For years we thought the cold war would last a hundered years, then suddenly it stopped. So:
Did the Cold War stop simply because the USSR collapsed? Or was it already finished before the end of the USSR? Why did it not continue with Yeltsin?
Also, if you think it ended swimply because the USSR collapsed, then why do you think the USSR collapsed?

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Even if it wasn't the only factor, the arms race played a major factor because USSR was trying to keep up with America but didn't have the economic backing that America had. There are many other things, like corruption, low production, widespread poverty et cetera. While I respect the people and have some respect even for the Soviet government, by in large I think it was not a good force and that it has shown the weakness of such a centralized government, and that Communism really can't work.

I'd have to say it ended because of the collapse of the USSR. Was the USSR finished before the end of the Cold War? I'd have to say no, and I'd point to Afghanistan as proof. Afghanistan was a Cold War theater and it occurred in the 80's, so the Cold War was going on right till the end, IMO.

The reason the Cold War did not pick up again with Yeltisn is that Russia was simply broken. The USSR ceased to exist on 1991, and without that, Russia could not be a threat. Then Russia continued to go down economically with an economic crash, and their military power also collapsed, as evidenced by their crushing defeat in Chechnya in the early 1990's. With the loss of Ukraine and Belaurs in 1991, I'd say that really was a heavy blow that ended the military threat of the USSR/Russia.

the USSR collapsed because they ran out of money and their sphere of infuence was dramatically reduced. If you really wanted to find a pivotal event and say "that is what caused the downfall of the USSR" it would have to be the war in Afghanistan. That did more to bankrupt the soviet union than anything else and when they withdrew in disgrace, it showed other nations that the soviets COULD be beat and encouraged dissention.

From a practical standpoint, the arms race the Us was trying to run turned out to be fairly ineffective because in the end we were the only ones running it. The soviets figured out early on that they did not need to spend $50 million each building nuclear missiles. They could build them out of cardboard and put them out where our people could see them and we would build REAL missiles to counter their cardboard ones. Then they figured out that we would build a full nuke, including launch facilities, for every silo door we counted with our sattelites. The russians, not being fools, recognized that a silo door that is actually over a silo, and a silo door that is made out of plywood and just laid on the ground in a field look the same from space, so they built a bunch of plywood doors and we built real missiles and silos to house them.

In the end, the soviets overexpanded their sphere of influence and did not have the economic might to field their military to control their sattelite states.

Interesting, I've never heard that before. What's your source for that info.

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... I am surprised at your insolence in writing to me at all. You know, as I know, that I bought this constituency... may God's curse light upon you and may it make your women as open and as free to the excise officers as your wives and daughters have always been to me while I have represented your scoundrel corporation.
I have the honour to be... your obliged humble servant, Anthony Henley
- MPs reply to constituent, mid 1700s

I agree that it collapsed because of money, it is could not keep up with the US spending caps. It also was showing some weakness in the political area, the [people were starting to question the leadership.

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I believe the cold war ended before the USSR collasped, because of the technology gap between the USA and the USSR.

Not quite ! If I learned anything from R.W.R. it was that when a GOPer is getting ready to take the oath of the POTUS, that any American should "scarf up" defense stocks ASAP. I made money on Reagan, but not thru Reaganomics. The money I made was made thru purchases of the defense stock of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, G.E., Raytheon, and Northrup-Grumman, etal.

The Soviets had retreated out of Afghanistan, leaving alot of their equipment in Afghanistan, and Reagan was using the taxpayers money like an American-Express Gold Card to build up the DoD. Reaganomics was a loser, but I made money with a wise stock-broker, and knowing to purchase defense stocks whenever a GOPer takes the oath of office as the POTUS.

One thing I will give Reagan credit for was his work with Gorbachev, and Perestroika. "Trust, but verify".

History of the United States (1980–1988) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Got to jump WAY back in the memory hole on that one. Thsoe revelations were coming immeditaly following the collapse of the soviet union, so prior ro internet dominance.

International News, November 18, 1998

The GR-1 farce is, IMO, especially illuminating. If you read Kissinger, it becomes apparenet pretty quickly that the US missile program was largely driven by the "threat" of the GR-1, as were our intelligence programs. We did not have anything even close to what the GR-1 was supposed to be capable of (global reach from a mobile launcher with low support requirements). We saw it as a HUGE advantage to the russians, and pushed our missile and missile defense programs into overdrive to counter that threat. Additionally, we made massive increases in our surveilance and intel programs because the GR-1 program showed how deficient those programs were....the Russians were turning out mobile nuclear tipped, mobile missiles with a global reach like sausages, and we could never find ANY of them. He described it as a "disaster".

Now we know that we could not find any of them because they did not exist, and the ones we saw were made out of cardboard and paper mache. You can order a video of an ABC news cast about it from the Vanderbilt archives:

Russia / Military / Nuclear Weapons / Cold War Imagery (ABC) from the Vanderbilt Television News Archive

I actually remember watching that because they had Steve Zaloga on. For years he was considered one of the foremost experts on the planet on soviet defenses. He recieved massive government funding until he started advancing the theory that most of the russians offensive weapons were made out of plywood and cardboard, and we were blowing a HUGE amount of money countering these wood products. After the soviet union fell and his claims were proven, he was still viewed by washington as something akin to a traitor. They were spinning the arms race with the soviets, adn our ultimate victory as the defining event of an entire generation. The last thing they wanted was folks running around pointing out that in the end, the idiocy inherhent in that race was likely the defining thing there, and that in the end we did not have a whole bunch to do with the soviet collapse. they would have fallen whether we had blown trillions countering their imaginary weaponry or not. Zaloga wrote several good books on soviet defense that are worth reading if you are intrested in that kind of thing.

The key to making big money during supply side economics wasn't just capital gains on defense equity stocks, but the use of investment tax credits and ACRS depreciation to reduce taxes on the gains. Current administration eliminated all that bookkeeping by reducing capital gain taxes to joke status in order to facilitate the real estate equity bubble.

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