Poland opened up secret files of the former Warsaw Pact which confirmed that the Soviet-led military alliance was ready to accept Europe's annihilation with nuclear strikes as part of a war with NATO.
"These documents are crucial for educating the public about the way Poland was kept as an unwilling ally of the Soviet Union during the Cold War," Defence Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told a news conference.
Sikorski said he was handing over about 700 files, which have until now been kept secret, to the National Remembrance Institute, where they will be studied by historians.
A map in one file shows Soviet and East European troop movements and the targets of nuclear strikes during a possible war between the Warsaw Pact and NATO.
"It shows a classic Warsaw Pact exercise, namely a counter-attack, as the 'forces of progress' would never attack first, which involved going all the way to the Atlantic. It includes expected points of impact of nuclear weapons, both Soviet and NATO," Sikorski said.
"Seeing this map was a moving and shattering experience. It shows that ... we were being asked to participate in an operation which could have resulted in the nuclear annihilation of our country," he added.
The ruling conservatives, who beat the ex-communist leftists in September's general election, have promised to open up communist-era archives to reveal the whole truth about the communist rule imposed on Poland after World War Two.
"Building the future must be based on truth about the past," Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz told foreign reporters, brushing off suggestions that the opening of the files would worsen already strained relations with Russia.
Poland and other East European countries escaped Soviet domination in 1989 when communism in the region collapsed. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved and the Soviet Union fell apart.
Poland and other former Soviet satellites joined NATO in 1999 and eight ex-communist countries entered the European Union last year in its largest ever expansion.
Sikorski said the files would offer valuable knowledge about the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which ended the Prague Spring and wrecked hopes that communism could be reformed to allow freedom of speech and respect for human rights.
The files could prove embarrassing for former senior communists and military men such as General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who as party chief and prime minister crushed the Solidarity pro-democracy movement in 1981 by declaring martial law.
Jaruzelski, now retired, has said he had to impose martial law to avoid a Soviet invasion.
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