Poland’s new defense minister, Radek Sikorski, took a brave step on Friday by declassifying 1,700 Warsaw Pact documents from the Cold War, including a map from 1979 showing that Poland would have been annihilated in a nuclear holocaust if the Soviet Union had pushed ahead with its first strike scenario to invade Western Europe.

In a phone interview from Warsaw, Mr. Sikorski told The New York Sun, “The map seems to show nuclear strikes against Western cities. The Russian strikes, the mushroom clouds, the red ones sent by the Russians, were bigger because their rockets were less precise.”

It was an act of even greater bravery that led to Mr. Sikorski to this map in the first place. He first heard about a similar war map from Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski, the Polish Army officer who in 1981 was smuggled out of Poland by the Central Intelligence Agency after he gave the Americans 40,265 pages of secret information from the Warsaw Pact’s files. These secret documents showed that Moscow had developed plans for a first strike with nuclear weapons against the West.

For years, there has been a debate in Poland as to whether Colonel Kuklinski was a hero or a traitor. These latest disclosures give even more credence to the doomsday scenario that Colonel Kuklinski warned Washington about. It is now clear that Colonel Kuklinski’s heroism helped avoid a World War III.

“What he did was courageous,” Mr. Sikorski said.

This story was told in a book that came out last year: “A Secret Life: The Polish Officer, His Covert Mission, and the Price He Paid To Save His Country,” by Benjamin Weiser.

It tells of how Colonel Kuklinski was a rising star in the Polish military in 1970 when he first contacted the U.S. military in Germany and explained that he and other Polish officers may rise up against their Soviet oppressors in the event of a war. Over the next 11 years, he provided the Americans with a clandestine look into the inner workings of the Soviet war machine.

When Colonel Kuklinski realized that he was suspected of being the CIA mole, he fled to the West.

In 1984, the Communist government in Poland sentenced him to death in absentia. As a result, he went into hiding in America.

It was not until 1997 that Polish prosecutors dropped all charges against him, saying that his spying was “a higher necessity,” namely, freeing his nation from Soviet oppression.

Now, Mr. Sikorski has proven that Colonel Kuklinski was right and that the Soviets were planning to sacrifice Poland and its people to take over Europe.

Mr. Sikorski said, “Of course, the Russian people were the biggest victims of communism and clearing up the truth about the past, and the Soviet regime, is in their interest.”

But in a convoluted response to Mr. Sikorski’s disclosures, the Russian daily newspaper Gazeta yesterday said that it was America that was planning to attack Polish cities along the Vistula River and that Mr. Sikorski failed to elaborate on the fact that “Poland was to be turned into dust by Americans.”

In response, Mr. Sikorski said, “I wouldn’t deny that the nukes that would have rained on Poland would have been NATO nukes, but this would have been in response to the attack by the Warsaw Pact.”

The Gazeta article said, “A study of the document presented by the Polish minister, poses serious doubts as to the mental health of Russian commanders, or the authenticity of the document.”

While such doublespeak is expected from Moscow, Poland’s former defense minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski, a left-winger, said that Mr. Sikorski’s decision is aimed at gaining popularity.

It’s one thing for the Russians do throw cold water on these disclosures, but quite another for Poles to do so. Mr. Szmajdzinski, who was a member of Poland’s Communist Party before the collapse of the evil empire, is now showing his true colors. Why didn’t he release this information?

Some have suggested that this was a move by Poland’s right-wing government intended to upset Russia. Far from it. This is simply an attempt to set the record straight. Only those that have a guilty conscience will not be able to handle the truth about the Soviet Union’s intentions.