Abstract
The defense of Western Europe from a Soviet/Warsaw Pact attack has been a major preoccupation of U.S. national security decision makers for the past 40 years. It has recently received renewed attention in the wake of the INF Treaty. This paper presents a tool for analyzing NATO's ability to stop a Warsaw Pact blitzkrieg without the use of nuclear weapons: a computer simulation. The model is based on the earlier work of Joshua Epstein. After the essence of a blitzkrieg and the model are described, several scenarios are explored using both. The results of the blitzkrieg model, while not as optimistic as those of Epstein, do offer some hope for NATO's ability to stop the Warsaw Pact.
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