Seven Days to the River Rhine
| Training Exercise "Seven Days to the River Rhine" | |||||||||
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| Part of Cold War | |||||||||
 A 1976 map of probable axes of attack for the Warsaw Pact forces into Western Europe |
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| Belligerents | |||||||||
 Warsaw PactGroup of Soviet Forces in Germany Soviet Army Northern Group of Forces |
 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Austria United Nations
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| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
 Leonid Brezhnev Col. Gen. Yuri Zarudin Gen. Yevgeni F. Ivanovski Dmitriy Ustinov Wojciech Jaruzelski Florian Siwicki Erich Honecker Heinz Hoffmann
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 Helmut Schmidt Hans Apel King Baudouin Queen Juliana Anker Jørgensen Rudolf Kirchschläger Bruno Kreisky
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| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| Would be carried out in response to a NATO first strike on Poland. Such a strike was estimated to cause 2,000,000 immediate Polish deaths near the Vistula river. | If carried out, heavy losses in West Germany. | ||||||||
Seven Days to the River Rhine was a top-secret military simulation exercise developed in 1979 by the Warsaw Pact. It depicted the Soviet bloc's vision of a seven-day nuclear war between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces.
This possible World War III scenario was released by the conservative Polish government following their election in 2005, in order to "draw a line under the country's Communist past", and "educate the Polish public about the old regime."
Radosław Sikorski, the Polish defense minister at the time the documents were released, stated that documents associated with the former regime would be declassified and published through the Institute of National Remembrance in the coming year.
The files released included documents about "Operation Danube", the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. They also included files on the 1970 Polish protests, and from the martial law era of the 1980s.
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