[QUOTE=chappachula]
But on the other hand, most of the problems you mentioned were pretty similar to the problems America faced earlier. Except that instead of Nicaragua/Afghanistan, it had been the Berlin Wall, Hungary and Poland. Instead of SS-20 and Pershing missiles it had been the threat of airplane-dropped bombs. Instead of the Europeans resisting American missiles on their territory, it had been the “ban the bomb” movement in England and France. Instead of the movie “the Day After”, it had been the book “Fail-Safe”(in which President Kennedy orders a nuke dropped on New York City, after the US accidently nukes Moscow)
Yet after all those scary events, the world had remained free of nuclear war, and I think the reason was what I mentioned earlier–rational leaders on both sides, who were willing to use brinkmanship, but not willing to use nukes. Because both sides knew it would be suicide. And maybe I’m naive–but I trust the rational leaders of the world not to commit suicide.
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I think you need to read more deeply into the history of the Cold War. Eisenhower was quite ready to use nuclear weapons to prevent North Korean/Chinese incursion south of the hardwon 38th Parallel; had North Korea not signed the armistice, there would very likely have been deployment of nuclear weapons in a “tactical” fashion.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was even more absurd, with the members of Kennedy’s Cabinet discussing not if a nuclear exchange would occur but when and how, and indeed, if the United States should strike preemtively. (General Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay–the primary influence for the character of General Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Bomb–expressed the desire to pave over Cuba with nuclear weapons.) According to several sources, including then SecDef Robert McNamara, Kennedy received two messages from Krushchev on 27 October, the first offering a trade (removal of a the squadran of Jupiter IRBMs in Turkey in exchange for removal from missiles in Cuba), and the second, received while Robert Kennedy was feeling out the integrity of the Soviet proposal and response of NATO allies) and EXCOMM discussed the implications of such a trade, was a message apparently dictacted by the military, essentially inviting a nuclear exchange if the United States continued its blocade of Cuba. It was the former (and again future) US Ambassador, Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson (no relation to the Wisconsin Governor and SecHHS under Bush Jr.) who suggested ignoring the second message and responding to the first, urging Kennedy to “empathize” with the Soviets. This lead to the public and secret agreements that involved the removal of missile bases from Cuba and (some months thereafter) the deactivation of intermediate range missile squadrons in Southern Europe.
“Empathy” was right; it was what was missing from the business from the very beginning. There was absolutely not reason whatsoever for the showdown, which in retrospect could have been resolved behind the scenes without any public fanfare. This wasn’t the style of Kennedy, however, whom despite the popular reputation he did and still mostly does enjoy, was one of the most ill-suited and incompetent leaders in the area of foreign relations this nation has had the lack of privildge to be led by. The Americans already enjoyed a significant numerical advantage (a fact discovered and publicized by McNamara shortly after he took up his office) and had a geographically favorable situation, able to base missiles within 90 minutes strike of Moscow from several locations in Europe, and bombers even closer. The Russian missiles (SS-4 and SS-5) deployed in Cuba were not accurate enough at the time to reliably strike Washington, so the credibility of the threat as a disarming strike weapon is highly questionable. And of course, the IRBM forces based in Europe were simply a stopgap measure while Atlas and Titan ICBMs neared operational status; the agreed removal date for Jupiters in Turkey was only a couple of months from when they’d been planned to stand down operationally, anyway.
The aftermath of the CMC–in which Krushchev was forced to publically back down–made him lose face and ultimately his position, which was a bad move for everyone involved; despite his boorish manners and lack of diplomatic sense, Krushchev was a legimate reformer, having engaged in a campaign of “destalization” to bloodlessly purge the government and military of more dogmatic elements and clearly willing to liberalize Soviet control over the Warsaw Pact states. His removal lead to undermining is successor Alexey Kosygin’s attempts at economic reform and fueled the Party apparatchiks like Brezhnev and Anastas Mikoyan, who while not ideologues guided the Soviet Union toward a more insular, paranoid position which likely extended the Cold War.
During Nixon’s tenure there are stories, some apocryphal and some less so, of the perenially drunken and notoriously paranoid executive screaming bloody murder about the Soviets. In one case, Kissinger claims to have instructed the Joint Chiefs to ignore any orders coming from Nixon. We find similar stories with various degrees of substantiation regarding Soviet leaders and subleaders, particularly in the post-Brezhnev era. So much for level-headed sanity among world leaders. If there is any moderation, it comes from the fact that even criminal dictatorships like the Soviet Union are not ruled exclusively at the whims of a single zealot. That’s a thin comfort to rely upon as protection against temporary insanity at command of a nuclear arsenal, though.
The problem with the comparisons you mention in the 'Fifties and 'Sixties as compared to those in the Reagan Era is that in the latter, warfare became quicker and more automated. Whereas in the 'Sixties preparing for a full-on strike took weeks of logistical preparation, and even a missile launch took a couple hours of fueling and erection, by the 'Seventies with the mass deployment of second generation solid fuel ICBMs (Minuteman II) and accurate submarine-based SLBMs, significant nuclear devistation was hardly more than a single launch code away. By the 'Eighties, with the deployment of heavy MIRV boosters in both hardened ground silos and ballistic missile submarines, it was quite reasonable to believe, even aside of the questionable premise of nuclear winter, that any exchange would lead to a situation in which hundreds of millions would be dead and both superpowers and many of their allies would be industrially devestated. A single LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’ or SS-18 ‘Satan’ could destroy a handful of major cities. A small mistake would leave no room for explanation or negotiation.
Reagan’s particular brand of insanity, fed by an almost total ignorance of anything technical, came at a particularly inopportune time in the transition of Soviet leadership. We never really understood who was in de facto authority of the Soviet Union late in Brezhnev’s reign through to Gorbachev, and Reagan (never one to fuss about details) opted simply to bully and bombast as if he were a hero in a B-grade war movie. This sent the Soviets into a frenzy; such was Reagan’s humor that one could never tell just how serious he was, and it stoked the dying embers of Stalinist ideology for one final burst of conflict. The years from 1981 through 1985 were bad ones for everyone involved; the Soviets were convinced that Reagan was a total nutter (not far from the truth) and the ideologues a leader that both would not unilaterally take the reigns of power but who would follow their agenda, including pursuing an increasingly desperate war in Afghanistan. The US was still reeling from the aftermath of the Iranian revolution and loss of influence in the Middle East, plus fears of Commies worming their way through Latin America.
One thing I haven’t mentioned so far is missile defense, specifically the Strategic Defense Inititive. Regarded by its opponents as a technical absurdity (and certainly in the original guise of a system largely based on projected energy weapons, it was more cartoon than capability), and even by the technically-literate advocates as a limited system to prevent a debilitating first strike, Reagan publically promoted it as a protective umbrella that would protect the United States and its allies from harm. This was beyond foolish optimism; even if the individual components were capable of disabling a booster in flight, the notion that the entire command, communication, control, and integration systems of the day would function so flawlessly as to negate the numerical capabililty of incoming weapons is laughably, childishly absurd. During development of the Nike-X/Sentinel/Safeguard system, it had been concluded by both internal and external analyses that it would provide only limited coverage at vast expense that could be readily overwhelmed by increasing incoming RVs and/or decoys. It did, however, contribution to destabilizing the long-standing equivilence of US and USSR capabilities; even if it didn’t work, the threat that it might is enough to make an opponent consider a disabling strike before the system is implemented, and on a longer scale, develop countermeasures to obliviate the viability of the system. To this day we haven’t been able to make anything like even a scaled down version of “Star Wars” work in an operational environment.
The real solution to US-USSR conflict was what occured after 1985, when the leaders of the two powers developed an amenible relationship, resulting in reform (and eventual dissolution) in the Soviet Union. Up to that point, it was quite possible for one small event to become inflated to a point of causing an exchange, the supposed sanity–and willingness of world leaders not to “commit suicide”–notwithstanding.
[QUOTE=chappachula]
(And, ironically, that sets me opposed to so many other Dopers. In threads on terrorism, the Patriot act, etc,… I’m the one who trusts the rational leaders–including GW Bush–but when I state that I fear the terrorists more than you feared the Russians in the 1980’s, I draw reactions of roll-eyes , and accusations of fear-mongering. But that’s a subject for a different thread… 
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“The terrorists” have, worldwide, in the last decade, managed to kill about 10% of the number of people who die in automobile accidents in the United States every year. The September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center Towers and Pentagon were flashy, practically drawn straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, but in any operational sense they were low-hanging fruit. My major surprise was that it hadn’t happened before, and it has proven easy enough to prevent similar attacks from having happened again. Despite all of the press given to these attacks and subsequent followups, including a large number of “credible but unspecified threats” that seem to occur inordinately around the time of anniversaries and holidays, these attacks have done virtually nothing to disrupt the lives of average citizens of Western nations beyond the level of minor inconvenience.
The current trend of referring to every attack on soliders and faciliities in Iraq as steming from “al Quada in Iraq” smacks of nothing more than boogymanism, more akin to exploding ductwork in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil than a threat to international security. “The terrorists”, nameless, faceless, with an apparent agenda against anything civilized, productive, or patriotic (including anything one conveniently wishes to brand under these labels for one’s on purposes) don’t seem to be too active these days; they appear to have “shot their wad,” so to speak. We certainly have no reasonable expectation of having whole cities destroyed, a society pushed back into pre-Industrialism, or anysuch destruction comperable to an exchange between superpowers.
And lest we forget, some of the enemies we face now were former, shall we say, clients for whom we funded their “insurgency” when it was to our benefit. In intelligence terms, this is called “backlash”; it’s what happens when the force you support bites back at you, because said support was based on passingly coincident goals rather than shared values and objectives.
I wouldn’t pay two bits for the supposed rationalism of the current CIC, engaged, as he is, in an egotistical penis-measuring contest with Putin over deployment of an unproven missile defense “shield” in one of a number of former East Bloc countries uncomfortably close to Russia which will neither intercept advanced RusFed missiles, nor (likely) be of much use against hypothetical IRMB/ICBMs that Iran may or may not be operating a decade or more from now. The whole issue is an utter bit of nonsense that both makes Putin look strong to the Russian public–which is now funding development of new missile systems for a Cold War Redux–and gives the Russian Federation all the justification in the world for cancelling their participation in treaties and agreements as a “tit-for-tat” response. These guys are two of the most obtuse assholes to hold prime executive authority in major industrial nations in the last fifty years (de Gaulle notwithstanding), and have the capability of doing a hell of a lot more harm than any band of terrorists, real or imagined.
Stranger