ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Alternative historical scenarios allow us to better understand the specific decisions that various politicians have made in the real history. Any head of state, while making a decision, approximate, in one way or another, the possible future in case of both fulfilling the appointed decision and its cancellation. Today’s reconstruction of the virtual past leads us to better understanding of the historical persons’ motivation and lets us estimate how justified their decisions had been. Long story short, alternative historical scenarios give the opportunity to estimate the lost prospects or, on the contrary, dangers for the state that were avoided (in our case we’re talking of the second variant). The question — whether the world would have turned to worse or to better — if at some given moment the course of history was different — is not vain at all. Its solution is vitally important for giving the appraisal estimates to the events of the past.

As far back as in September of 1938 Winston Churchill, then First Lord of Admiralty (naval minister) of Great Britain, put the question of mining the Norwegian coastal waters in order to bar Germany from exporting the iron ore via the Norwegian seaport Narwik to the agenda of Her Majesty’s Cabinet. In December of 1939 Churchill unambiguously supported the idea of preventive occupation of Norway. The USSR was fighting the war against Finland at the time and the plans of English presence in the North of Europe started to acquire the shape of the clearly anti-Soviet kind. In the same report dated the 16th of December, 1939 Churchill unequivocally pointed out the probability of starting the warfare against the Soviet Union: "Transfer of the iron ore from Luleo (Baltic Sea) has already stopped because of the ice and we can’t let the Soviet icebreakers to crush it in case if they try"...
http://www.win.ru/en/Mysteries-of-History/4113.phtml