Suppose that at some point between 1945 and 1989 a full-scale conflict broke out in Europe (and other places as well, perhaps) between the East and the West. What year would have been most advantageous for each side?
The long term slowdown in the Soviet economy seems to have started in the early 1970s, and the late 1960s were kind of a high point for ideological communism / revolutionary sentiment in a lot of places, so maybe sometime in the very late 1960s would have been the Soviets’ best shot.
Of course, in an alternate historical timeline the Soviets might have figured out ways to salvage their economic system (market/worker based socialism along the Yugoslav lines, simulated markets like Oskar Lange hypothesized, maybe modern computers/data analysis might have given a shot in the arm to central planning, or maybe economic collapse in the west might have made their system look better relatively). But without postulating any of those alternate timelines, I’d guess the Soviets were at their strongest point (relatively) maybe in 1969 or so.
That’s a good question.
I’m not sure how strong the Soviets were at this point but apparently the mid to late 1970’s were a dangerous time for the West, economic problems, domestic and political problems (end of Vietnam war for the USA, miners strikes, The Troubles in Northern Ireland for the UK etc), military problems (apparently in the UK the military had enough conventional weaponary to be able to fight for approximately one week in a general war scenario!). Basically for the West that was a period of relative weakness for various reasons, the will and means to fight were at a relatively low ebb.
For the West, I would say 1948. That’s the last year that America had a monopoly on nuclear weapons.
Could Russia have used the Korean War to it’s benefit?
Try to get China to expand the Korean War to tie up NATO resources so that Russia could attack Westward?