It was the greatest change. Reagan played a strong part, but was no more “responsible” than dozens of others, his hagiographers notwithstanding.
A greater change than WWII? Jeez, guys, I dunno…
Somewhat tangental to the topic … my memory of common attitudes towards the Soviet Union among those interested and knowlegeable was that socially, politiocally and economically it was a dismal failure (and had been for years and years); no-one I knew believed it was better off than the West - far from it, even the most socialist people thought it was terribly badly off and authoritarian (and not “true socialism” or even “true communism”).
However, that being said, no-one, not even the most right-wing, really anticipated it would collapse. If anything, people thought that it would go on, more or less the same, into the foreseeable future, and that the Cold War was simply the new general state of world politics.
It was odd, in that most more or less agreed that the Soviet Union was non-functional and crumbling, but few if any came to the logical conclusion that it was doomed as an empire.
Well, few, but not none.
Both the War College and the CIA predicted, in the late 1970s, an economic collapse of the Soviet Union within 15 years. That the collapse occurred in fewer than 15 years and that the collapse was so peaceful was not predicted (as far as I know), but people who were actually studying the situation, (as opposed to pundits and economists who were speculating without enough information or politicians who had a need to portray the USSR as an eternal enemy), had predicted the collapse.
Even so, the economic collapse might not have occurred when it did if it had not been for Gorbachev’s glasnost. Recall that the U.S.S.R. collapsed from within. A deteriorating economic situation played a significant role in this, and it might have been a desire to improve economic productivity that inspired Gorbachev’s notion of loosening control on information, but it was the overwhelming rush of ideas and facts that had been kept away from the Soviet peoples that caused them to abandon support for the government en masse. In a way, the Soviet collapse is one more support for the old theory that revolutions do not arise from the utterly downtrodden, but spring from a populace experiencing “rising expectations.”
Yeah, sounds about right. There is an interesting account of the process in Judt’s book Postwar.
Though I was speaking of the perceptions of those people I knew at the time who were knowlegeable and interested, not of the strategists at the War College and the CIA.
In particular, the contention made upthread by someone that some lefty types thought that the Soviet Union was doing better than the West strikes me as strange, or belonging to some earlier era. My memories are that lefty types, even the most hardcore Marxists, mostly thought that the Soviet empire was in dire economic trouble during the late 70s early 80s, and explained the same in various ways (that it wasn’t “really” Communist was a favorite I recall - some called it “state capitalism”. Though I’m not well enough versed in the doctrinal differences between various strains of Marxism to fully understand their commentary).
Depending on the date and the people to whom one was exposed, one can find an awful lot of varying opinions. I only knew a few Soviet supporters at any time. By the time I began encountering committed Leftists in college in the late 60s, most of the ones I ran into had decided that the U.S.S.R. had sold out the Communist cause, (with which I would agree, but, perhaps, for different reasons than they held). A larger number seemed to consider the U.S.S.R. to have been a flawed attempt at the Marxist ideal that was still better, in their opinion, than the Western democracies. Among those people, some thought that the Soviet economy was weak and some thought that the Soviet economy was stable. (I did not personally meet any Leftists who thought the Soviet economy was really strong.*) Similarly, on the Right, there were those who still believed that the Soviets were going to attempt to conquer the world for Mother Russia, some who held the somewhat internally inconsistent beliefs that the Soviets were utterly incompetent in all their actions, but that they were on the threshhold of overwhelming the West, and a few who believed that they were mightier than the West, based on slave labor and endless reserves of raw materials in Siberia.
Aside from the actual analysts who were paying attention, I do not recall anyone among the masses of people who believed between 1978 and 1988 that the U.S.S.R. was economically doomed. (I don’t recall having any belief that the Soviets were about to fall. With no internet, it was not that easy to read enough to stumble over all the possible publications (even when the material was declassified).)
- Even on the Left, the old joke about a Soviet visitor returning home from the U.S. claiming that the U.S. was obviously poor because all the stores’ shelves were filled, so the Americans must not be able to afford groceries struck a rueful chord.
I seem to recall that many thought that the USSR was militarily powerful, based on the lists of its weapons and regiments. But the “endless lines for everything” situation was pretty well known, too.
The overwhelming majority, as I recall (again aside from the analysts) thought that the situation was basically static - the USSR would go on ruling its empire, it would continue to have piles of weapons and a gynormous army, and people would continue to line up for bread and stuff. In short, economic weakness and military strength and empire seemed, in the case of the USSR, to happily co-exist.
Nice of you to drive by without making any material contribution to the discussion at hand. Next time, though, you might want to add something more than the semantic equivilent of “Did so!”
Even as a bluff charge, SDI didn’t really make sense. Reagan promoted it as a protective shield, and offered to share the technologies between both nations. The Soviets never took either claim seriously; as previously discussed, terminal phase interception–the only practical way to assure interception from ICBMs launched halfway around the world, SLBMs launched on a suppressed ballistic track, or FOBS–is essentially only effective for point defense of installations. Covering the entire continental US with such capability would have had missile interceptor complexes dotted at fifty mile intervals across the nation, or rings of interceptor sites around every major city and manufacturing complex, at a cost of hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars. This was nothing new; the same thing had been proposed under the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, and Robert McNamara opposed the deployment of strategic wide area defense ABM systems like Nike-X on the basis that they could simply be overwhelmed. And as far as lasers go, the Soviets had at least as much if not more experience with high energy X-ray lasers as the U.S. and was very aware of the technical problems in firing a laser at long distance at a moving target through the atmosphere, knew that it would be decades before the U.S. could possibly implement such a system, and that it would really be effective only in the boost phase, as the current AirBorne Laser is intended to be used. Electromagnetic railguns, particle beam weapons, and kinetic interceptors all have their own very problematic issues with which any serious student of ballistic missile defense will be well acquainted, and none of those were going to be solved in a handful of years.
So I’m not buying the “SDI had the Soviets quaking in the boots” argument; the Soviets had more strategic launchers with more throw weight, and had placed more emphasis on interceptor evading technology than the U.S. I think that intermediate range missiles in Western Europe, particularly the capable Persing II, which was intended to be deployed with the “enhanced radiation” (neutron) package, which concerned them far more than pipe dreams about lasers and satellite-based railguns.
Can you please cite one or more individual posts that state, imply, suggest, or otherwise indicate any belief that the Soviet Union was even in good, much less better, economic shape than the West? That is so far away from every post I read through, and of course the reality of the situation, that I don’t know where you could even draw that from. By the mid-'Seventies, it was clear that the Soviet Union was in economic decline which never reversed itself until Gorbachev came to power.
The Soviet Union did maintain a higher consistant level of arms production and weapon development, but at an increasing fraction of their overall gross national product, and despite the Clancy-esque view, Soviet systerms were by no means as incapable (nor were American systems as absolutely superior) as depicted in fiction. Generally speaking Soviet weapon systems were less precise and owing to problems with production quality control, of somewhat cruder construction, but they traded that for simplicity of use and robustness, and accepted a certain amount of loss as part of the operational cost. (The U.S. Navy has maintained it’s almost sterling nuclear safety record not by utter superiority of the system but by a rigorous, almost brutal application of safety processes and constant examination.) No student of aerospace development or ballistic missile systems would consider the Soviet Union to be a second rate force, and indeed, they surpassed both the technical capability and arguably the battlefield reliabililty of comperable American systems on many occasions, although head to head the U.S. military of the post-Reagan era would likely make a superior showing owing to the more consistant training, strong corps of noncommissioned officers, and a few key technologies.
Most educated observers anticipated a slow, steady slide into economic incapacity in the Soviet Union. Few predicted collapse of the system before the turn of the millenia, though Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn notably predicted it before then, and even he was surprised at out quickly it disintegrated. I can’t think of a single credible pundit who would have claimed that the Soviet Union was doing better economically than the West, and certainly no one in this thread has said this. If you can demonstrate otherwise, please do so.
Stranger
SDI was as misunderstood then as it is now. Part of that was overselling by the Reagan administration, but part was just plain refusal to accept the strategical value of SDI. So let’s talk about the strategic advantage of SDI for a minute.
First, if you will recall, the main focus of development of the nuclear arsenal in the 1980’s was centered around the protection of MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction. The MX missile, for an example, was a design that was specifically intended to allow the U.S. to retain a retaliatory capability in the event of a Soviet first strike. The thinking was if the Soviets could not be guaranteed a successful first strike, they would not launch one. Hence, we had the ‘racetrack’ design that kept the missiles moving around a large area in random patterns to prevent them from being targeted. Later, for budgetary reasons the forus was moved to hardening silos. For a long time, the arms race consisted of the U.S. building harder silos, and the Soviets responding by improving accuracy or building bigger warheads.
The Soviets were good at building big warheads, and had gotten very good at accuracy. They felt they could fully compete with the U.S. in this arena. They also had an advantage in intelligence, with the U.S. being an open society. There were many Soviet spies in the U.S. tracking missile movements and such.
The other race was with submarines and SLBMs. The Americans and Soviets put ballistic subs in the oceans, and the race was to keep them hidden while the other side developed techniques to find and shadow them. Here again, the Soviets were competing on fairly favorable terms. They had good subs that were very quiet and some pretty good hunter/killers. Geography also favored the Soviets.
But SDI was a whole new ball game. It didn’t have to be a perfect umbrella to have a major destabilizing effect on the strategic balance. In fact, even if it was only 10% effiecient it would render a Soviet first strike ineffective in the sense of preventing a retaliatory strike. Think about it - with a 10% effective system and 8,000 missiles, the U.S. could retaliate against a first strike with 800 missiles - more than enough to destroy the economy and infrastructure of the Soviet Union. And the Soviets couldn’t win the numbers game by building more missiles - even if they doubled their force and fired two at every silo, that would still leave 80 missiles. But the numbers get really, really bad as SDI improves. If each warhead has a 50% chance of being shot down, it becomes effectively impossible to overcome the system with numbers. Fire 8000 missiles, you get retailiated with 4000. Fire 16,000, and you still get hit with 2000 missiles.
And once you get up into the 80-90% effective range, you can start thinking of a first strike of your own. If you hit their missiles, and 800 come back at you and you can shoot down 90% of them, your country might survive. At least, if you’re a paranoid Soviet general, you might be thinking in those terms.
That’s why SDI was so scary. It radically altered the strategic balance and put the arms race on a playing field the Soviets were wholly unprepared to play on.
As for attitudes among the left during the 80’s, I can tell you that Soviet admiration was common here in Canada. You never heard people claiming that the economy as a whole was better, or that there weren’t lines - those issues were simply ignored. What you heard a lot of was the claim that everyone had a job, everyone got a free education, everyone got free health care, everyone got a place to live, and the rich weren’t exploiting the poor. If the economy as a whole was weaker and the overall standard of living a little lower, well, that’s a price well worth paying to get rid of dog-eat-dog competition and the exploitation of the masses by the rich. Oh, and by the way the Soviets have a great culture, great music, great ballet and opera, and in general is much more genteel than the wild-west, gun-totin’ Americans. I heard crap like that every day in university. Often from my professors.
This, too, is nonsense, of course. Gorbachev himself said,Of course, we cannot be indifferent to this dangerous program. But [the Americans] are betting precisely on the fact that the USSR is afraid of the SDI. … So he calls it dangerous and says they cannot be indifferent.
Even the lefties at Slate admit "If Reagan hadn’t been president—if Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale had defeated him or if Reagan had died and George H.W. Bush taken his place—Gorbachev almost certainly would not have received the push or reinforcement that he needed. " The Usual Suspects at the SDMB are just further in denial than serious thinkers.
Of course you don’t. When faced with an uncomfortable fact
simple denial is the easiest way to avoid having to change your mind.
Regards,
Shodan
This makes no sense. With missile subs in play there was never any chance whatsoever for a first strike sufficiently debilitating to prevent a retaliatory strike. So a minimally effective SDI program could save a few silos. And? It’s those Ohio class SSBNs you have to worry about, and they don’t need any SDI to save them from a first strike.
This is just fantasy.
Nonsense? Let’s look at your article:
In other words, if the U.S. was going to play games with purported defensive measures, (even if they could not work), the U.S.S.R. was going to be forced to play the countermeasure game. This was the explicit point I noted in the actual statements he made at Reykjavik. It was not a fear of SDI working, but the need to employ more hardware to counter Reagan’s intent to tear down ABM.
You are every bit in as much denial as your “Usual Suspects” on the Left, (of whom there are a few), refusing to evaluate actual history if it contradicts your own cherished beliefs.
WWII was a war. I specifically said greatest political change.
This is totally wrong. First of all, the “‘racetrack’ design” to which you refer is the Peacekeeper Rail Garrison program. I happen to have studied this program extensively, and it had a number of technical hurdles that made it unworkable, not to mention the security problem of running live nuclear weapons on top of Class 1.1C propellant solid rocket motors around on public railways. Rail garrison existed strictly to assuage members of Congress concerned about the vulnerability of ‘dense pack’ silo basing that was intended for LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’ deployment. The compromise that was eventually reached involved placing 50 cold-gas launched PKs in retrofitted Minuteman silos at Warren AFB, with the pledge to develop the aforementioned rail distribution system deployed out of central garrisons. The only garrison facility ever built was at Vandenberg AFB, and was essentially only a proof of concept, given the very limited rapid deployability from that site. Rail garrison never existed as anything more that a very expensive trade study to make face that the Air Force was doing their best to make good on the promise for rail deployment, never as an operational system. Because of this, a second system, the abortive road-transportable Small ICBM MGM-134 ‘Midgetman’ was developed, but technical problems and strategic obsolescence ended that program before it came to fruition.
This is also mostly wrong. Stealthy submarine propulsion and computer processing of sonar data was one area where the U.S. had a dramatic advantage over the Soviets, and while it wasn’t quite as great as the novels of Tom Clancy would have you believe, the difference was significant. Although the claim that a U.S.N. ballistic missile submarine was never trailed by a Soviet sub is probably bombast, it’s true that in free water the Ohio class is all but invisible, leaving a signature under normal cruising conditions that can’t be distinguished out of the background noise; so quiet that even the late flight Los Angeles submarines could not regularly maintain contact without being detected themselves. The same could not be said of Soviet Delta III and Typhoon boats of the day. While very quiet, especially the later Typhoons with their ducted screws, they were still detectable and stalkable by American attack boats, particularly due to the comparatively primitive towed sonar arrays used by Soviet boats of that era. Geography did favor the Soviets, and their typical game was to keep missile boats above the GIUK SOSUS line. Since their liquid propellant SCBMs had longer range and more throw weight than the American Poseidon and Trident missiles they could stand off much further and launch on an antipodal trajectory. With regard to Soviet attack boats, the Soviets subscribed to a different notion of high speed, deep diving interceptors rather than stealthy hunters like the Los Angeles class. In general, their attack boats had very noisy powerplants and eschewed anechoic protection for speed, although in the 'Eighties they make great efforts toward more silent boats as well.
Sam, you’re pulling numbers out of thin air, and doing bad math with with what you have. The United States never had anything like 8000 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles at any given time in its history; this number is an entirely specious claim. At the time of Peacekeeper deployment, there were three wings (150 units each) of Minuteman III missiles on strategic alert, and some portion of the 550 aging Minuteman II still awaiting retirement. The last squadron of Peacekeeper missiles were deployed about the same time that Minuteman II was shut down. I don’t believe the U.S. ever had more than 1,000 ICBMs on strategic alert at any time in the history of ICBM deployment.
Second, the Soviet Union specialized early on in building MIRV (Multiple Independently-targeted Re-entry Vehicle)-capable systems, so that one booster could carry many RVs. This was in fact the primary impetus for the development of Peacekeeper; the Minuteman III was pushed to the limits of technology and it’s packaging to carry three RVs. The SS-18 ‘Satan’ carried as many as 10 RVs with plenty of capacity to spare for decoys and chaff, or in another variant a multi-megaton warhead (in the 20-25 MT range) that made the 9 MT warhead carried by the Titan II look sick in comparison. So the Soviets could launch many RVs for the cost of one booster. They didn’t need to build as many launchers to compete with American numbers, and could easily afford to overwhelm any credible ABM defenses.
Third, you’re making an ugly mess of your reliabliity estimates. At 80% probability-to-hit reliability (an undemonstrated and hopelessly optimistic goal for a system that is entirely speculative) you’ll require an average of three interceptors per incoming missile/RV to obtain better than a 99% composite probability-to-hit. If we’re talking about 10 MIRV RVs from the aforementioned SS-18, your overall likelyhood of achieving complete success (i.e. no RVs sneak by), assuming the 3:1 interceptor to RV ratio, is about 92%. So for the cost of 30 interceptors to one attacking vehicle, you get a “pretty decent” chance of success. Given that the cost of a single slip is one lost city, industrial complex, missile installation, or airbase, I think those are pretty damned poor odds to bet the line. Given a more realistic number for PTH–say, the 50% you cited before–the odds become much worse and the costs become prohibitive, even by Reagan standards.
By the 'Seventies the probability of a successful disarming first strike was so remote as to be laughable. Early warning radar and orbiting launch detection systems were so good, and the time it took to alert and give launch orders to the solid motor ICBMs was so short that even just five minutes warning would have been sufficient for complete retaliation. Disarming first strike wasn’t even an issue by the time Reagan was in office, and not a significant issue as far as the Soviets were concerned. Indeed, while the United States has never officially taken the option for a unilaterial first strike off the table (either internally or in the world forum) the Soviets repeatedly and openly stated that they would not engage in a first strike. One can and should take this with the grain of salt it deserves, given other Soviet claims, but post-Cold War examination of their strategic plans appears to show that they never seriously considered the option of a disarming first strike, and by the time that they would have realistically had the capability to do so the U.S. had already deployed the first generation of ballistic missile submarines. While the original Polaris A1, A2, and A3 fleet ballistic missiles were nowhere near accurate enough to strike hard targets their retaliatory capability against soft targets (cities and unprotected industry) would have made any attempt for a disarming first strike by the Soviets a Pyrrhic victory. By the time Trident C4 was deployed the Fleet Ballistic Missile program had developed sufficient accuracy and range to strike semi-hardened targets with reliable accuracy and speed to counterstrike before Soviet missiles even reached the continental United States.
The Soviets, by the way, never subscribed to [Mutually] Assured Destruction; in fact, they made significant preparations for civil defense far exceeding American efforts, and distributed their installations and facilities into far-flung locations. Not that this would have helped them much; a full-up nuclear exchange would have been devestating for the entire Northern Hemisphere, and it’s likely there would be little left intact of the goverments and industry of any major power.
In short, SDI was nonsense from a both a technical and strategic point of view. If the Russians were afraid of anything related to SDI, it is that the Americans were sniffing their own fairy powder and believing the colorful viewgraphs about how effective the system would be, and planning accordingly. This wasn’t the case, and strategic planners never integrated ballistic missile defense into their plans, mostly because no basis for reliability estimates or realistic deployment schedules could be made, but those sort of details didn’t matter to Reagan, who was often noted for sleeping through Cabinet meetings.
I can’t argue with your experience, but Joe Public and Johnny College Student are not astute observers of economics and international politics. I’d suspect much of the attitudes you saw were a result of backlash against being chained to American strategic plans when it was convenient for the U.S., and ignored when it was not. And while the Russians had in their heyday great culture, music, and ballet, (and literature and plays) during the Soviet Era repression and the focus on so-called ‘Soviet Realism’, the State-sponsored art/propaganda was nothing short of kitchy. The Soviets continued to excel in science, mathematics, rocketry, et cetera, but often despite instead of because the efforts of the State, which often repressed those doing the valuable work.
At any rate, getting back to Reagan, if your claim is that by speaking in vague terms about ‘Star Wars’ and ‘protective umbrellas against nuclear attack’ that he sent the Russians packing and shattered the foundations of the Berlin Wall and the East Bloc along with it, I’m going to have to call that an utterly absurd and baseless statement. One might as well say that David Cornwell brought down the Soviet Union by forcing the defection of fictional spymaster Karla. Reagan did good international dinner theater, and he shouted support to those putting it on the line to oppose Soviet control and oppression, but he was fortunate to have come to office in a time when the last of the old Soviet apparatchiki were dying off, and the ideologues were losing grip, the promises of three generations unfulfilled.
Stranger
Happy to oblidge.
First, I should point out that my statement was not that ‘credible pundits’ believed that the Soviets were doing better, but rather that someone in this thread claimed that some lefty types (in fact, “many on the Left”) thought that the Soviets were doing better (in fact “proclaimed the superiority of the Soviet system”). This stuck me as odd, as no doubt it strikes you as odd, but I didn’t just imagine it.
From post #42, Sam Stone:
Emphasis added for clarity.
Edit: I guess the point is now moot, but I must say I still think this is odd:
I too was at university in Canada in the '80s; I had a lot of hard left profs, often doctrinare Marxists. The most common “take” on the Soviets was not one of admiration, but rather excuse - that the Soviet Union wasn’t “really” Marxist at all.
The background was a widespread undrestanding that it wasn’t doing well.
From my 70’s perspective the USSR was totalitarian. Much the same as Nazi Germany. I never met anyone, in 5 years studying politics at three universities, who considered the USSR anything but an evil authoritarian regime with no redeeming features. Student or academic.
The old british lunatic left like the IMG and Socialist Workers and the rest of those pathetic entriest cliques were trotskyite internationalists and therefore mortal enemies of the USSR.
And they were a tiny sub-set of the Left. But a noisy, annoying set of bastards.
The most deluded academic I met was in 1978 - a Cambodian ‘expert’ still in utter denial about the news coming out of there. And no one took her seriously either.
So the people in the USSR had nothing to do with it whatsoever?
:dubious:
No, I’m not, and you are a liar for saying so.
And as I mentioned earlier
Just as I said, the USSR was being pushed into an arms race that they could not win. And guess who was responsible for this?
Ronald Reagan.
as the Gipper himself said, but not as stubborn as someone determined to deny.
Regards,
Shodan
I don’t see how this makes your case – Gorbachov was objecting to the possibility of the US putting nukes into orbit. Something that the US and the Soviet Union had agreed not to do long ago. It’s clear from his quote that he was worried about Nukes in Orbit, not about SDI per se (Edward Teller’s “Excaliber” program would’ve used “third generation nuclear weapons” – atomic bomb-pumped X-ray lasers, which necessariy require a nuclear bomb as the trigger. In addition, lots of proposed SDI hardware, like particle beams, would’ve used fairly sizeable nuclear reafctors for power supply. This is orders of magnitude greater than nuclear batteries used for operating satellites.
I’ve always taken this to mean that he didn’t want nuclear weapons in space. Forget about SDI. Once you have Nukes in Space, you can juast drop them o your opponent. No annoying Boost Phase or Warnings. And he wasn’t worried about protecting against them, because, basically, you can’t. That’s a point Soviet scientists and engineers understood as well as Western ones.
And it doesn’t relate at all to a Soviet buildup, with ruinous results for the USSR, because building up wouldn’t have done any good.
Yes, you are and you are too close to your own cherished beliefs to recognize it.
You have moved the goalposts to rationalize your venom. Initially, Stranger On A Train pointed out that SDI was a red herring because it could not work. You declared that point “simple fiction” and pointed to your own red herring about Gorbachev’s remarks at Reykjavik. I responded to your “simple fiction” claim by pointing out in your citation Gorbachev’s actual lack of fear regarding SDI and his knowledge that it could not work. I then pointed out his concern regarding the abandonment of the ABM treaty, which was a harbinger of an increased arms race (a point which may legitimately be placed in the Reagan credit column).
Now, you want to come back and call me a liar for making the point that you spectacularly failed to make in your own posts while rolling in another claim defending Star Wars despite the evidence from the Soviets that they knew it was nonsense. If you wished to express the idea that the U.S. arms build-up contributed to the Soviet collapse, then you should have simply asserted that point and not pursued your own silly defense of Star Wars and claiming that its pre-ordained failure was “simple fiction.”
I had not even addressed the issue of Reagan except to note, elsewhere, that he played an important role in the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., but that I doubt that his role was primary.
You are so interested in insulting people with whom you believe you have philosophical differences that you do not even pay attention to the actual words of your correspondents (or, often, yourself), once you have placed those posters into your private pigeon holes of belief.