I’ve been studiously ignoring the news but this penetrated my anti-media barrier thanks to my spouse:
My first thought was, “Thank God this didn’t happen during the Cold War!” The Soviets were so batsh*t paranoid that they would have started with the assumption it was some kind of attack just like when they shot down the Korean airliner.
For all of the doom and gloom today about terrorism, global warming (or whatever apocalypse is fashionable this week) young folks should remember that no problem we face today was as serious and as dangerous as Cold War balance of terror. We faced the very real prospect that within the space of a mere hour, every major city and piece of infrastructure in the developed world, the communist and (it would turn out) India, would have been utterly destroyed along with most of the people inside them. Civilization would have ended for centuries. It would take just one hour for it all to end.
The post-Cold War revelation of just how ready the Soviets were to empty the silos, and how they almost did once out of shear delusion, are easily the scariest thing I ever read. The world could have ended just because a bunch of political zealots caught, in what was effectively a absolutist religious delusion, could have destroyed civilization for absolutely no valid reason at all, not even a reason valid in their ideology.
The Soviet Union would turn out to have been an utterly militarized state whose ruling caste was totally convinced not only that America spent its every waking moment trying to destroy them but that the “scientific” doctrine of Marxist historical inevitability made an eventual American attack as certain as the predicted orbits of the planets. Leftists scoffed at Cold War CIA estimates that the Soviet Union spent 20% of its GNP on the military. The CIA was in fact wrong. The Soviets actually spent 40% of their GNP on the military. Basically WWII, never ended for them and the Soviet Union was a military with the bare minimum civilian sector necessary to support it. They thought themselves constantly at war.
All the Cold War era arguments in the West itself about the West’s role in creating the Cold War turned out to be utterly moot. The Soviets were in hindsight so trapped in their ideological delusions that it never even seems to have occurred to any Soviet leadership that peaceful coexistence with the West was even possible. Nothing anyone in the West could have done would have prevented or even mitigated the Cold War because the Cold War ultimately arose purely from the internal dynamics of the Soviet’s Communist ideology.
Even at the very end, Gorbochev didn’t set out to dissolve the Soviet Union but to revitalize its economy with a new form of Communism. He, by his own admission, never thought peaceful coexistence when he became leader. He was only pushed to reform personally and was later able to push the hardliners along with his reform because they came to believe they had no other choice. Reagan’s defense spending and active support of anti-communist forces around the world had made it clear that no military solution e.g. seizing Middle-Eastern oil, was possible. The Strategic Defense Initiative caused the Soviets to seriously fear that America could eventually neutralize their nuclear arsenal. (That turned out not to be true but they certainly thought it a serious possibility at the time.) The only choices Reagan, Thatcher and a few others left the Soviet leaders was risking internal reform.
We can never let the world get in such a precarious situation again. We can’t assume that in the future, another delusional ideology won’t nearly destory the world for no reason at all.
Churchill famously said that Communism should have been strangled in its cradle. Had that been possible, the world would have been spared nearly being destroyed. Going forward, our technology will invest smaller and smaller groups of people with more and more power to both create and destroy. In another couple of decades, nuclear weapons will seem as quaint as a muzzle loading, black powder cannon seems to us today. We need to identify potential future communism-like threats and redirect or “strangle” them while they are small before their delusions threatens us all.
This won’t be the last big meteorite to hit us. Next time, we might not be so lucky.