Was there any scenario in which the Soviets could have “won” the Cold War? I was 11 when the Wall came down, so the “hottest” parts were before my living memory/lifetime.
That depends upon your definition of losing. The communist movements in Europe were very strong in the 70s. Communists won in central America and Africa. And, of course, there was Vietnam.
Fair point. My definition of “losing”: U.S. either: obliterated by Soviet nukes, or became Communist.
Essentially no chance of the latter, but an excellent chance of mutual annihilation. Of course in that case the USSR would have lost just as completely.
Was the USSR ever truly prepared to nuke America, with the knowledge that if they did so, they themselves would be nuked? The Soviets were not Iranian mullahs. They didn’t believe that they would all be sent to heaven if they destroyed America. They didn’t want millions of their people to be killed (by America - they were cool with killing millions of their people themselves.) Why would Russia ever have actually attacked us?
Fear that we’d do so first. Remember that to them, we were the equivalent of the Iranian mullahs. The Soviets never talked about the end of the world like it was a good thing or had major factions pushing for nuclear war with the intent that both sides be destroyed so the faithful would go to paradise; we did. We were more likely to go outright psychopathic and kick off the end of civilization than most of them were, save perhaps Stalin.
And so were they to us.
The USSR never had the means, nor the inclination to invade the US, at least in the middle term. Had the entire South American continent and most of Eurasia flipped commie (and under Russian guidance) maybe they’d reconsidered, but that’s something of a remote possibility.
As for nuclear strike, I believe Soviet doctrine made it abundantly clear that an aggressive first strike with them was out of the question. IIRC, released internal papers made public in the last decade confirm this [citation so completely needed it’s not even funny anymore]. Invasion of Europe using conventional forces would have been more likely, but even that would have required a bit of desperation on their part. I think they really thought everyone* would get around to seeing things their way in time, even if a little push was needed.
- proletariat and workers, I mean. Bourgeois reactionary capitalist pig dogs were always the enemy and would never have been converted, of course. That was what lamp posts were for.
IIRC, the post-Soviet government did comment at some point that the election of Reagan did spark serious consideration of a Soviet first strike since they thought there was a high chance he’d launch one at them in a religiously driven desire to create Armageddon. Reagan did have Falwell trying to convince him to do just that.
:shudder:
Yeah, I have trouble seeing what a possible “loss” for the USA would be, beyond what was already going on, our trading partners (stooges? partners) moving into a protectionist Soviet sphere.
Good post.
The old USSR was a bumbling giant, which was falling apart economically. By the time of Kruschev, it was actually importing food! The collectivist system of farming was inefficient and pathetically bad.
In technology, the soviets were able to match the west-for a very brief time. Take space-by diverting resources, the sovs were able to make some spactacular feats in manned spaceflight-but they were a one-trick pony.
Strangely, it was in the interests of the US military-industrial complex, to portray the USSR as a technological giant-because that meant bigger defense budgets!
Actually, the USSR had been failing since the 1920’s-the USA (Herbert Hoover’s relief program) rescued it in the aftermath of the Ukrainian famine (in which 3 million died). Later, the west rescued Stalin in WWII (massive shipments of food, truck, and jeeps). Finally, the era of rising oil prices bouyed the shmabling old dump in the 1970’s. When oil prices plunged in the 1980’s, the jig was up, and the soviet empire could no longer be held together.
After our space shuttle fleet retires next year, guess which one-trick ponies we’ll be paying to take our astronauts to the International Space Station?
Although I agree with the basic gist of your full post, you have the one-trick pony thing reversed. It was the U.S. space program that faltered after we “won” the race to the moon. I put “won” in quotes because after the Apollo program, we largely squandered our experience. The Soviets however, continued a rigorous program of long-term manned spaceflight.
They also didn’t abandon their hardware as we did from the Apollo era. While we brought in a troublesome space shuttle (which they flirted with, but wisely didn’t devote themselves to), they continued using their Soyuz. An upgraded version is still in use today, and we will be paying through the nose to ride it for the foreseeable future.
Of course if you want to talk about being obliterated by Soviet nukes, there was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. I won’t go into it here. But if you read one of the “insider” histories of it, it’s clear that the U.S. and Soviet militaries were both ready (maybe even eager) to launch a military strike and the civilian leaders were thiiiiiiiiiiis close to approving it.
I would say the best answer to this is the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was a bit before my time, but there are a lot of books and the newer ones show just how close we came.
No other time came as close as this, so if you start looking at this (Which is another Great Debate in of itself) the OP will find the answer.
Another good “What if” would be had we used Nukes against China in the Korean War.
I’ve read a fair bit about this, and it seems like that act in of itself wouldn’t have been the key destructor but it would’ve removed the nuclear taboo.
In otherwords even if that hadn’t ended in disaster it would’ve set precident for other nations to use nukes in limited wars. And we all know how quickly that could’ve gotten out of hand.
The Suez Crisis pretty much proved that only the USA and the Soviets could affect the globe worldwide. It set the pace where wars became more localized and in some cases proxy wars for the USA and USSR.
It was in the Yom Kippur War when the USA resupplied Israel that Anwar Sadat was finally convinced that the USA would never let Isarel fall. So he changed tactics and since then we’ve only seen hot flashes between Israelis and Arabs.
You also have to understand the Communists were very divided much more so than the West. I mean France went it’s way but we all knew in a heartbeat the USA would back France and vice-versa, if it came to that. We weren’t sure if China or the Soviets would care a bit if the other got attacked.
As for Africa, the movements started out genuine but all of them corrupted by greed and the leaders would swtich in heartbeat. They were more interested in pay lip service and pocketing any profits they could get from either side.
Wha…you seriously believe this? This is such an incredibly misguided set of statements I’m not even certain where to start addressing them.
As an ideology, communism was dead in Europe by the early 'Sixties. Although the reforms that Khrushchev attempted to implement were hardly radical by Western socialist standards, they were an extreme abrogation of Leninist-Marxist principles. The only East European nations of Europe that thrived economically in the 'Seventies were Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, both by moving toward a market economy. The invasion of Czechoslovakia during the 1968 Prague Spring reforms undermined any legitimate or moral superiority of the Warsaw Pact, and of course Tito separated Yugoslavia from Cominform early in the development of the East Bloc of Soviet satellite nations. The bulk of these satellites were being bled dry just to support the RSFSR, which ultimately led to the formation of Solidarity in Poland, the declaration of martial law, and the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact with a swiftness unimagined by even its most ardent critics.
In Africa, waving the hammer and sickle was a way to obtain weapons and materiel, used to support age-old ethnic strife. Not one single self-labelled Communist government or movement in Africa attempted to implement anything like Marxist doctrine. After the fall of the Soviet Union, these nations turned to the Peoples Republic of China for the same service, and we all know what unbending Communist ideologues the Chinese have been in the Xaioping era and after. South America is an even more absurd example; the wave of Communist movements was exclusively a response to oppressive autonomic governments propped up by American companies and often the American government through both overt and covert involvement. That the Communist and socialist governments arising from these movements were equally autocratic and vastly more incompetent at any productive industry was a surprise to no one. For the Soviets, it was really just a means to prick back at the United States for making such a fuss about Afghanistan.
Anyone who cares to point to Viet Nam as an example of Communist expansionism needs to perform at least a casual survey of the history of that nation, in which it has been invaded again and again and again from beyond written history. The Soviets viewed Vietnam (and later Syria) primarily as a means to test their SAM systems against American capability; actual support for the governance of Viet Nam was minimal. The Vietnamese have a long-standing ethnic hatred of the dominant Han and were never going to be subservient to Maoist China any more than they would take orders from Moscow. Indeed, the Vietnamese saw the American support for the corrupt Diem government as merely an extension of the French Indochina colonial repression; they’d thrown off the yoke of the French and were not going to be subject to control by the United States. The radical market reforms of Viet Nam in 1986 have made the nation socialist in name only; it is one of the chief emerging market economies in Southeast Asia.
Would the Soviet people as a whole ever elected such an option? Of course not? Would the notional government have agreed to such a no-win attack? Absurd.
However, realize two things: first, the Soviet Union was never governed by its government. The nominal head of government, the Premier (equivalent to a Prime Minister) held virtually no real power or authority. Actual authority was vested in the Politburo and often almost exclusively in the General Secretary, all of which were offices within the only permitted political party. This occasionally allowed arguably unhinged ideologues like Stalin and Andropov to reign supreme and wield almost unilateral authority. Stalin, at his most paranoid, could have conceivably initiated an attack. Andropov, terminally ill during his short reign, had little to lose personally in such an attack.
Second, a credible system of nuclear deterrence requires more than just being able to respond to an attack. It has to be able to pre-empt a potential attack, which requires the means and willingness to respond if a disarming surprise attack appears imminent or the chain of national command authority has been disrupted. That means you have to have automatic decision points to initiate an “defensive” attack, not dissimilar to “Plan R” in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The suggestion for Plan R in the film actually came from the writings of Herman Kahn, who was attempting to ironically point out the flaws in the philosophy of Assured Destruction. The United States actually had a policy of “Launch on Warning” integrated into the Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear response; doubtless so did the Soviets, and there are at least half a dozen known occasions in which the President called in his cabinet to seriously discuss a pre-emptive nuclear attack.
We also know of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Able Archer 83, and the Petrov Incident as three occasions where the Soviets actively deployed nuclear weapons with intent to use if any further indications of attack were known. In the case of the first two, we didn’t realize that weapons were deployed or that the Soviets took the blockade or exercises that seriously; in the latter, we didn’t even know of the incident until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Doubtless there are other incidents that are not in the public domain where the US and the USSR went to elevated conditional alert based upon indications of attack. Nuclear war, with weapons delivered by intercontinental ballistic missiles, can happen so quickly and with so little analysis or judgment that the danger is very high, even if rational actors are in charge. As former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later wrote in a critical analysis of American strategic policy, “The combination of nuclear weapons and human fallibility will destroy nations.”
As for the question of the o.p.: realistically, there was no chance that the United States would have “lost” the Cold War by any rational metric except by complementary destruction of the players. As a socioeconomic philosophy, Marxist and Maoist Communism was deader than yesterday’s tuna tartare even before WWII. The Communist movements in the United States and most of its allies were never taken with any seriousness by anyone less drunk that Joe McCarthy, and the actual spy networks developed from earnest Communist sympathizers didn’t mount to a hill of beans save for the Cambridge Five, who were mostly disgruntled about the state of post-war Britain. While the post-WWII United States (and its allies, thanks in part to the Marshall Plan) thrived, the nations of Comintern struggled to produce enough food staples and basic goods to keep people clothed and fed. Communism was a convenient boogieman, especially in the Space Race and America’s burgeoning imperial ambitions and desire for petroleum, but as any student of Russian history can appreciate, the Warsaw Pact was little more than the Russians seeking to surround themselves with a convenient buffer to prevent invasion. And that protective blanket ended up suffocating the Soviet Union, albeit faster and more thoroughly than anyone anticipated. Other independent Communist nations have either collapsed or become avowed market-oriented economies.
The United States was never going to lose the Cold War. It was just a question of how much it was going to cost, or more to the point, how much money could be made “fighting” the war. Fortunately, a fair portion of that effort didn’t just result in weapons but also gave us the indistinguishable-from-magic technology we now use to browse porn on the Internet and send text messages halfway around the world in an instant. Ain’t war grand?
Stranger
I regret to say that you are very much mistaken. Perhaps you’d care to look at Britain in the 1970s and 1980s? Remember Arthur Scargill? Remember Militant Tendency - Derek Hatton & co - a group of Trotskyists who tried to take over the Labour Party? Or Italy, where the Communists were almost elected - and ran many cities. I remember the Communists being quite strong in Greece and France too.
Sorry, you are very much mistaken.
Southeast Asia was touch and go in the '60s as well, with postwar economies in the crapper and no shortage of Chinese-backed communist agitators. Lee Kwan Yew credits American intervention in Vietnam with giving other Southeast Asian countries enough breathing room so that they could get their economic houses in order, to present a plausible alternative to the communists. Without this distraction, it was quite plausible that communist agitators would have succeeded; they were numerous, well organized, and very good at using and then subverting the mechanisms democracy and unions.
Meh, as long as America’s last line of defense (Colorado high school students) are up to the challenge, no Soviet/Latin invasion will prevail.
Holy shit! Your best example of the potency of the dirty Reds is Arthur Scargill, the man who broke the National Union of Mineworkers into two and whom Margaret Thatcher probably sends a nice fruit basket every Christmas for providing rationale allowing the Conservatives to hold the British Parliament for twelve years? With enemies like that, who needs friends? I have to admit to having to look up Derek Hatton, being as he was such a minor influence on British national politics. He appears to have had more influence in his post-political career as a media head, though largely as the butt of jokes. Politically, he appears to be about as much of a threat as Rick Gervais.
If this is the best you can muster about the threat of Communism during the Cold War, you prove the contrary even more aptly and succinctly than any other post in this thread.
Stranger