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Extremely interesting topic. Suvurov's The Icebreaker is a very interesting work on this topic, good for weapons and curious decisions even his historical arguments are a mixture of falsehood, distortion and extremely interesting facts and arguments.
Walter Post is better at arguing the case (if you read German) and some other people also argue the case.
My conclusion having read all the literature I can get my hands on is that the key issue is why did Stalin ally with Hitler to conquer Poland with the probable answer being to trigger the German French/British war so that when they were exhausted he could attack the Germans and wipe them out making European communism at least triumphant.
Fits diplomacy, weapons production, and communist theory.
That plan fell apart with the quick German victory in France.
After that the Soviets put the first echolon of their army in an attack position (thus easily surrounded and destroyed by the germans) with masses of tanks and planes at the front of the front.
But were they going to attack? That I do not know and no conclusive evidence has yet been offered to say they would. Only the disposition of their forces with Suvorov arguing they could not have survived the winter without attacking (one of his most interesting points).
Maybe, maybe not. But if Hitler had of invaded England, or sent large amounts of forces to North Africa, Malta, Gibralta, from July 1941 the Soviets would have been ready to attack with a massive advantage in forces, armaments etc.

Matt Buttsworth

PS - I am not a supporter of the prevenative war thesis as nothing indicates Hitler new about these plans, weaponry, dispositions etc. The Germans were astounded by the quantity of troops, weapons they captured in the first weeks of the war and before that had dismissed the Russians as poorly led, poorly armed and easily conquered.
If the Germans did beat the Russians to the punch by a couple of weeks it was a matter of pure luck.
I can give the sources for anyone interested in this topic. Most are in German. MB

If Germany did not attack Russia and Stalin did not attack Germany then the US would have poured all its resources into the Pacific war and crippled Japan sooner. The US would not be on a two front war. With quicker victory or at least reaching a point of obvious superiority, the US would have poured it's full weight in with Britan and the Allied landings would have happened sooner. Russia would have attacked in conjunction with the allied landings, say mid 43. THey would have been ready by then.
The big question is what would Germany be doing without the eastern front? They would maintain a huge garrison as the red army grew and would not have had the million Russians in static units on the west front. I believe internal politics and power plays at many levels would have weakened the Nazi party without the contant pressure of warfare. The "need" for improved weapons would not be as pressing and a lot of industry may have gone back to private or even into naval builds. The germans may have been less prepared to deal with the red army or more so. Either way, Berlin was a lot closer and the red army wouldn't be several million down.
So I still believe Stalin would have attacked when conditions were ripe. He would wait for allied involvment in the west, mediteranean, and Italy.
My opinion anyway.

If the germans didn't attack SU, but instead focused on UK, they would have been alot more scure. Why? simple:

If they had invaded UK and won (more about Battle of Britain later), the west front would have ceased to exists. If USA had joined the war later, how would they do it? Where would they invade? they needed UK as a staging area in operation Overlord. Without UK, they would have to send their troops over the Atlantic, and that's not realistic. By the time the invasion would take place, Atlantic would be crawling with German U-boats, sinking the invading ships as fast as they could. And the invading forces wouldn't have as much air-support.

As for the Battle of Britain. Yes, Luftwaffe was winning it. RAF was running out of pilots fast. RAF was really lucky things happened they way they did. If I remember correctly, one Luftwaffe raid accidentally bombed wrong target. They were supposed to bomb a airplane-factory, but instead, they dropped their bombs of civilian targets. Churchill demanded that RAF would pay back by bombing german civilan targets... And after that, Hitler demanded that London must be bombed to the ground in retaliation. Hadn't that happened, things would have been different.

Bombing of London was a really stupid thing to do. I mean, Luftwaffe didn't have big 4-engine strategic bombers needed for that kind of job. Their bombers were better at bombing specific targets, strategic, city-wide bombing was something they were not meant to do.