"rob" wrote in message
...

"Pooh Bear" wrote
I confess to being kinda amazed that the threat of use of certain
weapons
in
essence caused the CCCP to dismantle itself.

It almost beggars belief that someone was smart enough to think it
through
in
advance - but was that the case ?

Was it simply pure luck ?


Graham



There was a book written around 1960 by a Harvard Uni Professor (I forget
the name of the book or author sorry) that predicted that Communism
couldn't
work. He also said that because of increasing defense costs and because
the
USSR spent huge portions of their available budget on the military, not to
mention the Soviets mentality that the best way to overthrow them was to
build up your military and wait. I dont know if Reagan or his team ever
heard of this book but the idea had been around for years. The cost of
Technology and not being burdened by Vietnam meant that the time had
finally
come in the '80s


The idea hadn't "been around for years". Some people (mostly on the right)
had said that the "inherent contradictions" of the Soviet system would lead
to it's collapse but 1. no "reputable" policy maker during the '60s, '70s or
early '80s advocated policy based on the impending collapse of the Sovs and
2. no intel shop anywhere in the US _predicted_ worsening Soviet economic
conditions. To the contrary, the foreign policy "establishment" both
Democratic and Republican assumed that the Sovs would be a permanent
fixture. That was the origins of Kissengerian "Detente" and Carterian
lectures about "inordinate fears" of Communism. Reagan had faith in the
"inherent contradictions" and several private citizens (including fairly
famously, Robert Heinlein) looked at the Sovs and saw through the Evil
Empire's New Clothes but the policy establishment did not. The decline and
collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest intelligence failure in the
last fifty years and the soft landing that resulted from that collapse, the
largest miracle.