Could Have Avoided This Plot: Difference between revisions
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* In the novel ''Red Storm Rising'', the Soviet Union's largest oil refinery and the nearby oil production fields are destroyed by a terrorist attack, and the USSR launches an invasion of West Germany to distract from their true intentions for the Middle East in order to get the oil it needs, intending to use their existing stocks of already existing refined oil to fuel what they expected to be an easy defeat of a NATO surprised by a supposedly unexpected sudden attack. By the end of the novel, the Russians are repelled, and in the final pages a NATO commander quips that if only the Soviets had asked for help, the West would have been happy to sell it to them. "We would have demanded and gotten some kind of concessions, but don't you think we would have tried to avoid all ''this''?"
** One Politburo member actually pointed out that they could simply ''buy'' fuel, something they could afford slightly better than losing a war they had at best an even chance of winning, but was overruled for fear of the scenario mentioned in ''The Devil's Alternative'', below; The United States would have them over a barrel. [[Incredibly Lame Pun|Of oil.]]
*** The Politburo considered it but decided against on the grounds that they were afraid the Americans would ask for concessions that would ultimately destabilize the Soviet Union's political situation
*** It's also a plot point that an overly ambitious KGB deputy director generously passed his estimates of the USSR's odds of winning that war, as the decision to go to war was made during an absence for illness of the much less overconfident KGB Director. Had the Politburo known their actual odds of winning the war were not actually a slam dunk as they'd been told it was, they'd probably not have gone for it.
** This type of situation was handled far better in the novel ''The Devil's Alternative'', where the Soviet Union is permitted to purchase desperately needed wheat by agreeing to arms reductions, thus averting a similar invasion of West Germany.
* In the first [[Dragaera|Vlad Taltos]] book, Vlad makes a complaint of this nature to Sethra Lavode and Morrolan after learning his embezzling employee was their plot to meet with him. Subverted in the next two sentences when he acknowledges that he probably wouldn't have come if they just asked.
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