[QUOTE=Spoons]
Forgot these facts…
It is important to remember also that the early-warning systems for the United States’ defense were based in Canada. Both the DEW line and the Mid-Canada Line were constructed in the late 1950s and designed to detect Soviet bombers coming in over the North Pole. Wikipedia gives a good (if brief) overview of these lines and their place in North American air defense here. The sites went through a few changes over the years, but a number were still operational in the 1980s, and their presence and role in providing the US with information on Soviet air activity in the north made Canada a target.
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The DEW line (which was essentially obsolete from the Mid-Sixties onward) was eventually merged into the North Warning System for ballistic missiles in polar trajectories.
Canada was a “full” partner in NORAD (full in the sense of sharing responsibility, though the United States pretty much called the shots), and although it’s not as well publicized as the Cheyenne Operations Center in Colorado, there was a second underground command station in Ontario. Although American ICBMs were never based in Canada (although there was, prior to deployment of the long range Minuteman II, discussion of doing so) there were at least a couple of SAGE sites in Canada, and of course BOMARC nuclear-tipped bomber interceptor missiles were based in Canada through the Sixties, the debate about which lead to the collapse of the Progressive Conservative government and rise of the Liberals.
In short, the US and Canada were joined at the hip when it came to nuclear strategy, and Canada would have suffered some significant losses in a nuclear exchange.
You have got to be kidding here. The Falklands Conflict was a minor note to both the US and the USSR, neither of whom had any interest whatsoever in Argentina at that point. (Reagan was disdainfully bemused by the fight over a small, cold island in the South Atlantic.) And if anything, the Falklands Conflict illustrated serious problems with British, and by extension, U.S. naval doctrine of the time. In any extended conflict in the European theatre the U.S. logistical command would have had its ass handed to it by the Soviets and their extensive submarine and surface attack capabilities, even as they incurred heavy losses. The Falklands Conflict had about the same impact on Soviet policy as the invasion of Grenada; that is to say, practically nil.
I’m not really clear on where you get the notion of the “invincibility of the Red Army,” either. The numerical superiority of Soviet forces in Europe was certainly acknowledged (and generally exaggerated) but NATO considered them far from invincible, and in a conventional shooting conflict it was generally assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that the NATO forces would win air superiority, and thus overall control of the European theatre. (In the Middle East it was somewhat a different story.) NATO armies also had a better command and control structure, while the Soviets instisted on centralized control that likely would have crippled their theatre operations. The Red Army certainly had a lot of “successes” in putting down insurrections like the Hungarian Uprising and Prague Spring, but this was tanks against protesters. And for all the damage that the invasion of Afghanistan did to both international reputation of the Soviets and their own internal morale, nobody assumed that a European conflict would be anything like the hit-and-run mountain fighting in Afghanistan.
The Soviet Union did not collapse because of external factors, though some influences, like the invasion of Afghanistan, economic crises in Warsaw Pact states (specifically the increasingly liberalized Yugoslavia after Broz Tito’s death), “losing” the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Sino-Soviet Rift, certainly contributed to internal instability and loss of external channels and trade. The USSR collapsed because it was a fiscially nonviable system and had been so for decades before 1991, a fact long recognized by the less ideological members of the ruling party, but which would have required redupation of Marxist/Leninist doctrine to fully address. The often reviled Khrushchev attempted progressive market reforms, but following his removal from office the Soviet economy fell into a slump from which it never recovered. Arguments that the early Eighties Western defense infrastructure buildup caused the collapse have a small amount of merit, but the Soviets never really curtailed military spending the way the West did post-Vietnam, so their budgetary collapse had more of the character of a continuing drain rather than a sudden glurge of spending that undercut their economy. The one line item that could be said to have singly devestated their economy was the Buran program, the Soviet space shuttle, on which they spent 4-5 times as much as the United States (with a vastly more extensive test program) and which only flew, unmanned, once.
By and large, though, the Soviet Union came apart because they just couldn’t produce enough domestic goods to keep their economy viable without massive inflow from foreign sources. This had absolutely nothing to do with Margaret Thatcher or the fight over the Falklands Islands.
Stranger
I can’t be the only one here who had direct experience with refugees from behind the Iron or Bamboo Curtains, can I? My city was full of Soviet emigres, some Jewish, some intellectuals; one of my teachers had survived a gulag after getting through WWII (his youth sucked). My aunt’s folks were Hungarian refugees from the 40s and she remembered them sheltering compatriots in the basement after they fled from the uprising in '56. My first roommate in college was a 30-year-old woman who’d come over from China after her father had been denounced and she’d been sent to work in the fields instead of high school. Never mind watching the Vietnam War wind down when I was little.