To go back to the tracking thing for a sec, if the soviets were tracking US missile boats they certainly wouldn't share that info publicly, and the americans wouldn't have anything to gain by leaking it either.

There are some stories out there from the soviet side of the submarine "war" (for lack of a better word...submarine cold war perhaps?). Apparently the Victor-Class boats did a pretty good job messing with the ASW detection systems on the east coast. Then again, the truth is probably some compromise between the official position of either side.

Gauging the uncertainties is always quiet the exercise. Conventional wisdom tells us that NATO defenses are not as effective as NATO would have us believe; nor are Soviet abilities to penetrate those defenses as great as they would have us believe. On the other hand, conventional wisdom had the Coalition suffering 20,000 casualties on the first day of operations. 1st US Infantry Division was supposed to be combat ineffective 24 hours into the operation. In hindsight, we can see why the Iraqi defenses collapsed the way they did, but I never read any predictions that came close to the reality of the blow-out the Coalition produced. So it's possible that NATO ASW operations in the Atlantic would have produced an exceptionally one-sided result for reasons that would only become obvious in retrospect.

Heck, I remember having my high school teachers tell me in the mid-1980's that the Soviet Union would last another hundred years at least.

I will also contend that the unexpectedly one-sided result could go the other way as well. Realistically, the results would be somewhere between the two extremes, but we'll never truly know what would have happened.

And I thank God for that!!!!

As do I