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2011-12-04 Home Front: Politix
Book Review: "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy"
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Posted by lotp 2011-12-04 00:00|| || Front Page|| [1 views ]  Top

#1 I just added a few questions in the 3rd-last paragraph that get at issues for us today.
Posted by lotp 2011-12-04 08:31||   2011-12-04 08:31|| Front Page Top

#2 There is an important difference between then and now. Well before the communists ruled Russia, there were great concerns about the Czars and their rather imperialist behavior.

They contended with the British Empire at intervals with such things as "The Great Game", mostly a cold war.

And Teddy Roosevelt actually played peacemaker between Russia and Japan, who had been in a mutually imperialist struggle over Manchuria and Korea.

But this was an entirely different affair from when the communists took over. They were not content with these mild imperialist goals. They craved to rule and exploit the world.

Fortunately for all concerned, the communists were the ideal philosophy to utterly cripple Russia. Had just about any other form of government ruled Russia, even if not directly imperialist, Russia could very well likely be ruling the world today.

but we should long remember, that even under the utterly incompetent communists, Russia did end up controlling about half the world, despite very active opposition.

But, in the process, Russia used itself up. The ruling ideologues wasted vast resources and brutalized the Russian people so much, that under the best of circumstances they will be a hundred years or more in recovery.

And instead, they have Putin. And while inertia will likely reelect him, the enthusiasm has worn thin. His ideology is not communist, but a low order of intelligence apparatus technocrat.

The end result is an unsatisfying as if the CIA put one of its people as a figurehead president of the US. Which Obama may very well be. He is not a good president, or even very passable as a figurehead of a president. Instead he spent all his time on petty schemes which have not accomplished much, and now he is on perpetual vacation, leaving apparatchiks in charge.
Posted by Anonymoose 2011-12-04 10:37||   2011-12-04 10:37|| Front Page Top

#3 I know something about a lot of this. I'll try to skate between what's available to all and what remains classified.

"Dead Hand" was a concept, but was never fully implemented in the Soviet Union. The paranoia of the Russian leadership was such that they never were willing to give full control of Soviet defensive or offensive weapons to the generals. There was always the possibility of a coup.

The Soviets were thoroughly convinced they could survive a nuclear war up until about 1985. They spent tens of billions on civil defense, and trained anyone in any kind of defense industry on how to respond. They finally decided, in the mid- to late-1980s that our lead in electronics was just too big to overcome, our missiles far more accurate than we were saying (whether true or not - I don't know), and that no one would
"win" a multiple-missile exchange. At the same time, the Russian people were finally getting exhausted from the excesses of communism, and were simply going through the motions - pretending to be productive, while 50% or more of everything that was created was defective (with the exception of military hardware, where there was more supervision and quality control).

I've studied enough anthropology to know that one of the first signs of the decline of a species is that it soils its own nest. The same is true of societies. By the late 1980's, the Russians were no longer picking up after themselves and others. Trash began to accumulate along rail lines, in cities, and around industrial sites. Things that didn't work weren't repaired, but dumped - everything from aircraft to shoes. It wasn't really a surprise that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 - the "handwriting" had been on the wall for at least five or six years before that.

When you lose pride in your work, in your nation, and you have no religion to fall back on, you have no reason to feel responsible for what goes on around you, and collapse is inevitable. The OWS crowd scares the beejeebers out of me because they reflect the same sense of entitlement and lack of responsibility that 1980's Russia displayed.
Posted by Old Patriot  2011-12-04 14:54||   2011-12-04 14:54|| Front Page Top

#4 Indeed, Old Patriot.

That said, the issue of the old Soviet / newer Russian tactical nukes is of some concern and the bio-agents is a bigger one. The biological threat is real and growing although instability in e.g. Pakistan or Iran may well be a shorter term problem.

We can see both of those countries imploding, or threatening to implode, before our eyes. So the game theory / scenario-based Cold War approach is probably not going to be all that applicable. And yet it neither is an openly failed state and so must be dealt with using state-to-state mechanisms, at least in part.

In the case of Pakistan, implosion may bring (or may already be in the process of bringing) serious headaches soon. Will the CTR approach have any real chance of succeeding with either country? It's a concern ..... but Hoffman's book makes it clear why those in office right now continue the attempt.

I've heard members of the troika (Carter/Weber/Myers) talk about their work in the 90s. It's clearly a significant part of their lives and one they consider a success, and with good reason. As with us all, what once worked tends to become a lasting paradigm whether or not it applies well to new circumstances.
Posted by lotp 2011-12-04 15:44||   2011-12-04 15:44|| Front Page Top

#5 Thank you, Old Patriot. And thus we see that studying the liberal arts is useful in everyday life, although it may not lead to expensive suits and corner offices.
Posted by trailing wife 2011-12-04 15:45||   2011-12-04 15:45|| Front Page Top

#6 Re: Dead Hand, OP, that'a what seems to be the current unclass assessment, i.e. that is is partially implemented (semi-automated).

The accounts, plus some corroborating evidence, did contribute to the impetus for SMART 1. But what really scared the beejesus out of the inspectors after the treaties were signed was the repeated evidence they stumbled on of a) significant engineering and weaponizing of virulent pathogens and b) high volume manufacturing facilities for those pathogens - facilities that had clearly been used and were not 'merely' being held in reserve.

Vector was a virus engineering facility. The goal was reported to Andrew Weber as a viral agent that would mimic lesser diseases during the rapid infection spread stage, only to turn very deadly at a point in the viral spread when authorities would be overwhelmed.

An interesting data point that this came to the surface in 2007 and we saw major governmental action WRT the possibility of avian flu epidemic shortly thereafter.
Posted by lotp 2011-12-04 16:00||   2011-12-04 16:00|| Front Page Top

#7 An example of the best of Rantburg. Great job posters.
Posted by Hellfish 2011-12-04 18:02||   2011-12-04 18:02|| Front Page Top

#8 Yes, thank you.
Posted by swksvolFF 2011-12-04 22:13||   2011-12-04 22:13|| Front Page Top

23:33 European Conservative
23:31 JosephMendiola
23:14 Frank G
23:00 Barbara
22:56 Barbara
22:51 trailing wife
22:42 JosephMendiola
22:35 Skidmark
22:34 Skidmark
22:31 JosephMendiola
22:21 gorb
22:19 JosephMendiola
22:17 Pappy
22:13 swksvolFF
22:12 Grease Jith3343
22:11 CrazyFool
22:06 JosephMendiola
22:06 European Conservative
22:03 Pappy
22:02 Grease Jith3343
21:54 Grease Jith3343
21:52 JosephMendiola
21:15 Lone Ranger
20:27 no mo uro









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