🚀 go-pugleaf

Gabriele Neukam <Gabriele.Spamfighter.Neukam@t-online.de> wrote:

> On that special day, Jaakko Raipala, (raipala@pcu.helsinki.fi) said...
>> Look at the map - how happy do you think the Soviet Union would've
>> been with American bases in Finland? That would've been the start of
>> WWIII.
>
> Maybe, maybe not. Whatever, they had been here in the western part of 
> the FRG, and the soviets had had their army in the eastern part of what 
> then was the GDR, and now is part of the FRG, too. I think this was one 

The GDR was not a part of the Soviet Union. The point grabbing the
communist bloc was (besides spreading the ideology) to get a buffer
zone between the Russian heartlands and Western Europe. That's always
been the primary directive of Russian military thinking: having as
much land as possible buffering the heartlands (and that has often
worked very well in the past). It's a natural way of thinking for a
huge country without clear geographically defined boundaries, easily
attacked from the west through plains.

American bases in Finland would've been extremely offensive to the
Soviets, considering that it's closer to the Russian heartlands than
any other western country (right next to the USSR's second biggest
city - and the Soviets well knew Finland's wish to move the border
back in its pre-WW place, mere miles from Leningrad!).

Judging from the comments we're getting, the Russian military planners
still seems to think this way, even though the idea of huge land
buffers to stop a NATO invasion is obviously ridiculously outdated.

> But I don't actually know if there were any US military facilities in 
> scandinavia, and if there were, where they might have been. 

There are US bases in Iceland (although it's not in Scandinavia, any
more than Finland is). They also have a base in Greenland, which is a
part of Denmark (but definitely not Scandinavia!). Dunno about others,
if they have, it's probably something minor. All the Nordic NATO
members have managed to negotiate a special exception to NATO rules
forbidding nuclear weapons on their soil in peacetime.