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.
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“We’re not innovating. We’re selectively imitating.” June Bernstein, Acting President of the University of Arizona in Tucson, November 15, 1998.
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