I read the Child's Version of Churchill's History as a boy, back in the '60s.
Churchill said, correctly, that it would have been very easy for the UK to have prevented WWII, bloodlessly, in '33: Germany had been completely disarmed in 1919, and the UK could have ordered that Germany could not rearm, and must pick a new Chancellor, one who would promise not to re-arm. Churchill said that he thundered against letting Germany re-arm in '33, but I can't find a single example of one of those speeches anywhere in the morgue. So it appears that Churchill, like the rest of the British leadership, was terrified of the USSR and wanted a lightly armed Germany to pose a slight resistance that would slow the Soviet attack down enough for the UK and France to get ready to defend against it.
In any case, the UK did nothing in '33, Germany elected Ad0lph and re-armed, and the UK and France became afraid of Germany in 1938, so both started working on their defences: for France, the Maginot Line, and for the UK, the radar shield, and both wanted time to prepare.
So, in 1938, Chamberlain signed a (faux) Peace Treaty with Germany promising 'Peace in Our Time', Peace that did not last, and for which Churchill condemned Chamberlain, a condemnation that persists to this day. But the British radar shield saved the UK from the Luftwaffe attacks in '40 (the Maginot Line didn't do much for France, since the Wehrmacht figured out how to get around it).
But most of the British Expeditionary Force made their way back to the UK from Dunkirk, and Germany figured that an amphibious attack would be a disaster, so Germany used bombers, many of which were shot down thanks to the radar shield, and the UK managed to hold on until the US joined the war.
The Soviets got lots of materiel and Spam from the US to help them in their war effort, a contribution the US and USSR preferred not to remember: helping/being helped by the enemy.
But the Soviets fought at Leningrad and Stalingrad, and one can no longer see Leningrad or Stalingrad on any up-to-date map, so obviously, the Wehrmacht won, and had all of Eurasia until 1944 when the US marched in and single-handedly destroyed the Wehrmacht. At least that's the official US version, and that's the version that was in all the history books I had to read in High School. Along with the Churchill's lie that the UK could have easily defeated Germany in 1938 and Chamberlain giving Germany an extra year to prepare was the reason the UK lost in France in 1940. (Most likely, if the UK went to war in 1938, the BEF would have been defeated and captured in Czechoslovakia, not managed to get back to the UK to defend against an amphibious invasion, and with no radar shield, the Luftwaffe would have devastated the UK with bombing runs and not enough carrots for the RAF--Churchill always said the RAF knew when and where the Luftwaffe were coming because he fed them lots of carrots; Churchill's histories never mention the radar shield that Chamberlain completed shortly before the war began.)
So now we're back trying to figure out to stop the Soviet advance. The Russians may have changed their name from 'Soviets', but the Russians remain Russians, no matter what they call themselves, and all of Europe West of Russia are terrified that a Soviet attack is imminent, and that it can be easily stopped if they just act now, and act strongly.
WWII was the last war fought with only one nuclear power who bombed two civilian cities with no military significance, because they couldn't risk their nuclear bombs on any city with military significance that would be defended and might shoot the Enola Gay down. And the US hoped to teach the USSR a lesson: don't mess with anything west of the USSR. Only what actually happened was that everyone knew the basics of the atom bomb, that it required about 60 tonnes of uranium (mostly yellowcake, plus a little metallic uranium), and this was outrageously expensive and might not work.
After the Soviets saw that it did work, they immediately got 60 tonnes of uranium together, let it sit for 3 years producing plutonium, and in 1949, the USSR was the world's 2nd nuclear power.
J. Edgar Hoover was tasked with finding the spies that explained what uranium was to the ignorant Soviets who couldn't possible have figured this out by themselves, and arrested someone who was promised a prison sentence if he named one or more confederates, and the death penalty if he didn't. This went on until two Jews, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, refused to name anyone else, so both were executed in 1953.
France also figured out how to make a nuke, and the US helped the UK, so there were four nuclear powers.
Then the PRC, India, Pakistan, and the DPRK all developed public nukes, and one state probably has 'secret' nukes that everyone knows that they have.
Someone, probably MI6, with additional intelligence from the CIA and help from Mossad, managed to destroy a large part of the Russian nuclear force, so it looks like Russia is not the nuclear power that the USSR was, and can easily be defeated by a massive attack before they can launch any of their (probably no longer operational) nukes. So most of Europe west of Russia are all for a strategic stab at Russia to completely destroy Russia, break them up into somewhere between 5 and 20 small, unarmed countries, with all their resources handed over as war reparations, mostly to US oiligarchs (but with a little going to the UK, France, and other members of NATO).
What could possibly go wrong with such a brilliant plan????
