A common impression about the cold war is that it was based on parity of fear between NATO and the Warsaw pact, and that the fear of mutual annihilation, later codified into a policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD) created a Nash equilibrium between the parties involved, and that the cold war ended because the Soviet Union collapsed. I already explained why the last part is obviously false – because the cold war ended before the Soviet Union collapsed – but some misapprehensions still remain and I intend to deal with them shortly.

The first misapprehension is that, since the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device in 1949, the balance of fear between the parties essentially started at this point. However, one needs to be mindful of the historical context, as well as the facts of geography. Take a look at the world map:

Then take a look at the device commonly used to deliver nuclear weapons during that time:

Take a short pause here.

There was no balance of fear. America had military bases in Europe and could have its propeller airplanes take off from Ramstein in Germany, Aviano in Italy, from UK, Turkey or whichever European NATO country, reach Leningrad, Kiev and Moscow in a very short time and nuke them into stone age. On the other hand, the Russians could nuke Europe in the same amount of time, but they couldn’t possibly reach America, and could be brought down during their long flight in so many ways, it was ridiculous. Furthermore, since their European bases are only short way to Russia, the Americans could make the jet-propelled bombers which didn’t need to conserve fuel and could reach Russia faster, while the Russians were extremely limited by fuel economy due to the intercontinental range they needed to overcome, and were so slow and vulnerable they were essentially useless. This puts the American “duck and cover” propaganda in perspective: duck and cover from what? The Russians were completely unable to reach them. It was simply technically infeasible.

Things changed somewhat in 1957 when the Soviets developed the first intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile and used it to perform the first Sputnik orbital flight, demonstrating to America that it can be reached. However, the danger was slight, since those rockets were not very robust, they required as much preparations as the current Soyuz launches, if not more, and not many could have been launched either simultaneously or in close succession. Essentially, the Soviets could nuke one American city, to which America could respond by nuking the entire Soviet Union before it could hope to prepare the second rocket for launch. It was such a weak weapon, that in 1962 the Soviets attempted a dangerous maneuver of placing the short-range nuclear missiles on Cuba, so that they could have a closer place to launch, with the kind of missiles they actually could produce in quantities that would pose a real threat to America. However, since America threatened to immediately nuke them unless they abandoned the attempt, they withdrew. Again, there was no balance of fear, there was no balance of danger. Only the Soviets were in real danger then, there was no threat of mutual annihilation. As Wikipedia states: “In fact, the United States led the Soviets by a wide margin that would only increase. In 1961, the Soviets had only four intercontinental ballistic missiles(ICBMs). By October 1962, they may have had a few dozen, although some intelligence estimates were as high as 75.

The United States, on the other hand, had 170 ICBMs and was quickly building more. It also had eight George Washington- and Ethan Allen-class ballistic missile submarines with the capability to launch 16 Polaris missiles each, with a range of 1,400 miles (2,300 km).”

Later, things changed. The Soviets developed strategic nuclear submarines of their own, but they were so noisy they could be heard across the Atlantic and therefore very vulnerable. The real game changer was the R-36 Voevoda rocket in the early 1970s, NATO designation SS-18 Satan. It is a robust, mass-produced, reliable, heavy-payload, accurate ICBM capable of delivering either a 20MT single warhead, or a MIRV configuration of some 10 smaller warheads with 550–750 kt each. This is the point where USSR became capable of truly wiping America from the face of the Earth in 30 minutes, and it proceeded to introduce the Topol-M mobile launchers which cannot be destroyed with a preemptive launch, and they introduced a silent generation of super-submarines, NATO designation Typhoon. In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union finally achieved nuclear parity with the United States, and the “mutually assured destruction” finally became a realistic option, and America actually produced stock movies which had to work with the possibility where they would lose most of their nuclear arsenal due to Soviet first strike, and would have to surrender. At first, this was a ruse to get more money for the military budget, but later on, as shit got real, and as the response times were reduced significantly due to technological progress, they said “OK, enough of that, let’s be friends now”, and then it was like this:

Essentially, the “mutually assured destruction” was a reality for only five or so years during the entire cold war, and that very same America which kept trumpeting it around while it wasn’t real, became scared enough of it once it did in fact become real, that it ended the whole damn thing as soon as it became practical to do so while not only saving face but also pretending to have won.

In various youtube and other commentaries I frequently encountered an argument which basically states that the Soviet Union collapsed due to its failed economy, and therefore America won the cold war. This, of course, is complete nonsense.

First of all, the cold war actually ended before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It ended because Reagan and Gorbachev mutually agreed to end it. And second, it can be argued that the end of cold war actually caused the collapse of the Soviet Union.

You see, to argue that USSR collapsed due to its poor economy is the same as arguing that a duck fell out of the sky because its wings were too small for it to be able to fly. The immediate answer is that its wings were always that size; if they were too small to fly, then how did it happen to get in the air in the first place? USSR always had poor economy – it’s by design. Communism is based on a flawed premise that everyone has a “right” to have an equal share of everything, and if that isn’t so, it’s because either “capitalists” or “kulaks” grabbed more than their rightful share from some imaginary pool of wealth, and this is officially called “original accumulation of capital” in Marxism. This made sense to Marx because of a singular historical event that took place around his time, where the feudal property owners found themselves in a unique position to produce the monocultures necessary for the industrial mass production, due to the fact that they already owned the land, and could, for instance, decide to take the land away from the serfs and use it to produce sheep, because wool was needed for the first textile factories. This in turn produced the proletariat, the unemployed dirt-poor dispossessed former serfs who went to the cities to find work, had no rights and were the initial marketplace for the Marxist ideas which basically stated that it isn’t right for some to grab everything and completely dispossess everybody else. In this set of historical circumstances it is a valid claim and it made a lot of sense, however it was extended much beyond the scope of its validity.

Essentially, the variety of Marxism that was adopted for the purpose of experimentation on the lives of millions of people in the Soviet Union experimented with many failed concepts, such as the collective agriculture in the 1930s, which essentially meant that all the agricultural land was taken from the peasants and organized into “collective households” or KOLHOZ, a process which essentially reversed the previous agricultural reforms and re-introduced serfdom and a feudal system under a new name; the peasants were essentially dispossessed and turned into serfs, only with much less rights than in the feudal system, because the feudal system was designed to have the serfs pay 10% of income to the church, 10% to the feudal lord, and they were left with all the rest, which was usually barely enough to survive. Stalin reformed it all in such a way that he turned the peasants into slave labor, took all the produce and left them with nothing, at which they of course died of starvation by millions. The ones who happened not to die were accused of being the Kulaks (essentially the wealthy landowner exploiting scum who hid the grain in the attic after stealing it from the righteous state which owns everyone), and were deported into Siberia for reeducation. So basically the economic system of the USSR consisted of the state taking everything from you, and if you still managed not to die, they killed you because something was obviously wrong with you.

This system, of course, didn’t last long and was continuously reformed throughout the duration of that failed social experiment of a state, but it’s just to show how bad things were, not in the late 1980s, but in the very beginnings of the Soviet system. The essential flaw of the system is that it doesn’t recognize the fact that the wealth is not a given, and that it is created, and not necessarily by labor alone, but by better ideas which produce better results, and give the smarter and better men the advantage, which then usually translates into more wealth. Communism assumes that all men are equal, that all labor is worth the same, and that any possible differences in results are attributable only to injustices, which communism is here to remedy. Since this is complete bullshit, all communist states always failed, and maintained themselves in prolonged state of failure by inciting some sort of a fear of an external or internal enemy. This fear of the enemy is what kept the Soviet Union going, and the fear was actually justified, because its existence was indeed genuinely threatened by a nuclear-armed foe who actually used two nukes against Japan in order to put Stalin in line. So while America and NATO were considered to be a legitimate threat to the existence of USSR, all considerations about the poor state of the economy and the failure of the political system were deprioritized so far back, they were considered a form of treason – who the hell would bring up issues such as availability of goods and quality of services when the country is under siege? However, when the Secretary General was publicly seen smiling and behaving friendly with the President of the USA, and the cold war formally ended, the issue of “perestroika”, or “reform” was brought back up, along with “glasnost” (freedom of expression). The fact that the country was impoverished by the war in Afghanistan and the hugely expensive effort of decontaminating the Chernobyl nuclear powerplant which blew up spectacularly didn’t help the level of public dissatisfaction with the state of affairs. All the buried issues were brought up simultaneously, complete chaos ensued and the country literally fell apart. Something very similar happened to the Austro-Hungarian empire at the end of World War I; a combination of internal and external factors resulted in dissolution of a multi-national empire which had too many internal problems to outlive the transition from a feudal to an industrial economy, and it wasn’t the only victim; the Russian Empire collapsed under similar difficulties around the same time.

So basically, America didn’t win the cold war. The cold war ended in a friendly atmosphere between the former foes, and then Gorbachev’s failed perestroika did what American foreign pressure during the cold war failed to do, and wrecked the USSR beyond all repair. The main issue wasn’t even the end of socialism; it’s the nationalism in the former Soviet republics that wrecked the union, because they all embraced some kind of free market economy anyway. So basically the issue that destroyed the union was the surge of nationalistic sentiment, the same thing that destroyed the Austro-Hungarian empire and Yugoslavia, at least in appearance, because I could argue that the surge of nationalism is essentially caused by failure of the economy, because it is a convenient vessel of manifesting dissatisfaction and forming social cohesion on a lower intellectual octave.

One could ask, if USSR collapsed due to poor economy, how come Cuba and North Korea are still around? Their economy is much worse than Soviet economy ever was, and they still manage to exist in some state of prolonged decay between life and death. The reason, in hindsight, is obvious: they are still under siege, or at least perceive themselves to be, and spite in the face of such adversity can motivate people to endure all kinds of hardship. Lift the pressure, behave friendly, and people will ask why the hell do they need to wait in lines for bread when in other countries this is never a problem, and this is the point where the regime collapses. Essentially, the American concept of imposing sanctions is an excellent way of conserving the failed regimes in the sanctioned countries. You put people under pressure, and they will react with spite and endurance until you either stop pressuring them or die. From this perspective, the failures of American foreign policy are obvious.