Q: Elaborate on ground force deterrence.

A: IN the first place, unless Poland and the Checks are part of NATO, not much is going to happen from the west other than diplomatic panicking, but if somehow Poland and the Checks can talk the west into getting involved, then initially it would be western europe trying to stop inbound Russian forces with cruise missiles, which would initially be non-nuclear.

If Russia moves further west than Poland and Czechoslovakia, then the heat would be turned up by tipping the cruise missiles with nutron bombs.

Q: How effective will Europe be in deterring a Russian ground force invasion?

A: *Will*? You're talking like it's an inevitability, when there absolutely nothing for Russia to gain by doing an invasion of Poland and/or the Checks and Solvaks right now. In fact, with global warming, vast areas of Russia and Siberia are going to become inhabbitable and desirable in ways they weren't before, such that it's going to be Russia having to keep out people, like waves of Stanis crawling up from the already dry - and soon to be worse - south.

In the second place, a lot of the armaments that Russia used to have when part of the Soviet Union are gone now... it's been sold off to arms dealers for African war lords.

However, if Russia were to do an attack on the western europe, their policy has always been to hit the enemy with everything one has got as fast and as hard as one can. Think of it as Blitzkrieg Russian style.

Initially they'd try to keep it non nuclear, in order to hopefully keep the US out of it, and for that, they've developed a real kick-ass conventional weapon that uses a vacume-implosion effect to make an explosion as powerfull as a small atomic bomb. They also have an interesting delivery system that's like a fusion between and ICBM and a cruise missile, where it goes up to a high altitude, and then skims over the surface of the atmosphere as very high speeds, but is manouverable like a cruise missile.

So... first they'd want to make sure they know the locations of all the french and british subs, and if any of those are close enough to Russia to get involved before the attack has been settled, then they'd want to be very stealthily tracking those, ready to strike.

Then, in a coordinated fashion, they'd disable the british and french subs and launch their special atmosphereic skimmer ICBM cruisers armed with the special non-nuclear super-busters and take out all possible defenses in the west... in under 30 minutes.

Then they'd airdrop tactical forces to take control of government facilities asap, being followed by waves orf general occupation forces. If all went well they should have Poland and the Checks in a day.

All that time their diplomats would be working overtime keeping the US confused in order to keep the US out of it, and they'd have some subs of their own stationed off the coasts of england, france, and english and french foriegn posessions in order to stalement british and french involvement.

But that all presumes they stop at Poland and the Check Republic and Slovakia. If they went any further west then all those plans that NATO had for defending western europe are still in place, and the basic infrastructure for doing a nutron-bomb cruise-missile response to Russia crossing into Germany are all still in place.