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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zoltan! who wrote (11289)	3/17/1998 7:04:00 PM
From: RJC2006	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20981

<<<If that were true then he never would have ended the Cold War which was their boon. Seems they benefited most by the failures of Kennedy (Berlin Wall builder) and Johnson (Vietnam War). They have undergone a wrenching downsizing as a result of Reagan.>>> Sorry, but this is patently incorrect. National defense spending boomed under Reagan. The cornerstone was the mutual destruction theory and his stand against the "evil empire" of the USSR. The belief was that even though we could destroy each other five times over it was of importance to be able to do it ten times over which engaged the Communist in a military buildup that would break their economy. Why was this successful? Simply because the state in the USSR determined the level of production for military hardware and were required to shoulder the full financial brunt of that buildup. Whereas in the United States the level of production was controlled by private industry and the government of the United States only need stop purchasing that hardware avoiding the financial devastation that was the USSR imposed upon itself. So in effect, the USSR had only one choice to build or not to build whereas the US had only the choice to buy or not buy. The decision to not buy didn't mean that production necessarily had to cease thus this is why US military industry sold more arms overseas then any other country in the world. The USSR could have compensated by also selling overseas but unfortunately their customers were Chinese based communism and other lower scale Communist economies. But all along while U.S military contractors built arms, the USSR could never fully know whether it was for the US military or foreign powers.