No Credible Defense Against a Soviet Attack--2

I've skimmed the British documents, and it's interesting to see how upset Prime-Minister Callahan was about the "thin" British home island defenses against a Soviet attack. The problem is (and the internal discussion acknowledges part of this) that the imagined Soviet attack was a worst-case scenario, and that due to NATO's article 5 Britain would never have had to defend itself alone. Callahan may have overreacted. Interesting is also that there's no sustained analysis in these papers of how a Soviet attack might proceed (the extent to which sometimes impressive Soviet capabilities on paper would be effective in practice), and what role the U.K. would play in a Soviet plan of attack on the West. Of course, if you're in a position of responsibility, you'd better think of the worst-case scenario--or, in our post-9/11 era, try to imagine the unimaginable. Still, looking back knowing where the Soviet Union was headed (remember old Brezhnev and his colleagues Andropov and Chernenko, Tichonov, Ustinov?), the seriousness with which British leaders apparently considered the possibility of an overwhelming Soviet attack strikes as a bit awkward. After all, the Warsaw Pact, just like NATO, had lots of contingency plans, but neither side seems to have thought seriously about initiating a war of conquest against the other side. Everything becomes a lot less awkward, however, if you consider the most likely way a big war could have started during the Cold War, namely by accident. We came pretty close a few times, for example in 1962 (Cuban Missile Crisis) and maybe 1983.