thomas malloy wrote:
Maybe you haven't heard Jed, The Russians are continuing to build
Typhoon class submarines. Did you sleep through last summer? Does
the word Georgia, the country not the state bring back any memories?
That wasn't my comment.
But I think the Russian threat was exaggerated. Real, but
exaggerated. Much of the Soviet weapons buildup was a response to the
U.S. weapons build-up, which was a response to the Soviet weapons,
which were a response to us, etc, etc.
Also, both sides have a military industrial complex which profits
from things like Typhoon class submarines. You will note that the
U.S. still has these things, too.
My father was posted to Russia during WWII and the State Department
during the early years of the cold war. He and others there were
realists, and well aware of the might of the Soviet Union. People
like him who saw the remains of Stalingrad first hand understood the
power of the Russian people and the ruthlessness of their military
more vividly than you can imagine. It is one thing to read about
these things in books, and quite another to see mile after mile of
destruction and the graves of roughly a million people in a single
battlefield. But he and the others also felt that the postwar threat
to the U.S. was exaggerated. I have no doubt that if Europe had
collapsed in 1945 or 1946 from hunger and social revolution, the
Russians would have been pleased to push their armies through to the
coast of Normandy. The Berlin Crisis was a serious attempt to drive
the U.S. and its allies out of Germany. The Cuban Missile crisis came
far too close to triggering an all out nuclear war.
But despite their brutality, I do not think the Soviet ever seriously
intended to resort to full scale conventional war, and I am certain
that at no time did they ever contemplate using nuclear weapons in a
first strike. They were as desperate to prevent a war during the
Cuban Missile crisis as our people were. Gorbachev and others made
that clear, and there is plenty of historical evidence to back it up.
The Soviets were evil people. I know lots of people who experienced
this first hand. But they were not as evil or unpredictable as the
Nazis and the Japanese Imperialists. They were never as much of a
threat to the West as these others were. Winston Churchill and many
others agreed on that.
It is a huge mistake to paint all of your enemies with the same
brush, and to assume that there are no gradations in evil, and that
you cannot deal with people you do not like. It is also a huge
mistake to think that the U.S. shared no blame for the escalation of
the cold war, the nuclear arms buildup, or the near miss of the Cuban
Missile crisis. If Kennedy had listened to some of his hot-head
advisors it might have ended in unspeakable tragedy.
Of course the U.S. also shares the credit for the nuclear arms
reductions, which have been much broader than many people realize.
Reagan, in particular, went ahead with huge reductions that both
liberal and conservative analysts considered impossible. They said
the Russians would never agree, but they were wrong.
- Jed
