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The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union
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Subject: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union
Posted By: David Newton
Posted At: 3/4/02 18:02
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Stuart Slade
Administrator
Posts: 302
(10/26/00 9:02:58 am )
The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union
The seeds of the Soviet Union's destruction and the US Victory in the Cold War were laid many years before the climactic events of 1980 - 1986. In some ways they could be traced back to the death of Stalin in 1953. Stalin understood what made the Soviet system work; the total dependence of the population on the Soviet system for advancement and their total vulnerability to it for punishment. An alternative to the Soviet system could not be permitted because that would reduce the totality of that dependence and vulnerability. The seed of destruction buried within that system was that, by its very nature, it concealed the inefficiency and shortcomings that were rife thoughout the whole structure. Failings were concealed, shortfalls were buried and statistics were gun-decked. Over the years layer upon layer of lies, mis-statements and evasions built up until reality had completely ceased to exist.
Khruschev had recognized this problem and attempted to do something about it. Unfortunately for him, he did so in ways that alienated large proportions of the Soviet power structure; in particular the military forces and the industrial structure that supplied them. His efforts to improve the miserable performance of the Soviet economy alienated the Party structure who interpreted them as threats to their control, their ideology and their personal power. The remaining arm of the Soviet system, the Organs of State (the security services such as the KGB et al) had been gravely weakened and were in no position to oppose the developing alliance between Party and Military. Khruschev was deposed and replaced by Brezhnev.
The Brezhnev era was a collegiate founded on an unspoken agreement between the military-political-industrial alliance that had deposed Khruschev. In effect this gave the Party the unfettered power to run the Soviet Union provided that the military had an unfettered right to build up and equip their armed forces as they chose. This deal was the basis of the tremendous Soviet military build up during the late 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, the Soviet armed forces were consciously taking advantage of a window of opportunity when they believed that the USA was (firstly) too distracted by the Vietnam War and (later) too demoralized by its defeat in that war to respond in a proper and timely manner. Buried within this build-up was a deadly flaw in the Soviet system. There was no way by which costs could be measured. As an example, the Russians appeared at the Farnborough Air Show in 1988 with some of their military aircraft and were asked about costs. They quoted the same "cost" for each aircraft on show, regardless of whether it was an Su-27, a MiG-29 or a Yak piston engined trainer.
With no means of measuring costs and with an economic picture rendered invisible by years of systematic deceit, there was no way that the impact of Soviet military expenditure on the economy as a whole could be measured. If one doesn't know what the size of a cake is and doesn't know how big a slice cut from that cake is, there is no way to know how much cake is remaining. There was also no means of deciding whether a given military program was actually a sensible use of resources; without accurate knowledge of costs, it is impossible to determine cost-effectiveness. The only criteria available was that the Soviet military forces wanted it; if they wanted it they got it. The result was a plethora of programs, some overlapping, some not. Some realistic some not. Some effective some not. . The basic Soviet economy was so inefficient and wasteful that they had long lost any real idea of what things cost or what the trade-offs were in production. The effect of this profligate and highly inefficient use of resources was to @#%$ and load a gun pointed at the brains of the Soviet system. All that was needed was somebody to pull the right trigger.
That leadership had been sorely lacking throughout the latter half of the 1970s. The Carter administration was fundamentally defeatist in attitude. Carter had accepted that the Cold War existed, that nothing was going to change and that the US could, at best, hold the line. He appears to have gained that idea as a result of a complete failure to understand how the containment policy instituted by Kennan worked. Containment had been founded on the perception that preventing the political and military expansion of the USSR would maintain the status quo while the basic economic weakness of the Soviet system brought about its collapse. Under Carter, containment was replaced by "peaceful co-existence" which was interpreted to mean that the Us would not actively oppose Soviet initiatives. The watchword of those years was (as formulated by one Carterite State Department official) "What's theirs is theirs, what's ours is negotiable".
When Reagan gained the Presidency in 1980 he brought with him a team of advisers and strategists who had been working on the defense problem for almost twenty years. He also brought with him a new and quite outstanding idea - things don't have to be this way. Reagan had a quite different perception of the situation than the Carter Era officials. He believed that the Soviet Union did not work, could not be made to work and that the correct pressure applied in the correct places could bring about the collapse of their system. In short he believed that the USA not only should win the Cold War but that it could do so and in relatively short order. That was not just a belief; a finely judged and carefully-estimated strategy for doing precisely that had already been worked out in some detail.
As a result of the Brezhnev era build-up, the Soviet Union had a great preponderance of military power in Europe. This was not quite enough to overrun the NATO forces but had gotten perilously close to it. NATO could not build equivalent conventional military forces because of the different way their economies were structured. The military burden imposed by maintaining such large standing forces would have destroyed their economy. The only way NATO could be certain of stopping a large-scale Soviet conventional attack was to use nuclear weapons and that was rapidly becoming impossible. If the USSR could continue to build up its conventional forces to the point where they could overrun Europe without using nuclear weapons it was all over. The problem they had was that by the late 1970s, they had hit the max on their economic structure. The weight of military expenditure was distorting their economy to the point where it was just the safe side of breaking down. This left them vulnerable in ways they couldn't possibly understand because their basic belief system didn't allow for those ways to exist. It was that weakness that Reagan's team exploited (brilliantly).
What they did was a three-pronged attack. The first attack was a concerted campaign of economic warfare against the USSR, aimed at draining the Soviet Union's remaining gold and hard currency reserves. This exploited the weakness of the Soviet agricultural system and its inability to provide adequate food supplies. The US staged a series of massive grain sales to the USSR that gave the appearance of supporting the Soviet system. In fact, they did precisely the reverse. They depleted the Soviet reserves of gold and hard currency, removed any incentive for the USSR to reform its agricultural system, supported the US farmers and had one other, rather amusing, side-effect. The USSR had tried to generate gold and foreign currency reserves by selling oil and gas to Western Europe. These deals had been strongly opposed by the Carter Administration; Reagan's team was much less vocal. The reason was simple; the gold and foreign currency generated by those sales was going straight to the US to pay for wheat. The net effect was to strengthen the US at the expense of Western European countries that opposed its wishes on trading with the USSR
Secondly the Reagan Administration started a defense build-up that concentrated on an entirely new generation of precision guided munitions and C4I structures. Ironically, these had actually been developed as prototypes under the Carter administrations but production had never been properly funded. Now resources were poured into procuring the new equipment. Arsenals and bomb dumps began to fill up with the new guided weapons. The significance of these weapons was their very high accuracy allowed the relatively small NATO forces the ability to destroy the much larger Soviet conventional force without resorting to nuclear weapons. The new weapons meant that the massing conventional forces in the style beloved by Soviet commanders simply gave the NATO defenses more concentrated targets to eliminate. Soviet espionage quickly revealed to them how effective these new weapons were and the thought terrified them. Even worse, it quickly became apparent that even these new weapons were only the first generation of such equipment; there were developments coming down the line that made these weapons obsolete. That discovery lead to the third blow against the Soviet system.
The US instituted a whole series of black and advanced technology programs that appeared to offer a devastating counter to any Soviet military initiative. Many of these programs were bluffs - they were physically impossible but the Soviets looking at the high-tech military goodies entering service didn't realize that. What they could see and touch was bad enough. Soviet strategists began to view the US as a technological wizard capable of bending the laws of physics at will. A determined espionage effort penetrated some of the black programs, bring back secrets that were fearful indeed. Aircraft that could penetrate the densest air defense systems unseen; missiles that could drop a high-penetration nuclear warhead with pinpoint accuracy. What was even more terrifying was that some of these espionage efforts failed completely - US security was so tight on some programs that nothing could be learned. The possibility that there was nothing to be learned because nothing existed never seemed to occur to the Soviet leadership
The Soviets now faced a real problem. Their entire military structure was being faced with a type of war they hadn't imagined and didn't quite know how to answer. They had the details of precision guided munitions; their military wanted them. That's when the real blow, the one carefully concealed, struck. When the Soviet military demanded high-tech weapons they discovered they couldn't get them. The Soviet economy couldn't supply either the quality or quantity of equipment demanded. The huge surge of production during the late 1960s and 1970s had been achieved by running existing facilities into the ground. Factories had not been re-equipped nor were they fitted to exploit the latest technology. While Soviet research and development had been active and highly productive (some of the US black programs had actually been based on Soviet R&D) the effort needed to translate that R&D into production equipment hadn't taken place. From the early 1980s onwards the effects became obvious. Ships and aircraft started to appear without vital electronic systems, new types of military equipment started to experience increasing delays in service entry.
The initial Soviet effort was to buy and steal the equipment they needed from the West. Then they started to learn the reality of their position. Deals could not be completed because the seller demanded payment in hard currency - only the Soviet currency reserves had gone, turned into American wheat and eaten by Soviet citizens (and by implication, turned into income for American farmers, the tax on which had gone to pay for the new precision-guided munitions). The espionage effort was far more successful and far more demoralizing. Every secret stolen showed that the West was pulling further ahead in military science and that those advances were being productionized. Even worse, all the efforts of the Organs of State were being wasted. The inefficient and obsolete Soviet industrial structure couldn't use the information that was pouring in. One Soviet historian summed it up by saying "It was raining soup and Soviet industry was equipped with a teaspoon".
Gorbachev was faced with the reality that he had to meet military demands that the economy couldn't supply. His reaction - quite a sensible one, probably the only sensible thing he ever did - was to try and make the economy more efficient . Then he made a horrible discovery. He couldn't make the economy more efficient because nobody knew what the economy was. The Soviet system was built on layers of lies going to every level of government and every year of history. Factories that were listed as producing according to plan had never been built (fact). Aircraft that were supposed to be flying x hours per month had never been built. Oil refineries that were supposed to be churning out thousands of barrels of refined products and had won awards for exceeding quotas had never been connected up to the supply grid and had never seen a drop of crude. Because of the way the Soviet system worked, everybody gun-decked reports and didn't rock the boat. The effort to match the American Revolution in Military Affairs pushed them over the limit into economic collapse. The Reaganite team had won the Cold War with a magicians trick; they had misdirected and flimflammed the Soviets into doing exactly the one thing that would wreck them. The team that had planned the offensive grinned and switched over to planning a soft landing for the Cold War. The US Had won the Cold War, now all that was left was to arrange for a suitably peaceful Soviet surrender.
Gorbachev didn't realize that it was all over. He understood that the situation was desperate, that the USSR faced an unparalleled crisis and that the primary need was to buy time while he reorganized the Soviet economy to produce the high tech goodies the Soviet armed forces needed. What he actually did was incredibly, unbelievably stupid. Looking to reform a system that depended for its very survival on establishing and maintaining a monopoly of power, he broke that monopoly. Glasnost and Perestroika (Openness and restructuring) were envisaged as attempts to find out what industrial base the USSR actually had and then rebuild it. Gorbachev's overtures to the west and apparent conciliatory behavior was a desperate attempt to buy time and restructure the Soviet Union. Traditionally, faced with military defeat, Russia and the Soviet Union had withdrawn to their heartland and regrouped. Now, faced with the stunning economic and industrial victory the Reagan defense team had inflicted on the USSR, Glasnost and Perestroika were seen as the economic equivalent of that policy. Of course Gorbachev didn't realize that letting the screws off would collapse the system completely but it did. Glasnost and Perestroika turned out to be nothing more than the signatures on the surrender document
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ARH mk 2
Old Friend
Posts: 52
(10/27/00 2:41:38 am )
Re: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union
To bring up one specific point, what influence do you think Strategic Defence Initiative played in the Soviet capitulation?
"It is better to be rich and happy than poor and sad."
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Dirk Mothaar
Old Friend
Posts: 138
(10/27/00 9:03:29 am )
Re: For your amusement
Stuart, I posted your essay (with credit of course) on another board. I got a rather amusing reply from a young Australian lad that I thought might be good for a laugh. BTW, that board is for the discussion of Robert Jordan's fantasy series "The Wheel of Time" but sometimes lapses into politics. Anyway, here's Apis4's reply to your essay:
Incidentally, his last paragraph has to do with a longstanding dispute over the gentleman to whom he refers as "Ronnie Ray-Gun." He was a little upset when I said that Ronaldus Magnus had been instrumental in ending the Cold War and defeating International Communism.Apis4
Registered User
(10/27/00 9:11:12 am)
Reply Re: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union
I think that this is all very well and good, but the victors survivers always write the history book, and I am yet to beconvinced that there was no other factors contributing to Soviet decline and "Fall". In fact that theres is such sketchy records available in Russia supports my theory that the Reagan Administration just assumed that they were responsible for the end of the cold war, when indeed Russia could have collapsed on itsself for many different reasons, In fact I think that simply with the Reagan approach alone, it may never have fallen. The Russain people had never known anything but a small central monopoly on power and the incentive for anything different wasnt totally there. On top of this Russian patriotism ,if controled properly by Soviet propaganda would have served to further maintain Soviet power in Russia, as for the weapons issue, I doubt that even new technology alone would have hurt the USSR too much, since Russia has always been ready to sacrifice to survive (I truely beleive it was Russia that won WWII, since geo-politic required the "world Island" for power, which was occupied be Russia, so the Germans threw everything at them, if they had have focused on the West, it was all over for us). They probably would have thrown everyhting at these weapons regardless, if it ever came to war, and might have still gotten far through sheer weight of numbers. And then you have the (mis)concept of MAD.
If Russia ever found itself with the back to the wall so to speak because of Military advances, it was fully capable (and still is, ten brand new NICBM'S were built last month) of mass production (I really mean mass, as in like the way they built Tanks) of nuclear weapons. And I think if forced to, they would have sent a big nuclear "@#%$ you" to the West, regardless of the consequences, which IMO wouldnt have occoured, the technology used for nuclear warfare even to day means that a lot of maintenace and/or preperation is required for a Nuclear attack at the best of times, so the sheer logistical magnituded of such action after an nuclear attack, is to me, evidence enought that whoever went first would stand a good chance of victory.
Russia very well might have lashed out in desperation, whilst the US were not thinking along those lines because of "new technologies", and would be caught in absolute shock by the Russain attack. If you think that technology alone is enough to collapse nations, look at China. They have far less advanced Technology than the US (though I'm glad they managed to steal some, good on em) but I think that America would be foolish to think they could ever muscle China into submission with out a fight (look at Korea to see just how ready the Chinese are to stand up to anyone, even the US)and indeed the US is seeking to further it ties to China (accepting their Communist government) through new trade policies.
So the claim that "Old man Ray-Gun" destroyed Communism is ridiculous (see China, Vietnam, Loas, North Korea and, Cuba), infact he may have not even single handedly destroyed the Soviet Union!
*On with the World revolution Comrades*
Be Evil and Profit
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Stuart Slade
Administrator
Posts: 313
(10/27/00 10:26:52 am )
ABM and the Soviet Collapse
I think it was one of the impossible black programs that lead them to believe that it was all over. I'd better clarify that. As you know, I'm a strong believer in ABM defenses and recognize that the technology needed to establish them is very far from being unattainable. In fact we've had the means and the ability to esatblish anti-missile defenses for over 40 years. So ABM is both practical and desirable. What was impossible about the US program was the way it was being done. Once the defensive options being discussed started to rotate around space-based lasers, orbital battle stations, x-ray lasers and other exotica the Russians started to really believe we could do all those things. They knew that we had a perfectly good, perfectly capable ABM system in 1965; given development since then what had we come up with since then? Look at the wonders we can see coming out. What else is there we don't know about? If they had a system that worked all those years ago why are they not building that rather than developing these exotic things. Doesn't that imply that they've already built the older ....... uh-oh.
Get the Organs of State to look into this. What? They can't find out anything? The security is that good. That can only mean the equipment must work very well indeed. uh-oh uh-oh.
So again they were faced with the options of spending billions on an entirely new development track and had to fold. They didn't know that they had just folded to a hand of nothing.
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Stuart Slade
Administrator
Posts: 314
(10/27/00 10:39:19 am )
A good laugh is about right This guy is incredible; he gets everything wrong. I've never read such illogical absurdities.
Taking his screed bit by bit. Russian records are not sketchy, they are actually quite voluminous. So much so that there is more stuff out there than we can conveniently read. All of the US stuff is documented as well. So its not as if we are theorizing in a vacuum; the documentation is there to back it up and the accounts from both sides have remarkable agreement as to what was going on. The rest of the first paragraph is largely incoherent and unsupported personal opinion and filled with non-sequiters to boot. There's nothing there worthy of attention.
I assume by NICBM he means near-intercontinental ballistic missiles. In fact the missiles being built by Russia are MICBMs (mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles) and they did NOt build ten of them last month. In fact they haven't built ten in the last two years. The rest of the paragraph shows a lamentable lack of understanding of nuclear strategy and is also basically unsupported personal opinion.
His third paragraph is also absurd; the possibility of a Soviet attack was understood from the beginning and making the necessary arrangements for a soft landing (that is a peaceful rather than explosive conclusion) were being made from an early date. That was what lay behind the meetings in Iceland and elsewhere. The rest of this paragraph is plain drivel; the author clearly doesn't understand what was being done or why.
His last paragraph simply reveals how childish and immature he is.
All in all, not a bad joke for a Friday afternoon; thanks for sharing. I may even print this out and put it into the indoctrination file for research assistants labelled "a horrible example" [:) ]
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Dirk Mothaar
Old Friend
Posts: 140
(10/27/00 10:58:05 am )
Re: If this tells you anything about the lad He proudly wears the title, "Most Annoying" on the WOT (Wheel of Time) board and in fact took great delight in posting some spoilers for the ninth volume of that series. That might not seem too bad, but most of us have been waiting for two years for that book to be written - it hits shelves November 7th in the US. Ah, well. There is a young lady from Finland with whom I had a very good conversation about the merits of free market capitalism vs socialism.
Be Evil and Profit
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Philip Boshier
Regular
Posts: 26
(10/27/00 1:26:17 pm )
So how much did the Reagan Administration Actually invest in a program that was never really intended to be deployed? Was there any work done on it at all? Was it all really just a huge facade? Very interesting . . . .
"If wars were won by feasting,
Or victory by song,
Or safety found in sleeping sound,
How Britain would be strong"
Rudyard Kipling
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Stuart Slade
Administrator
Posts: 320
(10/27/00 1:50:13 pm )
Black programs
Thats right; there were enough practical black programs to give the environment credibility and enough really advanced work to suggest what could be going on but the majority of the black programs were chimeras. They were backed up by carefully leaked information that something strange was going on, mysterious sightings of strange things at peculiar hours and just enough mistakes with unconvincing denials to season the mix. People had a lot of fun cooking up weird and quite incredible programs that could be made black and budgeted. Of course, a lot of the funding from the fake black programs went to the overtly covert programs so it looked like they were getting marvellous results for far less investment than was the case.
Then of course there were the programs that didn't make any sort of sense. Create a rationale for a hypersensitive program that is obviously ludicrous and the opposition will spend years trying to sort out what its really for. The explanation that its to create defense-related jobs in a politically sensitive area would never occur to them. Line units didn't get the full impact of what was going on but they entered into the spirit of the thing. One FF-1052 class ship in the Med gained quite a reputation for creating imaginative sculptures out of waste steel pipe and antenna wire which the crew welded to the aft edge of their hangar. Its reputed that several Soviet AGIs nearly went aground trying to photograph the creations. Of course, the more various crewmembers denied that it was anything secret the more convinced the Soviets became that they were onto something really big.
Its really a modern version of the ancient Roman urn marked with the motto Iti Sapis Spotanda Bigone
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Philip Boshier
Regular
Posts: 28
(10/28/00 4:04:43 pm )
Re: Black programs
So, is this the reason why Reagan refused to share the SDI technology with Gorbachev? The technology he wanted shared simply didnt exist or not to the level the Soviets were worried about.
"If wars were won by feasting,
Or victory by song,
Or safety found in sleeping sound,
How Britain would be strong"
Rudyard Kipling
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Tim Hanna
Founder
Posts: 758
(10/28/00 4:18:46 pm )
Re: Black programs
Even if it did exist it would defeat the purpose to give it to the USSR. The easiest way to defeat a program is to first know exactly how it works.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former"
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Stuart Slade
Administrator
Posts: 322
(10/30/00 9:07:33 am )
Re: Black programs
Sort of; it was even more devastating than that. In effect the Reagan team was saying to the USSR, "we don't care if you know how this works. We're so far ahead of you we can introduce new technology faster than you can counter it."
Telling an enemy they don't scare us is standard. Telling an enemy we don't care whether they think they can scare us or not is really contemptuous.
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Hoahao
Old Friend
Posts: 60
(10/30/00 9:59:50 am )
Soft Landing Stuart, could you go into more detail as to how this was arranged??
"The shovel is brother to the gun." C. Sandburg
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Martyn
Old Friend
Posts: 135
(10/31/00 7:37:28 am )
Funding black/gray projects I know that a number of scientists were funded via the SDI program, in academic terms a lot of money was given out. A lot of good science was funded and a lot of it seemed to have little to do with SDI, but all the physicists would pitch they grant applications to appeal.
A lot of good can out of SDI, if you throw fistfuls of money at scientists to play in their favourite area you get good results.
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Dirk Mothaar
Old Friend
Posts: 143
(10/31/00 9:51:15 am )
Re: Update on young Apis4 I will not post his profanity filled reply, but it was kind of sad. I described it as a good example of pounding the table when unable to argue the facts. If you wish, here's a link to the board: Wheel of Time Board
Be Evil and Profit
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JoeA64
Old Friend
Posts: 86
(11/2/00 5:43:55 pm )
Re: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union
Stuart, I've taken the liberty of reproducing your essay (with proper credit, of course!!) at the Today's News Forum at www.politics.com. There's a fellow there who's claiming that Reagan doesn't deserve any credit for the fall of the Soviet Union because (a) Communism worked just fine as an economic theory and therefore Reagan forced it to crash with an economic arms race, or (b) Communism was doomed to fail and Reagan played no role in its failure.
I don't really expect I'll be able to change his mind, but it should provoke some interesting discussion (though there generally seems to be a lot more heat than light on those boards!!)
-Joe-
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Stuart Slade
Prince of Darkness
Posts: 355
(11/3/00 12:23:28 pm )
Re: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union
No problem but the link is dead. Could you check it so I can amble over please?
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JoeA64
Old Friend
Posts: 95
(11/3/00 1:36:15 pm )
Re: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union Sure, the correct link is:
www.politics.com
Go to the Forum section, and check the "Today's News" forum (you may need to set up a Delphi account first).
I think I might have messed up the link (over there) intended to link back here, too - typing in URL's manually is not exactly one of my strong suits. [:\ ]
-Joe-
(At 2:42) Doh. I forgot to give you the name of the thread I reposted your article in. It's "The Best and Worst of US Presidents".
Fair warning: there's generally a LOT more heat than light shed in those boards. There are several extremely vociferous Democrat posters (especially today) who will give you a headache if you're masochistic enough to let them.
Edited by: JoeA64 at: 11/3/00 1:42:01 pm
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Euclidean
New Guy
Posts: 6
(2/11/01 12:02:52 pm )
Reagan may have been on duty when the Soviet Union finally collapsed, but I think credit must be given to a consensus (remarkable in its longevity) that the Soviet Union must be contained.
I think it is worth noting that George Kennan, the man who clearly defined the need for containment, predicted that Stalinism would ultimately collapse. In light of this, I don't quite believe that Reagan was the one who discovered the specific formula which caused the Russian bear to keel over dead.
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Reagan VS USSR
RBH Jr
Posts: 2885
(01/31/08 14:17:28)
Overall I would say pretty good summation. I do have few problems with this section;
And perhaps most importantly; Reagan forced Western powers to stop selling technology to the Soviets. This meant that the Soviets could only rely on their own behind -the-times technology, and whatever they could steal from the west, in their efforts to try to keep up with the next generation of weapons Reagan was pushing the military to develop.What they did was a three-pronged attack.
...
The USSR had tried to generate gold and foreign currency reserves by selling oil and gas to Western Europe. These deals had been strongly opposed by the Carter Administration; Reagan's team was much less vocal. The reason was simple; the gold and foreign currency generated by those sales was going straight to the US to pay for wheat. The net effect was to strengthen the US at the expense of Western European countries that opposed its wishes on trading with the USSR You are not capturing the whole story. Reagan opposed the Soviet-German gas pipeline project that, when finished, would double annual Soviet hard currency trade and allow the Soviets to blackmail western Europe into compliance and likely led to the end of NATO as we knew it. Reagan also pushed "western" nations to stop buying anything from the Russians and opposed any western development of Soviet energy infrastructure. This had the duplicate effect of increasing the drain on Soviet hard currency reserves and starving their infrastrcuture of much needed (and otherwise unavialible) investment and technology.
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Seer Stuart - The Prince of Darkness
Posts: 6741
(02/01/08 06:51:27)
That was written seven years ago and I think it holds up pretty well. One thing that interests me is the following:
We could very well argue that Russia's behavior under Putin for the last seven years has been exactly that startegy, withdraw to the heartland, regroup.Traditionally, faced with military defeat, Russia and the Soviet Union had withdrawn to their heartland and regrouped. Now, faced with the stunning economic and industrial victory the Reagan defense team had inflicted on the USSR, Glasnost and Perestroika were seen as the economic equivalent of that policy. Of course Gorbachev didn't realize that letting the screws off would collapse the system completely but it did. Glasnost and Perestroika turned out to be nothing more than the signatures on the surrender document.
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abuzuzu
Wed Oct 30, 2013
I read an article this weekend which very nicely complements and supports Stuarts original October 2000 essay re-posted here by MKSheppard. I hope I am not out of order in commenting to this long dormant thread.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140819065 ... 3KvmCh7Rec
This article by Ken Adelman is basically a plug for his new book, Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War. Adleman states, as did Stuart, that the economy of the Soviet Union was terminally dysfunctional and Regan pushed them over the edge by refusing to back down on his "Star Wars" ballistic missile defense.
I am indebted to Stuart for his insightful - to say the least - essay. During the end of the cold war I saw multiple inconsistencies with the then dominant media and talking heads analysis but lacked the background and analysis skills to pull said inconsistencies together into a coherent whole.
For example there was a very brief write up in NASA tech briefs magazine that described a new and improved -IIRC- woven Hafnium Carbide material used to replace the then current ceramic used for seals in a combined cycle - jet turbine, ram jet- scram jet engine. In order to function across the entire turbo-ram-scram spectrum the engine internal geometry had to change and this material was used to seal the sliding joints. The key point was this article claimed changing seal materials increased the seal maintenance interval from 50 hours to 500 hours.
The fact the article did not say calculated or modeled, or projected maintenance interval strongly suggesting to me that such an engine existed and was flying or someone was playing mind games. I read the article very carefully over a period of weeks and came to the conclusion it was impossible from the wording to tell if this was discussion actual results or not, a mean feat of word smithing worth noting. The style of NASA Tech Briefs at that time made very clear distinctions between actual and theoretical data and was never avoidably ambiguous. I had originally thought this was perhaps an intentional slip hinting at the existence of an Aurora type aircraft, wishful thinking on my part.
I had long felt the conventional cold war analysis was badly misleading at best and possibly intentionally deceptive. Thus Stuarts essay was a great and long awaited revelation for me.
Thanks again Stuart and thank you MK Sheppard for posting Stuart's essay on this forum.