THE COLD WAR
By Alex Ness
July 5, 2021
INTRO
The future of the world I live in now is actually something that seems better than what many predicted in the past. A major reason for that is that the Super Powers of the Soviet Warsaw Pact and the Western NATO forces didn't go to war and fight existential battles with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. I've heard people say China caused COVID, and so that is an existential biological war but I think you need to look closer, since the West was investing in, and paying for specific research at the labs in China working on those supposed viruses. And the term China Virus? That is a vile racist term. I realize some people cannot understand how a person just couldn't see the truth in their vile accusations, I just think it is simplistic and almost certainly wrong.
"In their loss of purpose, in their abandonment even of the themes they most sincerely espoused, Britain, France, and most of all, because of their immense power and impartiality, the United States, allowed conditions to be gradually built up which led to the very climax they dreaded most. They have only to repeat the same well-meaning, short-sighted behaviour towards the new problems which in singular resemblance confront us today to bring about a third convulsion from which none may live to tell the tale." Winston Churchill
THE COLD WAR TURNED HOT
As this is written from the perspective of having lived in the Cold War era, I am also aware so much of that era could resurface, we haven't become friends with our enemies, and we for damn sure haven't turned our swords into plowshares. As such I think it is important to note that playing games that take place during the Cold War isn't born from a desire to have experienced that open war that was feared. The games shown above do a good job of presenting a scenario and having that in front of you, strategize or make choices as a character to achieve a tactical victory.
The region known as the Fulda Gap was long considered the most likely site of the next global conflict, since the terrain and the active players in the war would almost certainly collide with armor, infantry and air support, and if things went badly for the NATO Powers, one might expect to see tactical nuclear warheads used. That would almost certainly lead to an all out exchange... and I always found the SPI game FULDA GAP to be a truly terrifying real setting, that no matter who won, you knew, even if the NATO forces held off the Warsaw Pact, this conflict wasn't over, and this scenario would lead to more conflict, and was never going to end up with victory celebrations and parades.
The small game ICE WAR from Metagaming/Microgame was great fun. It was extremely limited in scenario and scope but strategy was important, as was each unit used. It was more science fiction or military fiction than the previous game, but it still used concepts alive at the time (late 1970s, early 1980s). The first clash of that imaginary Third World War was in Alaska, where a coalition of the Communist nations and similar form of governments sent forces to cut off America's only true source of Oil. The game was simple in design but truly fun to play.
TWILIGHT 2000 is an RPG with a great deal of technically accurate scenarios and rules. It was more playable than most similar games, but if there were flaws, it was a world that could demand knowledge of the world outside of our own. At the time I played it, there were people who couldn't understand how American troops were in Europe to begin with, at a time when we had many thousands. Also, there were people attracted to it who might be considered gun nuts, who just liked to kill things. While that happens in any RPG, the need to work as a team and understand what you are trying to accomplish was paramount here in this game. So, there were better sessions played and worse ones. But, I will say, I think it was a great game, and if it had only had more fictional support in the form of novels as well as new scenario book it could have been one of the best game worlds. As it was I still liked it very much.
Another example of a game simulating the result of the next world war, would be a game most of us born before the 1990s have played, MISSILE COMMAND, where the player attempts to defend cities from warheads crashing down upon the city, using anti missile missiles and proximity explosion weapons. But, the moral of that story is, you always end up losing everything. It isn't a matter of winning, it is a matter of not dying as long as you can possibly do so. As such, it certainly reflects the reality of warfare in a Nuclear age.
As I began this article I began to realize that there are many many books using the future wars or potential nuclear war as something to avoid, by the actions in the book, to recover from, due to previous actions taken by various countries going to war, or lastly, fight the war that the Cold War did not fight. Therefore rather than give a flavor of ten thousand books, just three I liked most particularly regarding the subject.
Sir John Hackett's THE THIRD WORLD WAR: August 1985 was written in such prose as to use the conceit that it was written in the future looking back on this period of time. It was academic in ways, not written as a thriller, but in a way to move the action along in ways that the reader could appreciate what was going on. It is frightening and rather good. The only flaws I saw in it were from the lack of absolute prescience of knowing the changes in the world order immediately happening between the publication of this book, and the forward timed event. The idea that Iran and US forces would join teams to push out Soviets is laughable now, but this book was written prior to the fall of the Shah. And who knows, lots can happen in many different ways, the future is not a guarantee for any of us.
TEAM YANKEE by Harold Coyle is a very good read. It is a fiction based on similar events happening in the now contested areas of Germany, between the NATO units and those of the Warsaw Pact. The events center around the lives of members of a armored unit, even their families, and shows how the events that happen in fine detail can have a great effect upon the lives beyond that event. One armored team delaying the massive onslaught of an invader can give the defender time to plan and fight with pinpoint tenacity.
Nevil Shute's ON THE BEACH is a highly moving and somber treatment of a world that used every means of destruction available upon the enemy, and the cobalt enhanced bombs leak radiation that will, inevitably, kill everyone on planet earth. The war began with series of attacks and counterattacks, NATO eventually blames the Soviets, and the slow run up to war moves quickly to envelop the globe. In the end the submarine featured is used to find out if the radiation has decreased in the Arctic, and to discover if the signal coming in from the West Coast of the US is from a human rather than a computer, or some unconsidered anomaly. This is not a happy book, but I definitely think people should seek it out.
HISTORIANS TO READ REGARDING 20TH CENTURY WARS BEFORE THE COLD WAR
AJP Taylor
I am a great "fan" of the writing of AJP Taylor. His knowledge is thorough and his writing makes the subjects he covers both comprehensive and modern in prose. He was an able debater of ideas, and there are a variety of ways in which he caused the field to adopt ideas he suggested, which were different than the common orthodox views. He saw violent actors on both sides of the war, and didn't mince words. His work THE WAR LORDS, by title alone should give you an idea where he is planning on taking the book. He saw no great white knight figures, and only one truly villainous character, and all the while, his expansive understanding of the world politics preceding the Second World War shows in his knowing comments about the figures who took the world to war. I prefer my history to be clean from fawning lovers of the hero, or painters of evil men all around, he tells us the foibles of the leaders, and he gives all of the reasons for choices made, paths taken. He wasn't prone to loving Americans, and his body of work is European at heart. But he didn't mistake anything for what it was not.
I didn't include an image of one of Beevor more famous books, BERLIN THE DOWNFALL 1945, but I like all of his work. Some people are seduced by his prose style to think they aren't reading an academic work, but each book has solid history documentation. I particularly liked his Spanish Civil War book because it has a lot less advocacy for one side or the other, however much he is sympathetic to the events. I never mind when a historian has his or her own outlook, what I mind is when it is made into a paradigm and it violates known facts. I've not read that kind of history with Beevor. I have heard some folks think he was too general with the Spanish Civil War book, but in my experience most of what I read was too finite in detail. I don't mind learning more, but above all, if millions die and many nations participate I'd really like to know the overview more than the minute details.
David Glantz
I've read most of the books I can find of David Glantz, and they are well written and historically accurate. He is a historian of the military actions of the Red Army of the Soviet Union, and his instinct is to both trust Russian sources and to assume that German accounts have biased information in them, due to the mythology built around the loss suffered by the German army to the Soviet Red Army. As it happens, many writers of the 50s through the 70s, regarding the actions of the German armies, didn't do nearly the study of records of the Soviet archives for one huge reason, many were not allowed to do so. Being forced to rely upon one sided information, history was written and presented as fully resourced and reasonable, when it truly was not. Glantz took advantage of new openness as well as the fall of the Soviet state to learn far more than predecessors in the west were able to do so. As such, there is a realism in his work that I am moved by. There is something else though... While I do not take issue with his books or ideas, I do sense someone who has a bias. However, knowing that he is more likely to believe Soviet facts than Nazi German General recollections, it is a bias I consider known and not an obstacle to learning from his words.
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