the Cold War

[franksolich]

I just got done reading Memoirs (Andrei Sakharov, 1990, Alfred A. Knopf), a used book I had purchased a couple of years ago, but never got around to reading, knowing in advance that the first half of it--and it's nearly a thousand pages long--was "heavy" into physics.

Well, I read it, and yes, it's "heavy" into physics, but Sakharov had that particular genius of explaining such things so that someone with only a few college courses in the subject can readily understand them.

Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989) was the creator of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, the most powerful weapon ever devised by man, although his modesty prevents him from claiming that distinction.

I was struck by two things in the Memoirs; the first was that the Soviets, once they had gained superiority in weaponry and delivery, were not going to waste a minute putting them into use, so as to subdue the west.

The idea of MAD, mutually assured destruction, to them was laughable, not even worth considering.

Of course, some of us here knew this, even when teenagers growing up in a society noisily dominated by peaceniks, appeaseniks, coexistniks, surrender monkeys, and other idiots useful for the purposes of forces anathema to freedom and democracy.

The problem did not appear to be in the invention of new and terrible weapons--of which the Soviets boasted many--but in their delivery to targets.

My own first-hand and up-close observations of life in the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants with free medical care for all--even though I am no nuclear physicist--convinced me that the Soviets could never have devised a good "delivery" program; a missile headed for London or Washington probably would have fallen on a farm in Poland, if it even got off the ground.

It got to where, by the mid-1970s, the election of James Carter heartened the Soviets, who hoped very badly that their useful idiots in the west could at least slow down the development of various "delivery" systems, so that the Soviets could catch up, and surpass.

Well, as we know, fortunately that never happened, Carter being booted out of office a short time later in one of the biggest landslides in American electoral history (because the landslide of 1984 was so large, people tend to forget that the landslide of 1980, one of the most lopsided electoral victories in American history, ever happened).

And then of course Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" bluff put the last nail in the coffin; there was no way the Soviets were going to catch up, and so they just gave up.

The Soviets had the goods, and wanted to use them, but just couldn't deliver them.

The other thing that struck me in the book was that Andrei Sakharov was so quintessentially Russian, no western man.  This is generally true of all Russians--Alexandr Solzhenitsyn immediately comes to mind, but there's others too--but this surprised me because after all, Sakharov was a scientist, ostensibly dedicated to "pure logic and reasoning," and no other way of thinking.

Of course, the fast-declining "Age of 'Reason'" never penetrated eastward, and so the characters and perceptions of those outside the influence of the west evolved differently from us.  To the Russians--and essentially, all peoples outside of western Europe and the northern part of North America--instinct and intuition are just as much a useful function of the intellect, as is logic and reasoning.

The enemies of freedom and democracy don't think like we do, and it's long past time many in this time and place recognized that.

[TheSarge]

The enemies of freedom and democracy don't think like we do, and it's long past time many in this time and place recognized that.

The enemies of freedom and democracy never stopped plotting against us.  Some people in this country ned to realize this.

IMHO the cold war didn't end just because the wall came down.

[franksolich]

The enemies of freedom and democracy never stopped plotting against us.  Some people in this country ned to realize this.

IMHO the cold war didn't end just because the wall came down.

The Berlin Wall coming down was a consequence, not a cause.

You know, sir, the collapse of the Soviet Union caught all western intelligence agencies off guard, it being an utter surprise to them.

Of course, one can't think--either individually or collectively--of everything.

I credit the collapse of the Soviet Union to the pervasive and ubiquitous corruption inherent and inevitable under socialism; these socialists made politicians from Illinois look like Honest Abe.

[DumbAss Tanker]

An interesting and thoughtful post Frank, as always.  It always appeared to me that committed Communists, those who actually bought into Marxist-Leninist ideological crap about Communism being the natural state of man, would really not fear plunging the world into a new Neolithic age since they would regard that as preferable to seeing an ascendant Capitalism.  Fortunately the USSR was generally in the hands of more pragmatic men who enjoyed the perks of high office, and preferred them to be laid on in terms of fine food and drink, dachas, and hot and cold running Ukrainian babes rather than first bite of the rat-on-a-spit cooked over an open fire in the mildly-radioactive rubble of their cities. 

I have to say that one of the conundrums which gave me great pause in the rush to war with Iraq was the issue of delivery systems.  Of course, as a Soldier, mine was not to gainsay the elected leadership even if I thought they were acting oddly, it just isn't the done thing.  One presumes at such times they have intelligence to which the public is not privy, and even if they don't, one has already purchased a ticket to ride the train and so is honor-bound to stay on it and see it through to the destination, even if it isn't going anywhere particularly worthwhile, out of keeping faith with one's comrades in arms if nothing else.

Designing a reliable delivery vehicle is an engineering problem every bit as tough as designing the basic weapon that will go into it, and making a reasonably safe-to-handle nuclear weapon compact and light enough to fit a launch vehicle is a third, iterative engineering challenge.  I honestly found the reasoning proffered by Colin Powell and other Administration officials to be, well, preposterous, as far as Iraq offering any near-term nuclear threat to anyone but themselves.  The evidence they offered was ridiculously scanty, and the performance of Iraqi ballistic missiles in Gulf I has shown their rocket and guidance technology to be only marginally better than that of a fireworks impresario, with their improved SCUDs being the top end of their capability (In spite of a longer range than the original Soviet model, they performed even more poorly than the originals in their terminal ballistic phase).

I have no qualms about us squashing Saddam like the cockroach he was, few people have better-deserved their fate than he.  Nor does it trouble me that we committed military force to do it -- after enduring the Clinton administration's embarassing and obvious unwillingness to put boots on the ground anywhere for fear of even a single casualty, and the harvest that approach brought about, my threshhold for that is far lower than that of the political class.  The best weapon in the world is of no use if your opponents sincerely believe you will never use it, after all, and even ill-grounded commitments of force have the salutary effect of convincing your foes on the sidelines that screwing with you might be a really bad idea after all.  It did go rather far to convincing me that critical members of the Bush foreign policy team (Especially Powell and Rumsfeld) did not have or seem to want an accurate and realistic picture of the threat environment, though.         

[Eupher]

As I recall reading some time ago, and in breaking out my broad brush, the Russian mind is absolutely different from the Western mind. Whereas we Americans tend to look at things from a personal freedom standpoint and have the history of helping out the world and policing the world (usually because it's in our own best interests to do so), the Russian mind is historically distrustful of the west. Russians are largely cloaked from the west, deliberately so, and are loathe to come out of hiding.

It's been that way for hundreds, even thousands of years, and it's not gone away since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

I like DAT's analogy of the Soviet/Russian chieftain, his dachas, Ukrainian bedwarmers, and ueber-vodka. Yeltsin was a terrific example of that kind of excess and it's reasonable to expect that, despite the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin and his predecessors were opportunists first, reformers second.

When we, as a Nation, forget history (as we all too often do) and ignore the rumblings of the Russian bear, we'll once again pay the price for that stubborn insistence of living in a paper doll world.

Putin/Medvedev are rumbling these days and we're too preoccupied with bailing out AIG and the bonus money debacle to pay much attention.

Passing ex post facto laws is in these days.

[Doc]

Good analysis Frank, but I have also read Sakharov's Memoirs albeit a decade or more ago, and I suspect that all that he posits about the Soviet launch capability was not altogether true.  During the Soviet era, the natural Russian paranoia was heightened well beyond its normal levels, and I would suggest that the Soviet weapons capability was so well compartmentalized that he likely had no specific knowledge of the true "state of the art" of their delivery systems, beyond their payload capability, which would be needed for his warhead design programs.

Once you have a grasp of the basics, which the Soviets did demonstrate with the launch of "Sputnik", the design of a ballistic delivery system becomes dependent on only the issues of guidance systems, and lift capability.  Both of these were well understood by Soviet missile engineers as far back as 1960, again demonstrated by their "Sputnik" series, followed by their initial suborbital manned launches.  Achieving a stable directional orbit is a far greater engineering challenge than hitting in the general vicinity of a fixed ground target, particularly with a 50-megaton device, ala Sakharov.........

I am certainly no apologist for the Soviets, or, more currently the Russians in general, however, I too, spent a little time in the USSR before the fall, and some aspects of their engineering was cutting edge.  I would go so far as to offer that back in '57 & '58, when we were watching Redstones, and Vanguards explode on their launch pads, the Soviet vehicles (not without failure as well) were at least ten years ahead of us in design concept, and remained that way up to the end of the Soviet era.  Much of the problems with Russian launch capability was not design, but their inability to maintain a sufficient level of quality control to avoid repeated failures, most of which we never heard about.

After the fall of the USSR, much of their technology has been absorbed by an international "consortium" of which the US is a major player, and the quality issues have been resolved.  The result is that the current crop of Russian "heavy-lift" vehicles are the best available today.  Interestingly their basic design dates to about 1972.  There would be no "International Space Station" without this launch capability.

I would suggest that the fact that some sort of nuclear exchange did not happen during the cold war was much more likely the result of (as DAT suggests) the likelyhood that Soviet leadership carefully considered the downside, and made the decision that living in the Stone Age was not really an option.  The Soviets may have been zealots, but they can never be accused of being stupid.......

YMMV


doc

[franksolich]

As I recall reading some time ago, and in breaking out my broad brush, the Russian mind is absolutely different from the Western mind.

It's no "broad brush;" they really are different from us.

I remember getting freaked out (on the inside) one mid-winter in a village, when it finally occurred to me that even their perceptions of time and space are different from the western perception.

And with the constant erosion of western influence, including this "Age of 'Reason'" stuff, we're going to have to adjust our own ways of thinking, to more closely correspond with that of the other 90% of the world.

Interestingly, it might prove useful in the war against terror, which as George Bush said, could very well last 100 years or more.

Whereas we Americans tend to look at things from a personal freedom standpoint and have the history of helping out the world and policing the world (usually because it's in our own best interests to do so), the Russian mind is historically distrustful of the west.

Of course; remember Solzhenitsyn at Harvard.

They distrust us because from their perspective, the west in its materialistic decadence is the west's own worst enemy, and no one likes to pal around with a suicide case.

Russians are largely cloaked from the west, deliberately so, and are loathe to come out of hiding.

One can as usual "blame" Poland, which since the beginning of time has served as an impenetrable wall shielding Russia from the west, and the west from invaders going through Russia.

There appears a clear line of demarcation between western thought and ideas, and Russian philosophy, and it appears vaguely somewhere in Poland.  Not only the "Age of 'Reason'" never got through to Russia, but also things such as the Reformation or the industrial age.

If the Russians--Europeans, after all--think so much differently than the west does, think of how much differently the Arabs and the Hindus and the Chinese think from what we do.

I've always been really tired of this kumbaya theory that "everybody" wants peace, for example.  No, everybody does NOT want peace.

I am not sure what the common denominator of humanity is--that thing on which we can all agree, in every society and every culture--but it sure as Hell isn't what western "intellectuals" think it is.

[DumbAss Tanker]

It's no "broad brush;" they really are different from us.

Yes, I am minded of an old saying, to the effect that "A Western farmer prays for his crops to grow, a Russian farmer prays for his neighbors' crops to fail."  They do indeed have a different way of looking at things.

[franksolich]

An interesting and thoughtful post Frank, as always.

As usual, you compliment me way too much, sir; this is why I'm happy you're here, because if I'm wrong about something, anything, I appreciate being set straight, and no one can do that better than you, with more grace and class than you.

[Chris_]

Yes, I am minded of an old saying, to the effect that "A Western farmer prays for his crops to grow, a Russian farmer prays for his neighbors' crops to fail."  They do indeed have a different way of looking at things.

I believe that living in a feudal system for a ten centuries will have that effect on the populace.

Their inability to understand and embrace a democratic capitalist system, when offered the opportunity, reinforces your premise.  Unfortunately, as many would like us to believe,not all societies are equal.......nor do many of  them wish to be.....

doc

[franksolich]

Much of the problems with Russian launch capability was not design, but their inability to maintain a sufficient level of quality control to avoid repeated failures, most of which we never heard about.

Key words there, sir; "quality control."

A Russian civil engineer once told me that drainage (around buildings and somesuch) is a "decadent bourgeoisie capitalist concept;" I assume quality control is considered the same.

Of course, quality control even if utilized in the western sense, would be abysmally a failure under any socialist system, because socialism breeds corruption and a preference for "on paper" "results" than real results.

One of my first insights into socialist domestic life was when a father came home, proudly bearing an East German-made electric bread toaster.  Old, broken, and it had cost him a fortune. 

I was confused when I later noticed the toaster in the trash.

It was explained to me that the East German-made toaster had been purchased specifically for one part.....a part for a Lithuanian-made natural gas stove.  (I have no idea what part that was.)

It took a while, but I finally grasped what was going on, by then having seen so many other examples of socialist manufacture.  The part for the natural gas stove had probably been given, for money or some other thing, to the East German toast manufacturer (who had his own need for the part), and the natural gas stove manufacturer had, on paper, marked his product as "complete," after which it was sold to the hapless socialist consumer.

This was s-o-o-o-o-o-o prevalent, a common practice.

And thus my theory about Soviet nuclear arms possibly--possibly--being duds.

I'm not so sure this might not have happened, the Soviets launching their nuclear arsenal, most of them falling back on their bases, some of them dropping over Soviet territory or even over the innocent Congolese or Paraguayans, some of them exploding in mid-air, and one meant for Washington actually plopping onto the ground in New Orleans, turning out to be a dud.

Say it takes 1,000 parts to make a weapon, and its delivery, work properly.  All 1,000 parts have to be there, and in good working order.  If one single item is amiss, the whole thing doesn't work.

The Soviets were socialists, remember.

I could very well see where a corrupt factory manager could have "sold" one of those 1,000 parts, or even two or three different parts, but on paper mark the weapon, or the delivery system, as "complete."

It's just a pet theory of mine, based upon what I saw first-hand and up-close about how life is under socialism, and so I could be way wrong, but it is within the realm of possibility.

I would suggest that the fact that some sort of nuclear exchange did not happen during the cold war was much more likely the result of (as DAT suggests) the likelyhood that Soviet leadership carefully considered the downside, and made the decision that living in the Stone Age was not really an option.  The Soviets may have been zealots, but they can never be accused of being stupid.......

Of course, and I defer to Tanker, who knows more about things than I do, with one minor exception here.  I don't believe they considered any "downside" at all, because the socialists were so wrapped up in the privileges and perquisites of being one of the few elites under socialism, that they didn't consider anything at all, other than maintaining their own status.

[DumbAss Tanker]

Of course, and I defer to Tanker, who knows more about things than I do, with one minor exception here.  I don't believe they considered any "downside" at all, because the socialists were so wrapped up in the privileges and perquisites of being one of the few elites under socialism, that they didn't consider anything at all, other than maintaining their own status.

Well, my point was really that their leaders were not so much ideological zealots (though their system certainly produced plenty of those) as they were themselves corrupted by the system and consciously or unconsciously were disinclined to throw away their hoarded luxuries, if only luxuries in relative terms often enough, in favor of bringing down Capitalism to a flint-knives-and-bearskins level of equality.

The Soviet system was indeed as corrupt as you describe insofar as its provision of goods for the masses were concerned, but they did take a somewhat different and higher level of care with things that might actually be checked personally by any of their mutually-overlapping security services, any one of which could all too easily deal out summary death sentences (or worse, such as an all-expense-paid trip to the Kolyma goldmines for 'Career retargeting') for stealing or lying about a very few particularly sensitive things.  While the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces would no doubt had a fictionalized operational readiness rate, and would have had a failure rate unacceptable to a Western aerospace force, plenty of weapons would have gotten through to knock us back into a population and technology level consistent with at least the 18th Century, though perhaps not the Stone Age.  One of the features of Soviet warheads was a last-ditch mechanical impact fuze, like that of a WW2 artillery projectile, so that if all the electronic circuitry failed to detonate it at a desirable altitude, it would at least blow up when it did come to earth, dirtier in fallout and much-less effective in destruction radius as a ground burst might be.  Like all Soviet weapons, it was a "Quantity has a quality of its own" design philosophy, and even with the highest failure-to-launch, failure-to-reach-target, and failure-to-detonate-at-altitude rates which could be sanely projected, modern life as we know it would certainly have come to a screeching halt if they had chosen to launch.  Despite an extensive Civil Defense capability of their own (which was as fraudulently-run and corruption-wracked as a typical Soviet social program, unlike the actual military forces), the NATO counterstrike could well have largely eradicated human life between the Vistula and the Urals.     

[Eupher]

I have to chime in here, in a musing sort of way, about QC. (This is not meant to be a hijack, just a word or three) about QC and how this science and philosophy is adopted or resisted here in the States.

First, a bit of background. After retirement from the Army, I went into pharmaceutical quality assurance. This is a fairly exacting process, heavily regulated (despite the hype that FDA is a bunch of losers), and, in general, a great industry to be in. FDA plays off companies against each other, likely because their own resources are limited. Those companies that do well in the biannual inspections enjoy a fair amount of latitude because their culture of quality is palpable and real.

But it isn't entirely roses and perfume.

I currently am a QA Manager for a large company that is, so far, largely unaffected by the recent economic downturn. Good for us, I guess.

But one of the battles I constantly wage is the struggle between the culture that still, to this day and despite the regulations, takes the view that QC is a waste of resources.

It's like taking a walk backwards in time.

I am dealing with people who think as those I'd read about back in the Sixties - that systematic application of the tools that Deming et al brought to bear drive defects down. When defects go down, productivity, efficiency, and quality all go up.

When the Russian Bear looks at a puddle of open sewer water lying just outside his door and he's otherwise conversant in microbiology, yet still fails to understand that quality begins with controlling your environment in which  you manufacture your widgets, hey, they're lost.

Unfortunately, that thought process still occurs in our western culture as well. It's just hidden pretty well.

[DumbAss Tanker]

Having survived the Army's Total Quality Management infatuation in the early 90s, Eupher, I do have to offer a bit of a counterpoint to your comments.  Every three to five years the Army finds some new management voodoo cultic practice that they go utterly overboard with, beyond any rational thought process and with a suitably-zealous shunning of anyone who does not loudly profess The One True Faith, with an enthusiastic groupthink mentality that only leadership born at West Point and raised in the Pentagon can bring to bear on screwing up things.

Currently it's LEAN Six Sigma (Well, that's what they say it it, there are actually some differences between what the Army does and what the private sector does on that).  Before that it was ISO 9001, before that it was Baldridge Award criteria (they didn't stay with that one too long because it could actually fit a service or 'people' industry rather than being a misapplied gizmo-producing industry idea), and before that in the early 90s it was 'Total Quality Management.'

Aside from the fact that even Deming wasn't too sure how relevant his whole scheme was to non-gizmo industry in the first place, and the obvious potential for failure lurking in an 'industry' like the military where the inputs are not really under your control (and many of them are independent actors with their own goals, including the recruits) and the desired outputs shift with the political winds, the basic weak point of it was that quality costs money.  In the real world, there really is a point where the product could be made better, but it is more than sufficient to the purpose for which it was designed, and the cost of taking it to the next order of excellence just isn't worth it.  While it does have to meet or come close to that 'More than sufficient' level, numbers have swamped quality with a depressing frequency in the military world, at least where the two sides weren't starting at opposite ends of the quality spectrum, like the US vs. Iraq.  World War II tanks come to mind, as does fighter aircraft technology of the period...in both cases, German technology and end products were true world-beaters individually, but were massively outnumbered by machines that while not as good item-per-item, nonetheless could be produced much more cheaply, with fewer precision parts, and using less skilled labor.  It was a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good, a direction the unbounded quest for excellence above all other criteria inevitably takes. 

[franksolich]

One of the features of Soviet warheads was a last-ditch mechanical impact fuze, like that of a WW2 artillery projectile, so that if all the electronic circuitry failed to detonate it at a desirable altitude, it would at least blow up when it did come to earth, dirtier in fallout and much-less effective in destruction radius as a ground burst might be.

That part, I wasn't aware of.

Of course, my speculations are those of a professional civilian who knows less about military armaments than about silkworms, but they do seem at least possible, based upon what I see, or saw, and what I read.

For example, my own observations of conditions in specifically the Ukrainian army during the mid-1990s--which were later used in support for asylum in the United States, for a 19-year-old kid of Jewish derivation--totally, utterly, blew away the illusion that the Red Army lived up to its legend.

When I returned to the United States and read a biography of Yuri Andropov, there was much comment about Soviet plans to invade and occupy Poland 1979-1980.  That never happened, because the generals were successful in persuading the leadership that the Poles would make mincemeat of the Red Army; chew it to pieces, chase them back to Russia with their tails between their legs.

If I had read those statements before I went to the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants, I would've thought them preposterous, but after actually seeing things (although circa 15 years later) as they really were, I was not surprised.

[Chris_]

You know, when it comes to an overall analysis of the cold war, and its associated arms race, I often wonder why, in about 1980, when it should have been clear to Soviet leadership that they possessed a sufficient nuclear arsenal to obliterate their primary enemies, and the associated ballistic and submarine delivery systems to make it happen, that they didn't just say ENOUGH, and stop investing in additional hardware, and just reduce their defense spending to refinement of what they had.

It is true that Regan's "Star Wars" system likely scared the hell out of them, but their own scientists must have told them that it was a bluff, and would likely take two decades to become an effective system, if ever, considering the current technology.......further, the cruise missle was beginning to be developed, which would essentially render "Star Wars" useless as a total nuclear deterrant......

It seems to me if they had just halted rampant military spending, the Soviet Union might have survived to this day, without considering other outside economic and political influences.......

Likely ego and paranoia, but curious none the less......

doc

[Eupher]

Yeah, DAT, I was exposed to some of that TQM stuff and all of its reincarnations along the way. The odd thing is, the pharmaceutical industry is far less poised to sashay into that ASQ-driven stuff, Baldridge, LSS, etc., and therefore, I didn't have to actually have that stuff crammed down my throat.

Until recently. You're right, LSS is the rage du jour from just yesterday and the blacker your black belt is, the more you're worshiped.

ISO 14971, Risk Management for medical devices, has become the latest rage du jour, as decreed by the Notified Body. This is the ISO standard that tells us it's okay not to pull out and pay for a howitzer when a popgun will do the job nicely.

The only problem is, and it's one that I have to be aware of, is that the threat of litigation is more apparent now than ever.

When they start the document subpeona process and demanding depositions, that popgun with all its wrinkles starts to look just a wee bit weak in the knees.

[DumbAss Tanker]

Eupher, the potential loss in litigation is absolutely one of the cost factors that has to be taken into account when making that basic cost-benefit analysis, as you obviously realize.  The big risk is that the key decision will be made by a hit-and-run senior management team which does not plan on being around the corporation when the litigation chickens come home to roost.  That is the sort of situation that sets up short-term decisions that become wounds that just never stop bleeding in the long term, which happens with a depressing frequency.  This actually is one of the reasons we have a Lotto-mentality personal injury legal system, the public good in it is to force companies to think about the full cost of their decisions, not just enrich lawyers for very-damaged plaintiffs.  Unfortunately, with the high mobility of senior executives in many industries it is to some extent based on an out-moded model of corporate accountability and decision-making.

[Eupher]

Good points, of course. (When we start talkin' legal stuff, I start lookin' for a life jacket since I can't swim in that pond.)

Your statements are precisely the reason I carry a personal protection umbrella policy. At $1 million, it probably ain't enough if somebody really gets messed up (doubtful with Class I devices), but it's the best I can do.

I am under no illusions - senior mgmt make drive-by decisions, get promoted or leave of their own accord for greener pastures, and leave the schmucks in the trenches holding the bag.

Yep, looks about right to me.