POLAND: Poland's new conservative government has announced plans to release sensitive Warsaw Pact military documents in an attempt to "end the post-Communist era".
Defence minister Radoslaw Sikorski has published a 1979 plan showing how the Soviet Union would have retaliated against a Nato attack on eastern bloc countries with nuclear bombs obliterating major western European cities.
"It is crucial to educate the public on the way that Poland was kept as an unwilling ally in the Cold War," the defence minister said.
Educated at Oxford, Mr Sikorski served as junior minister in the Polish foreign ministry from 1998-2001 and as executive director of the conservative New Atlantic Initiative in Washington.
"It is important for people to know who was the hero and who was the villain," he said.
Opposition politicians in Warsaw have dismissed the plan, announced a month after the new government came to power, as a "propaganda gimmick" to stir up anti-Communist feeling and one which will damage Poland's relations with Russia and its reputation abroad.
Warsaw Pact members agreed in 1991, as the alliance fell apart, not to disclose secret documents in the future, but Mr Sikorski said on Friday that Poland had never ratified that agreement.
He signed into law on Friday an order giving researchers access to almost 1,700 volumes of the Warsaw Pact's top-secret archives through the state Institute of National Remembrance from next year.
However former defence minister Bronislaw Komorowski said the new law did not automatically mean files would be made public.
The hypothetical Warsaw Pact plan - to go into operation after a Nato attack - showed mushroom clouds over Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark but apparently left Britain, France and Ireland unscathed.
Nato would have retaliated, according to Soviet thinking, by striking Warsaw Pact forces based around the Vistula River, which Mr Sikorski suggested would have killed two million Poles.
Similar documents were released by a Hungarian government commission four years ago, detailing retaliatory strikes on Vienna, Munich, Verona and Vicenza.
The move comes at a delicate time in relations between Warsaw, Moscow and Berlin, ahead of the first state visit by the German Chancellor, Dr Angela Merkel, to Poland on Friday.
The Polish government is concerned at plans to build a new pipeline under the Baltic Sea to supply Germany with Russian natural gas because it would allow Moscow to shut down gas supply to Poland and other central European countries without affecting western European countries.