I recall the Pope and the Solidarity union movement in Poland having quite a bit to do with it too. But mentioning that would I suppose mean acknowledging unions and their power to do good, and the fact that they are profoundly pro-democratic institutions, so I suppose that would be less than an ideal thing to cite in the right-wing universe inhabited by those who believe it was Reagan alone, or even principally.
However the Eastern Europeans do seem, from over here, to be grateful to the U.S. in general and probably to Reagan in particular. His unyielding and loud moral support for them was doubtlessly appreciated.
Not based on your anecdote. The link you provided indicated that Mr. Witt knew only that the Kennedy family tended to be upset by references that Joe Kennedy Sr. had participated with Chamberlain in appeaing Hitler. Witt, himself, seems to have had only the vaguest notion of the accusations made against Joe Sr., and was only using that irritation to heckle JFK without any understanding that he might have been linking JFK, personally, to appeasement in any way.
The only people who have actually held that the U.S. engaged in appeasement have been the nutjobs of the John Birch Society who have never been representative of anyone in the U.S. except far right nutjobs.
Hmm. So Charlie Wilson’s the guy that got Osama bin Laden started, eh?
You’ll excuse me if I withhold my gratitude.
I’ll go along with this. I was flabbergasted when I heard Reagan’s March, 1983 speech proposing SDI, and I ollected everything I could about it. A lot of the most incisive analyses about SDI cakme from Soviet scientists. I suppose it’s possible that Soviet politicians might have been scared of the idea, but if they istened to their scientists they wouldn’t be.
One problem was that there never was a single SDI – there were a lot of proposals, and there were people like Daniel O. Graham saying that you could provide point defense for your silos (as Sam writes about), but there were others who pointed out, rightly, that anything shy of a 100% shield would make a really bad day for the major cities. One bomb per city getting through would be a disaster so catastrophic that nothing in history could compare with it. So, yeah, you do need a virtually leakproof shield.
The technologies proposed were a grab-bag of ideas. The one that got Reagan all worked up was Teller’s “Excaliber” system of “thid-generation nucear weapons”. A crazy idea even if it was going to work properly, and there were serious questions aout even the limited tests run on it. There were also problems with the charged particle beams, neutral particle beams, chemical lasers, groun-based lasers, and nuclear -powered devices in space. One of the things I found particularly bizarre was that a lot of pro-SDI literatiure made a big deal about a ussian quadrupole focusing syste for particle beams, as if this roved our unreadiness in a Sputnik kind of way. It as published in an open journal, though, nd had notjhing to do with missile defence.
None of the tests made before the al of the Soviet Union were very impressive, an some were downrigh embarssments. The best two were the Army test with an expanding “fan” of blades that destroyed a previously-launched target, and the MIRACL IR laser that hit a section of strapped-down booster from 1 km away. Both of these were extremely far from a demonstration of reasonabe range, and were light-years from feasble operating systems.
Sam Stone, you’ve got an odd idea about how MAD works, and SDI’s interaction with it. It was never possible for the USSR to attack the US and survive itself. A force-on-force strike to destroy the other side’s nuclear capabilities went out the window as unworkable once each side had large numbers of deliverable nuclear warheads and the radars to detect an inbound strike. That occurred in the 1950s. Once a strike large enough to target all of the other side’s missiles and bombers bases was detected, the retaliation would be a strike to destroy the other side’s cities. You’ll recall that SAC kept nuclear armed bombers permanently aloft from the early days of the cold war to ensure a retaliatory force should the bases holding the rest of the bombers somehow be taken out in a surprise action of some sort. The deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles on submarines removed any doubt that might have remained that the other side’s nuclear force could be destroyed on the ground. Each submarine had enough nuclear firepower to lay waste to the other side, and being able to locate and simultaneously strike them was a practical impossibility. This occurred in the 1960s. The deployment of the MX as a mobile ICBM was abandoned, but the idea isn’t unworkable at all, the RT-2PM Topol, also known by the NATO designation SS-25 Sickle, is a road mobile ICBM that began serious development in 1977, and deployed from 1985.
SDI was and still is unworkable as a shield against a full scale nuclear strike. The percent that can be stopped begins to drop sharply as the number of missiles in a mass strike goes up. However, even if it were 99% effective against a strike by, say 30,000 warheads, that still leaves 300 weapons each powerful enough to destroy a city.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know if any of the current SDI proposals actually have managed to pass a test without cheating? Because all the “successful SDI systems test” reports I’ve seen require stacking the deck in ridiculous ways – giving the interceptor advance knowledge of the target’s launch time/position/trajectory, installing a homing transponder in the target, disallow the use of any decoys, etc., etc. (And let’s not get into the tests that failed, even with all this aid).
I mean, there’s no point in saying “there have been X successful SDI tests so far” if every single test required oversimplifying the test to the breaking point…
I think you have it backwards. The Soviets were afraid of SDI because it wiped out their retalitory strike capabilities. With a working SDI, the Soviets felt, the US could initiate first strike, and then destroy any retalitory strikes the Soviets launched. So a working SDI meant that MAD was no longer a factor, and that the US had the power to nuke the USSR without consequence.
It was Reagan who installed command economics in the USSR, thereby weakening them from within.
It was Reagan who implemented galsnost in the Soviet Union, allowing the disaffected to vent their frustrations and to dare to see an alternative.
It was Reagan who created the unions in Poland.
The man won the cold war singlehandedly.
Well, you’ve got me dead to rights on the first part, tom. And while I fully agree with your last statement, I’m not sure that someone as impartial as you will if I start, uh, naming names.
I’ll only offer one example: Norman Podhoretz wrote an article in 1976 entitled “The Culture of Appeasement.” Once you know who his pals are and how they make their bread and butter today, well…
However, Podhoretz warned of the danger of appeasement. I do not recall him actually claiming that we had engaged in it at any time. Certainly, following the Vietnam debacle we were not eager to commit troops to “containment,” but I cannot think of any places where we actually “conceded territory” to the Soviets in the hopes that they would go away.
As for SDI, had the U.S. ever come close to implementing it (even though it would clearly fail to work as advertised), it would most likely have actually triggered the final World War. If the Soviets actually believed that they would have been subjected to the threat outlined by Sam Stone, it would have compelled them to launch a preemptive strike to ensure that the U.S. did not have the opportunity to launch one of our own from behind the “shield.” So it would not merely have failed, it would have failed disastrously.
I remember a Yahoo news story (Reuters, I believe) that described the successful test of a mobile, ground-based laser. It was about the size of two semi trailers, plus a tank.
In the test, the laser successfully destroyed an artillery shell in flight. Think about that for a second, and SDI becomes a terrifying possibility. There’s a natural variation in the ballistic trajectory of an artillery shell, so it wasn’t a case of firing a shell through the laser beam; the laser acquired the target and destroyed it within the (I think) eleven seconds it took to fly from gun to ground. Screw enemy missiles–imagine the impact on a modern battlefield if your artillery is suddenly 100% useless.
Straight Dope Message Board > Great Debates > How did Reagan defeat the Soviets?
No. Of course not. Reagan didn’t defeat communism.
Soviet communism collapsed on its own accord because socialism is a piss poor system for human advancement. Do any of you hippie dopers want to defend communism today?
Well? Here is your venue… ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ .
SDI was not a first strike weapon, for the very reason that it was NOT going to be 100% effective. This time, the math breaks in the opposite direction - even if the shield is 99% effective, a 10,000 missile strike would obliterate 100 cities. This is why Reagan offered it to the Soviets. SDI was a stabilizing system. It gave the people who implemented it some assurance that their retaliatory force could survive a first strike, thus allowing them to move away from dangerous doctrine like ‘launch on warning’. At the same time, it could not possibly protect all of a country’s cities from a full-scale counter-attack, so it was never designed to allow for a first strike.
I think you mean this story. I don’t think it spells the end of artillery by a long shot. It’s worth noting who’s developing it:
It has uses for destroying artillery shells or rockets coming in groups of ones or twos at a time, and could potentially nullify future cross border shelling, mortaring, and rocket attacks by Hamas and others against Israel. Stopping a battlefield artillery barrage where the shells would be coming in multiple thousands per hour is another matter entirely. Similarly, SDI might be able to stop an individual launch or perhaps several, but stopping a full scale launch involving 1,000+ missiles each with multiple warheads and the use of decoys is another matter entirely. More so when a failure rate of even 1% still means the complete devastation of the US.
On preview, yes Milum, disagreeing that Reagan won the Cold War on his own equals hippies who love communism. How very perceptive of you. :rolleyes:
That’s the story.
In it’s current form, yes, it could stop a low-intensity barrage. But imagine where it could be in ten years: something the size of a main battle tank, on the same chassis (with the same mobility), and a recycle rate under a second. 100 of these five miles behind the front line, and an artillery barrage, even a heavy one, would be seriously degraded, if not effectively eliminated.
Since indirect fire has been one of two dominant themes in warfare in the 20th century (the other being armored mobility), such equipment would have an incredible effect.
Beyond that, though, imagine two or three of these stationed at each missile silo. SDI wouldn’t just be partially effective on a statistical level, it would give every missile real survivability. It was this story that turned me around on the technical possibility of SDI. If an artillery shell can be shot down in flight, then a missile can too.
Eh - depending on how you phrase the question. No test of the ground-based midcourse interceptor (more or less the ‘national’ part of a national missile defense) has been under realistic circumstances. Case in point: the tests so far have been on missiles launched from California headed toward the South Pacific – we haven’t actually tested it at all on missiles on a flight path toward the US. IIRC, the first of the tests that would even be vaguely representative of a North Korean missile launch are still a couple years off, but have no fear: we’ll have a few NMD missiles installed at Fort Greely, Alaska, by the end of next summer. Election year promise, anyone?
And thinking of artillery protection, I think this is the neatest damned thing I’ve heard of in years. No idea how well it works, though.
Reagan giveth and Regan taketh away. The minute Reagan stepped off the plane from Iceland, his administration was furiously explaining that he didn’t really mean it. And even if he meant it, there was no way to guarantee that whoever held the White House years later when it was implemented (faults and all), would still hold to his intention. There is no reason for the Soviets to have believed that story and, had it been workable, there is no reason to believe that the Soviets would not have launched a preemptive strike.
And, of course, there is the small matter that despite receiving the largest single-weapon appropriations in history (to the detriment of a number of other systems), within four years the administration, itself, downrated the proposed objectives, replacing SDI “umbrella” or “astrodome” for the nation with the SDS “defend the nukes” program.
After nineteen years, we finally have achieved the point where an artillery shell can be brought down in a carefully controlled test. We still have no clear way to provide protection from hordes of MIRVs moving much faster than an artillery shell and we don’t yet know how simple it might be to provide nearly absolute countermeasures. (Simply using spinning warheads covered in anti-radiation paint might be enough to thwart the system that we already know will let through enough missiles to destroy most major U.S. cities.)
I had no objection to the U.S. working on the technology, but the declaration that we were going to make ourselves safe from Soviet attack was a spectacularly stupid move (and the diversion of an inordinate percentage of our research monies to chase after every harebrained scheme in the hopes of stumbling across some neat trick that might work, combined with the continued falsification of test data and proclamations of success using pre-SDI technology in mediocre tests was simply lunacy).
I guess we’ll probably have to agree to disagree on this one. I’m very conservative with regards to technology changing the dimensions of the battlefield. In its current form, it’s a technology demonstration prototype. Perhaps someday it could be miniaturized to the point of being a militarily useful battlefield laser, but I’ve seen too many examples where technology has failed to follow through on its military promises. For examples, the airpower will make all other services obsolete argument of the 1920s and 30s, the anti-tank guided missiles will make tanks obsolete argument of the 60s and 70s, and the surface-to-air missiles will make aircraft obsolete argument of the 60s and 70s.
Sam Stone: I’d hardly regard SDI as a stabilizing force in the MAD equation; the detection of the launch of a single or a small number of missiles would always have given some pause to the decision to launch a full scale retaliation to determine if it was deliberate or accidental. The promise that Reagan sold was as a shield to protect the US from a Soviet attack, which it was clearly incapable of doing. If it were capable of doing it, however, it would have been extremely destabilizing since it would have allowed the US to launch a first strike against the USSR without fear of retaliation. Faced with the potential of such a prospect, the USSR might have been tempted to pull the nuclear trigger before it was unable to so effectively.
The whole missile survivability aspect of a nuclear exchange is a futile question. The entire point of a nuclear arsenal is the ability to completely destroy an enemy nation, not its missiles. Again, the retaliatory aspect of MAD is the ability to annihilate an enemy’s entire existence by vaporizing its cities, not the ability to launch a strike to destroy its retaliatory capability in a first strike which is clearly unfeasible, and has been since the 50s.
Yeah, that’s pretty much my understanding as well. As a cog in the big military-industrial complex, I try to keep an eye on what new systems get proposed, and how much the hype matches the reality.
You might also want to check this out, if you’re into kewl military hardware.
I’m not sure one can make such a distinction between appeasement and the shrill attempts to maneuver public policy because the threat of it looms.
However, I think tomndebb is right about SDI, too. As soon as research into the project begins to show promising returns, it potentially forces the enemy into a “use it or lose it” scenario which still invites a coin-toss decision on destruction of you, or destruction of everyone. Someday Reagan is going to be on the front side of a coin, as was Stalin, and a few others I could name–if I were naming names.
But we were lucky the toss came up tails.