There is a story about Kissinger’s brother that may or may not be true. Both were born in Germany and later emigrated to the US, but Henry’s brother has no remaining trace of a German accent. When asked why, the brother supposedly said, “Because I actually listen to other people.”
I also recall that the new Soviet “deepwater” navy came on the scene in the late 1970’s-it was a shock to Western naval experts. The Soviet Navy was then headed by the very energetic Admiral Gorschkov-who was determined to build a force capable of challenging the US Navy. The new ships looked powerful and modern-only they never developed an aircraft carrier fleet.
I think the ships had many technical problems as well, because ,many of them spend a lot of time in base, getting repairs/modifications. And a brand-new destroyer blew up and sank in the Black Sea-so maybe there was more hype than substance to the USSR naval forces.
The main thing that collapsed the iron curtain was perestroika. Gorbachev basically said that the USSR would not use force to keep its eastern european client states in line, as they had done in 1956 and 1967 and threatened in 1980.
One analysis I read (after the fact, of course) said that the technocratic, undedicated new rulers like Gorbaheve were younger; those of the previous generation, the Brezhnevs and Andropovs, remembered 2 wars in 1918 and 1941 where the Europeans threatened like Napoleon had, to march right up to the gates of Moscow. As a result, the old farts were determined to have a buffer space of satellite countries that would give them plenty of room to stop this. The younger politicians barely remembered WWII and instead experienced a country of self-inflicted shortages and mismanagement that was visibly falling behind the west. They also saw less reason, in a more peaceful age, for the wanton cruelty and viciousness (and expense) required to keep clients and citizens in line. In fact, those attitudes were associated with Stalin and deliberately criticized.
However, as we also saw in the arab spring once you open the floodgates, good luck getting them closed. 70 years of USSR did not convince the non-Russian SSRs of the common cause; nor did it convince all of the population that religion was the opiate of the masses.
In the late 70’s, Carter’s decision not to make Angola, Mozambique, or Ethiopia/Somalia the next Vietnam, the next battleground between the West and ever encroaching communism, was heavily criticised. In retrospect, it was a smart but unappreciated move. In the 70’s it looked like the Soviets were moving in everywhere unopposed. In the end, they overreached themselves with Afghanistan… All it cost us was the twin towers…
Well, although amorally committed to realpolitik in foreign relations, he was undoubtedly a patriot and wanted to see his adoptive country, the U.S., succeed and maintain its place as a superpower by just about any means necessary.
Remember, too, that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan happened on Carter’s watch, and it was he who first began covertly supplying the mujaheddin. That support was dramatically ramped up under Reagan.
I am a bit gunshy about Kissinger. I think he has been much maligned…but have kept that opinion to myself over the years as it is very unpopular with people older than me where he was a devil.
If I was a leader of a country and could pick my advisors…one of them would be Kissinger. I might not always follow his advice but I would want to hear it.
Some good info in this thread. . .
But I can’t help imagining Brezhnev in a Simon Bar Sinister voice telling his inner circle how he plans 'to RUUUULE the WORRRRRLD!"
I was surprised by this bit from Wikipedia -
Would you have wanted to be at the Battle of the Bulge, wearing an American uniform, with Kissinger’s accent?
Not unless I had three big, tough, well-armed pals from Brooklyn along to vouch for me!
To be fair he wasn’t the only one 
The Soviet Union was much close to parity with the United States then it appears if you only look at overall economies. It wasn’t about who could produce more consumer goods. The conflict was between military forces.
America had a lot more resources but we were essentially “wasting” most of them. The Soviets made their military a priority - they were building tanks while we were building sports cars. And when it came to a war - which appeared inevitable - sports cars would be useless and their tanks would outnumber our tanks.
Not a completely implausible belief. The Cold War leaders had seen the Soviet Union win a world war and knew it could be done.
War explicitly between the Major Powers, as opposed to proxy states, would have been nuclear or nothing, which is why we had nuclear forces on as close to hair-trigger as we dared. (Not just us: The UK explicitly had a fail-deadly strategy more-or-less just to screw over whoever managed to wipe them out before Whitehall knew what was coming.) The whole idea of MAD was [del]Herman Kahn’s sense of humor[/del] to make any conflict between the Majors spiral out of control faster than anyone could stop it; therefore, there wasn’t any such war.
The massive missile build-up, where all sides built white elephants well beyond tactical need, was to drive home that point: Even if 60% miss, get destroyed by anti-missile defenses, get destroyed by a first- or second-strike nuke, or are never launched because of a Petrov or Arkhipov, we still have enough on-target to make the whole idea of ‘victory’ academic.
Jesus.
So nice to see you, and right on schedule, Mr. Godwin.
You are correct-“Aviation Week” magazine had a series of articles about this mysterious bilding. Many analysts were convinced that it contained a giant laser, designed to destroy US spy satellites in orbit.
Never read anything on it, since then.
That’s very questionable. David Halberstam made the assertion in The Best and the Brightest, presumably with some basis, that Kennedy would never have launched nuclear weapons, even as he ran for office on the basis of a “missile gap” that didn’t exist. I don’t see any reason to think that Johnson, Nixon, or the rest were any more enthusiastic about it. I have strong doubts that a general war in Europe would have gone nuclear, that’s why we had NATO forces massed in West Germany and huge numbers of forces ready to stop an invasion at the Fulda Gap. If nukes or nothing was the strategy it makes little sense to invest so much time and money in the defense of Western Europe in the form of men and materiel.
Nuclear weapons are chiefly psychological weapons, something that allows you to say that things have gone far enough. Nobody winning a war will negotiate from a position of weakness unless they face annihilation, and with that card available it allows for the end of hostilities while giving a “victorious” country a face-saving way out.
MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction - was just that. 20,000 nukes meant you take outnot just Moscow and Leningrad, but also every known military base of any consequence, any facilities (like powerplants, all bearing factories, etc.) that would assist in replenishing the military infrastructure; plus, I have no idea what military thinking was like on each side - but if you took out the USA or Russia, could you allow China, Germany, France, UK, South Africa, Australia, or any other percievable power to continue to exist if you were basically back in the stone age? (Assuming the world did not end from fallout, etc.) The risk is that a second-rate power like Turkey could decide “Hmm, there’s nothing left of Russia but wheat fields and fiels of glass” and march in. Plus, you hit things like misile silos several times just in case you missed the first few times.
Someday maybe they’ll declassify the war plans and we’ll see exactly what Kennedy or Nixon wer presented with…
Remember, nobody was in the dark. If the president was presented with “10,000 nukes coming over the horizon, you have 20 minutes to decide…” - would he launch or not? Instinct says yes. OTOH, if it was a case of we bomb their fleet, they bomb our main fleet, we bomb another fleet, they bomb Pearl Harbour or Hampton Roads, we bomb their Sevastopol harbour, or whatever… Instinct says we would stop and negotiate after a round or two. (I sure as hell hope so.) Or, Egypt does not stop in 1973, we bomb Sinai, they bomb Israel, we bomb their fleet at sea…
You can play all these"what if" games as long as you want. I suppose, ultimately, neither side was suicidally committed and so the MAD process worked.
The difference, it turns out, was that we could afford this game of military build-up, they could not.
I had an international relations instructor in 1985 who liked to say, “Deterrence exists between the ears of the Kremlin.”
Outside of a few right-wing fantasies, nobody was envisioning Soviet troops marching through the United States. Nuclear weapons prevented a major war. But it left open the possibility of minor wars. The concern was that the Soviet Union would gradually expand its influence through one region after another, becoming stronger while never crossing the threshold that would trigger a nuclear war. Would the United States start a nuclear war over someplace like Ethiopia or Pakistan or Malaysia or Nigeria or Peru? No. Would we fight a conventional war for these countries? Maybe not. So the Soviet Union could see places like this as potential opportunities. The fear was that if the Soviet Union was able to keep expanding like this, it would eventually reach a point where the majority of the world was under its direct or indirect control and then it could start putting more direct pressure on the United States by economic or diplomatic means or proxy attacks against American allies. The United States would eventually end up isolated and cut off from the rest of the Soviet-dominated world.
Again, not a completely implausible fear. The Soviet Union did have a consistent pattern of pushing its influence throughout the world and some people - like Kissinger - were concerned America wasn’t resisting this as much as it should.
It was not just craziness and parnoia from a bunch of unpredictable fanatics.
Remember, the old farts who ran the Kremlin, Brezhnev and his lot, had seen Russia overrun twice (or 3 times, depending on the view of the Russian civil war) in their lifetime. From their point of view, the Europeans and their American backers were just the next in a line of crazy Europeans who seemed to swarm lemming-like over the Russian landscape every few decades, leaving destruction and death in their wake. Now that here were atomic weapons, distance and climate were not going to stop them next time. Strong deterrence, both nuclear weapons and buffer states, were the least they could do to protect their land.
While the war games on both sides probably included the possibility of an all-out surprise attack, more likely they were concerned about a confrontation hat spirals out of control. Kennedy seemed quite prepared to blow up the world to keep the Russians out of Cuba; Kruschev wisely chose not to find out, at the cost of his leadership. The one time nuclear push came to shove, it was the Russians who chose wisely.
Of course, threatening to blow up theworld to keep missiles out of Cuba, while happily placing western missiles in Germany and Turkey on Russia’s doorstep, hardly seemed like fair play to them.