CDKW00109 - Imminence of War with the USSR?

Despite no indication that the USSR had any intention of war, the Chiefs of Staff Committee reportedly dedicated time to discuss that exact scenario in a meeting during the late summer of 1950, according to this document dated 11 August. The Canadian Chiefs of Staff still believed that Soviet forces and strategy continued to be based around a theory that armed conflict between the USSR and western democracies was an eventual inevitability. In light of this, the Chiefs of Staff were deeply concerned about any USSR aggression outside of Korea; with ground forces largely concentrated on the Korean peninsula, they feared there would be too few troops that could be deployed immediately to combat on a secondary front. Given these considerations, the Chiefs of Staff worried that “the likelihood of war with the U.S.S.R, or its satellites taking place in the period of the next twelve months is greater than at any time in the past and probably greater than in the succeeding period.”