developing an ICBM with a 3,500-mile range, which could reach all of Europe, and one with a 6,300-mile range, which could reach the eastern U.S. It also has a super torpedo, against which U.S. aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf apparently have no defense. Other technology transfers include surface-to-air missiles and dual-use chemicals and precursors needed for chemical weapons (ibid.).
Missile Rising Over California. On Nov 10, during evening rush hour, a KCBS television crew videotaped a billowing plume rising from the ocean about 30 miles off the coast of Los Angeles. The government’s official response was that it was a contrail from a jet aircraft, although FAA documents showed no aircraft in the area at that time. According to Brig. Gen Jimmy L. Cash, USAF Ret., this was unquestionably a missile launch, most likely from a submerged Chinese submarine that had not been detected. NORAD’s assessment was simply that North America was “not threatened.” (G2 Bulletin 11/19, 2010). The missile was likely a JL-2 ICBM, range 7,000 mi., fired to demonstrate China’s naval capability right off our coast (Schwarz Report, January 2011).
Underground Great Wall. The Chinese army is believed to have built a massive underground network of tunnels stretching 5,000 km to conceal mobile, nuclear-tipped missiles. The underground missile base could withstand several nuclear attacks and launch a counterstrike (Chosunilbo 12/14/09).
Nuclear Shelters. For a TravelChannelTV tour of Beijing’s underground shelter/city—built with picks and shovels, see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF6Fh0P9y58. A tour of the Moscow metro shelter is here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgBA6Pl1we8. A British report on Russia’s plans to build an additional 5,000 shelters in Moscow by 2012 is available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OADS8rMYJU.
Samuel Cohen, R.I.P.
Known as the father of the neutron bomb, Samuel Cohen died in December 2009, at age 89. He was a steadfast advocate of American civil defense, and a harsh critic of American war policy. In his view, the U.S. has not won a single victory since World War II: He said at the time of the Cold War victory attributed to the Reagan-Bush military build-up that “the U.S. was second best by a country mile” in every category, nuclear and nonnuclear.
“I don’t know the explanation except that the Soviets decided to cave in. To what extent they have caved in militarily, I get back to the ignorance factor. Our intelligence has never been good enough to be able to determine exactly what the status of the Soviet military really is” (CDP, July 1992).
Cohen said the inspiration for the neutron bomb came from a visit to Seoul in 1951. The city had been largely flattened by conventional bombing, and abandoned children were drinking from gutters filled with sewage. He wondered about a nuclear device that could be used against battle formations without wrecking cities and the lives of their inhabitants. In his 1983 autobiography, Shame: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb, he called this device “the most moral weapon ever invented.”
The inventory of neutron bombs produced by order of President Reagan was destroyed by order of George W. Bush.
The audiotape of Cohen’s 1992 presentation at the DDP meeting, “The Best Defense Is Defense,” is now available at www.ddponline.org/audio-video.
Lame Ducks Ratify New START
For the first time in U.S. history, a lame-duck Congress voted to ratify a strategic arms reduction treaty with the Soviet Union or Russia. While the Obama Administration claims that the treaty will have no effect on current U.S. [minimal] missile defenses, it limits future defenses that might undermine the “viability and effectiveness” of Russia’s strategic nuclear force. It has no on-site monitoring of mobile missile production facilities (Ed Meese and Richard Perle, WSJ 12/2/10).
Lt. Gen. Alexander Burutin, deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, stated that Russia would not destroy a single missile or launcher before its service life is over. He also said that Russia would carry out 10 to 12 test ballistic missile launches per year; it agreed to transfer telemetric data on only five of them to the U.S.
The treaty will leave the Russians with thousands more nuclear weapons than the U.S., considering their 10-to-1 advantage in tactical arms, stated Frank Gaffney (G2 Bulletin 12/11/10).
Civil Defense Perspectives 26(6): September 2010 [published March 2011]