THE POSSIBILITY
1945 ONWARDS MORE WAR FOR WINSTON?
British prime minister Winston Churchill found himself ousted from 10 Downing Street following the British general election on the 5 July 1945 but would once again become prime minister in 1951 at age 76. However, if he had launched Operation Unthinkable on his chosen date of 1 July, prior to the election, would the emergency have forced him to stay in the position? If so, who would have won the next election? Would we ever have seen the reforms, such as the creation of the NHS, introduced by Clement Attlee?
1945 AN EXTENDED PACIFIC WAR?
Despite the end of the war in Europe, Soviet forces pledged to assist in the ongoing war in the Pacific. Known as Operation August Storm, on 8 August 1945 (just two days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima), over 1 million Red Army troops invaded Manchuria and Sakhalin Island. The invasion was influential in contributing to the Japanese surrender on 2 September 1945. Any American involvement in Operation Unthinkable would have put an end to Soviet assistance in the Pacific War, meaning it potentially could have dragged on for months longer.
1945 ONWARDS NO COLD WAR?
From 1945 until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the West and the East were in a Cold War. Berlin and indeed Germany as a whole remained divided, with the former separated by a vast concrete wall, which became an enduring symbol of the Cold conflict as a whole. Throughout these 46 years, at several points the tensions between the two powers threatened to escalate. In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis saw the world poised for all-out nuclear conflict. Had Operation Unthinkable occurred, it’s likely the Cold War would not. But what would the international situation look like today?