[Bobbo]

There was a war plan:
Dropshot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dropshot

earlier Totality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Totality

This is article on Dropshot speculates how a WWIII could start
http://www.johnreilly.info/ww3.htm

(It assumes Stalin is still alive in the '50s and Adlai Stevenson is president and they have the personalities & policies the writer ascribes to them)

http://www.johnreilly.info/ww3.htm

If the parties to the Cold War had wanted a military showdown, they would have had several perfectly suitable occasions in 1956, notably the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Uprising. Had Stalin still been alive at that time, it is conceivable that he would have started to deal with the peoples of Eastern Europe as he had begun to deal with the peoples of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Certainly some Eastern Europeans believed that Stalin was planning massive movements of populations and the vigorous purging of pre-World War II society. If this happened, an outraged Stevenson Administration might then have announced its intention to send a standby expeditionary force to Western Europe to support any future popular uprisings in Eastern Europe. Less suspicious rulers than Stalin would have been moved to preemptive action in such an event. He would not have been reassured by the interminable flow of moralistic rhetoric that President Stevenson could have been relived upon to produce. There would have been too much of it to read, much less analyze. Stalin could easily have decided that he could no longer wait for his creatures in Western Europe to take power through force or fraud. Hoping for a decisive victory before the U.S. expeditionary force could arrive, he sends his armies across the north German plain to take the ports on the English Channel.

Easy enough to have Stalin send in the NKVD in '46-'47 to liquidate out his "enemies" en mass in eastern Europe and with the memory still fresh of the Nazi death camps Trunman being so outraged to see a repeat he moves to stop it by force.