Stranger touched upon Able Archer and I find that incident to be a revealing turning point in the relationship between what would soon become the former Soviet Union and the West. Once the Reagan administration realized just how close the fears of the Soviet Union had brought us to nuclear war, the tone changed and dialog finally started.
This one incident is what lead to the discussions with the USSR and Perestroika. This BBC documentary is about 75 minutes long, was 90 minutes with commercials. If you haven’t seen it I highly recommend it. If this link doesn’t work for you search for the title.
Don’t put words into my mouth. I never said he was the best example; I gave him as just one example. I could also have mentioned the unions’ defeat of Ted Heath - which Scargill tried to repeat.
Remind me, did you live in Britain in the 1970s and 80s, and are you old enough to remember them? I did, and I am.
And what, precisely, does that have to do with the Red Menace? Heath governed during a particularly tumultuous period, and ended up being as unpopular with his Conservative brethren as he was with the Liberals. This is a complete non-sequitur.
That’s nice. I’d love to hear about your childhood memories. But that has nothing to do with the actual threat posed by the Soviet Union in the Cold War. By 1970, the economy of the Soviet Union was so moribund, and its security focus was so dominated by the effort to keep East Bloc nations like Czechoslovakia and Poland from declaring autonomy that any actual threat it posed politically to the United States, Great Britain, or NATO was minimal aside from the substantial nuclear arsenal. As we know now, its conventional forces, while large, were poorly trained, often indifferently equipped, and would have been generally incapable of effecting an invasion of Western Europe.
The actual threat that the Soviet Union would “win” the Cold War by any reasonable metric, be it political, economic, or military, aside from a Pyrrhic victory of wide scale nuclear exchange, was negligible. The Soviets were so busy just trying to keep together what they had that apart from a few high profile espionage operations and funding opportunistic revolutionaries in Africa and Central and South America that took Soviet aid and then proceeded to engage in the same ethnic strife and oppression that has been going on in this regions since before the Europeans showed up in boats, they really had no means to vanquish NATO. Citing a few largely forgotten Communist enthusiasts in Britain (and Trotskyites? Seriously?) in no significant way challenges that argument.
Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with the conventional forces in place in Western Europe at the time. Token British and American contingents in West Germany, and domestic European militaries which were even worse-equipped than the Warsaw Pact forces.
Far from token, the American military presence in Europe was enormous to an extent that influenced budgets and non-military policy of the nations, and protecting the logistical shipping lines from the United States to Europe was a key driver in combined USN-RN naval strategy in the North Atlantic. (As the Falklands Conflict demonstrated, it was also a flawed plan, but even accounting for shipping losses to the Soviet Navy it still wouldn’t have been taxing to maintain adequate shipping.)
The Soviets, on the other hand, despite sitting on substantial oil reserves, did not maintain adequate supplies of refined petroleum on hand to sustain extended land and air operations for a push into Western Europe. This despite only limited usage of oil by the civilian population (in comparison to the automobile happy United States and Western Europe). Whatever else they would have run out of, the first would very likely be oil, and in modern warfare Napoleon’s famous dicta is modified to say, “An army marches on its petrol.” This leads back to the basic philosophy of the Soviets in their annexation of Poland, East Germany, and the Baltic and Carpathian nations; that they were creating a buffer zone against incursion, not staging for further expansion into Europe, which they could neither afford nor every realistically planned.
Alas, if you could make use of a post-Cold War graduate-level history text as well as a thesaurus, you would discover that your strongly-held opinions on the grave threat posed by Soviet expansion, and the role of Britain as the near-solitary bulwark against the Red Menace is very nearly fantasy. The Soviets lacked the means, and in the post- 1956 Hungarian Revolution era even the will to even engage in military adventurism on that scale. They certainly weren’t above funding Marxist-spouting revolutionaries in Third World backwaters, engaging in military and commercial espionage, covertly overthrow of shaky governments in Asia, and eventually constructing a massive land-, air-, and sea-based nuclear arsenal (though the alleged “missile gap” upon which Kennedy rode to office did not exist), but the idea that they were running around Britain with wild abandon influencing national politics is so far from reality I’m not even certain where it comes from aside from political spin doctors who found it a convenient scare tactic to shift politics to the right.
Russia will, by conservative estimates, require almost 30 years to replenish its’ armies. And that’s just to working condition, nevermind the capacity to participate in an arms race. Its’ nuclear stockpile is less than a fourth of what it used to be and being diminished by the week.
Russia has completely and fully backed down from the Cold War and is only now getting the footing it needs to be able to defend itself and retain its’ national structural integrity. The only bugbear left over from the Cold War is the one in people’s heads.
On a side note, it’s always amusing to learn new things. Such as Norway being a hairsbreadth from being turned into glass back in '95. (I’ve heard about the “Black Brant scare,” of course, but never realized that Yeltsin had actually actived his nuclear football and was waiting on consensus.)
To the same forces that led to the demise of the USSR: imperial overreach and an inability to reform economically. The US is a more robust country than the USSR, so it’s losing the Cold War more slowly than the Soviets did. The phrase is somewhat tongue in cheek and I’m unsure of its origin – maybe Chalmers Johnson.
Did we beat 'em or just outlast 'em? It seems very much to me that the Soviet empire imploded because of its own internal weaknesses. The US may have accelerated the process with some actions, such as speeding up the arms race under Reagan, but basically the Sovcoms were hamstrung by a political and economic ideology that had little to do with the real world. The Chicoms were more pragmatic.
It seems to me that, like Nazism, the various communist movements were largely personality cults: first Lenin, then Stalin, later Mao, and small fry like Casto and Tito.
I agree with what seems to be the majority opinion on this thread, that the Soviet Union collapsed from within. But we shouldn’t get too cocky. Ruinous debt, ideological paralysis and runaway immigration are likely to lead us down the same path.
The statement of someone who treats the Daily Mail like a newspaper. Yes I remember the militant Tendency and all the other tiny left wing troskyite twats (who hated each other more than the Romans)
There never was, not in 1 million years, any chance of a communist takeover in the UK.
Why not point out what an Epic Fail the Labour Party was then? 17 years without a sniff of power until Blair benefited from the Labour Party war on entryists waged by Kinnock.
And if the French or Italian Communist parties won power in free and fair elections (which they did not although once they renounced Soviet Communism they were more electable) then that is democratic politics in action.
Perhaps I’m misreading you, but the Falklands only demonstrated flaws in the RN, not NATO naval strategy with regards to the USSR. In concentrating on an ASW role the RN had badly neglected air and missile defense on its vessels. This, combined with their retirement of all ‘real’ aircraft carriers cost them heavily when they had to go it alone against Argentina. The Harrier performed admirably, but it wasn’t even in the same class as the F-14 or even an F-4 as an air defense fighter. To make matters worse, they had no AWACS support to detect low flying Argentinean aircraft at long range. Aside from the Type 42 destroyers which had the Sea Dart, the anti-aircraft armament of British destroyers and frigates consisted of a pair of manually sighted 20mm Oerlinkons and one or two quad mounts of the horridly dated and obsolete Sea Cat. The Sea Cat had a very short range, was subsonic, and used visual command line-of-sight guidance. The vastly more effective Sea Wolf was only just entering service; only 2 British ships were equipped with it. There were no CIWS on any RN vessel to deal with sea-skimming missiles or very low flying aircraft.
Compared to this, the US Navy in 1982 had proper carriers flying F-14s armed with the 110 mile range Phoenix and supported by E-2C AWACS. All cruisers and half of the destroyers and frigates were armed with the Standard MR or ER missile, with the other half of the destroyers and frigates being armed with the Sea Sparrow. The 20mm Phalanx CIWS was standard issue on all newly commissioning ships and refitting existing vessels started in 1980. The first of the Ticonderoga Aegis cruisers was about to enter commission. The US Navy was not in the same boat as the Royal Navy with regards to air and missile defense.
That would be why the hard-left Michael Foot became leader of the Labour Party, and why Tony Benn lost a subsequent leadership election by less than 1%. And yes, I did at some points read the Daily Mail. I also at some points read the Times and the Guardian and the Telegraph.
Perhaps you don’t remember the union activity of the 1970s and early 1980s? The Winter of Discontent of 1978/79? The power cuts when Heath was PM? The 3 day week?
Sorry, but the forces of Socialism were really on the march.
You keep shifting your goalposts to try to rationalize your argument. First it was the Soviets, then Troskyites of Militant Tendency (even in the era of destalinization, “Trotskyite” was a pejorative in the USSR), now it is the homegrown disaffected English Socialism, which pretty much served only to shove British politics so solidly to the right such that the positions of contemporary Labour are barely distinguishable from Thatcherism. And all of this presumed that winning the Cold War hinged on the future of Britain, which falls along the same anglocentrism that has the aliens in Dr. Who serials always establishing their beachhead in the England (or occasionally Scotland or Wales). This entire line of reasoning is about as well anchored as a rubber dingy in the mouth of the Thames at neap tide.
I find it difficult to believe that you have actually studied British history of the period. If you had, you would know that to the great British public, they were all Socialists.
And again, you put words in my mouth. If you had bothered to just read what I wrote, you would have noticed that I restricted myself to the 70s and 80s and not mentioned contemporary Labour.
Ronald Reagan didn’t even go to church. The Soviets were not run by idiots, you know.
First strike policy was US and NATO policy when Ronald Reagan was still an active Hollywood actor. The Soviets were ALWAYS terrified of their inferiority in this regard; by the time Reagan became President they’d had decades to worry about it.