304 
period of the preparation for nuclear war, will have no importance 
in the course of the war itself? Some bourgeois authors draw 
this conclusion irrespective of whether the future war will be 
a short or a long one, or of how it will begin. . . . It is difficult 
to agree with this point of view—the war may start as a conven- 
tional one and may only eventually grow into a nuclear one; 
the warring sides may under definite conditions be strong enough 
to wage a lengthy war and then its course and outcome will 
be enormously effective [sic] by the state of the combatants’ 
economy. ... In all probability the war will not end with an 
exchange of annihilating nuclear missile strikes. Despite the heavy 
destruction some part of industrial enterprise and other economic 
objectives will survive. It is therefore very possible that the 
remaining enterprises will be engaged both in the production of 
weapons and in catering to the needs of the population who 
have survived the bombings and radiation. Under these conditions 
decisive importance is acquired not only by the existing industrial 
potential of the warring coalitions, but also by their viability and 
mobility: the vulnerability of industry and communications and the 
ability to restore industrial production in the course of the war.’’® 
Of course, as has been pointed out earlier, the Soviet Union’s own 
resource and energy situation is not without its vulnerabilities 
economically; under wartime conditions, extremely long pipelines with 
pumps and compressors, linking sparsely-inhabited Siberian energy 
sources with the western U.S.S.R. and its Eastern European allies, 
would offer tempting targets that could be hit without causing major 
civilian casualties. 
However, vulnerable resource and energy arteries are of major im- 
portance not only under war conditions (a full-scale global war being, 
in any case, a repugnant and implausible contingency); as Admiral 
Gorshkov has pointed out, armed forces, including naval forces and 
submarines, are not merely instruments of war, but means of pressure 
for the achievement of political goals under nonwar conditions. The 
threat (implicit or explicit) of severing such arteries, especially 
between the West and its overseas sources of energy, could constitute 
a very effective means of pressure. 
As an astute eyewitness of the Soviet scene has commented: 
“The entire history of the U.S.S.R. demonstrates that the Soviet 
leaders place political goals above economic aims, although they 
have often been forced by economic crises to retrench. Hence, 
they are making an all-out effort to eliminate as quickly as possi- 
ble their dependence on foreign economic ties. [The U.S.S.R., 
of course, wishes] to ... derive maximum benefit from the 
West’s technological and economic potential, and [at the same 
time, also reveals] a readiness to foster local conflicts in order 
to achieve Soviet goals, yet retreat when a global clash threatens. 
Soviet diplomacy has played its far from brilliant cards very ably 
and has largely managed to convince the West that the develop- 
ment of foreign trade is of far more benefit to it than to the 
Soviet Union. What is more, it has even used this factor as 
an instrument of pressure on the Western countries.” 
20 Marxism-Leninism on War and Army, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972, pp. 222-223. (The 
work became available in the summer of 1973.) 
