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Politics : Clinton's Scandals: Is this corruption the worst ever? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: j g cordes who wrote (8618)	10/20/1998 2:08:00 PM
From: mrknowitall	Respond to of 13994

j g - quite true. However, I would venture to say those dissidents would not have succeeded had we not kept up the economic pressure, particularly in a military sense. Technologically, the Soviet military machine was surprisingly primitive. The War Command knew even their top-tier avionics, weapons and even strategic missile systems were prone to failure - their readiness rate was dismally low but they labored under the "mass" theory rather than percentages. I call it the "Beware of Dog" strategy - you once owned a mean dog, put up the sign and when the dog got old and couldn't do anything but bark, you left the sign up. For many years they managed to conceal the growing problem but had no timely or viable solution - there was no available economic means to re-engineer and retrofit, let alone catch up to the US technology juggernaut. Their final option was always limited to mutually assured destruction (MAD), but the threat of a missile defense system in the US that could "un-assure" and "de-mutualize" that strategy led them to capitulate to the reality rushing by them. And, IMO, they were terrified that Reagan or someone like him would call their non-nuclear military bluff someday. Mr. K.