I think the SU did have a larger nuke stockpile. Their problem was economic, and on a related note, having a relatively less advanced electronics industry.
During the 1980s there was a best selling Japanese book (I believe it was "Japan Can Say No") that called for Japan to become neutral and support the Soviet Union with advanced technology so as to play the SU and US against each other.
Your challenge is to make the Soviet Union the clear superior in the Cold War, with a larger nuclear arsenal, technology base, and so on. By just how much is up to you. Your POD can be anytime not before 1917. Ready? Go!
Western or Japanese technology for that matter wont do the Soviets any good without Western or Japanese quality control. The KGB was quite good at aquiring western technology, but the Soviets still were not able to replicate a lot of it.
The fundamental flaw of the Soviet Union was that it promised a workers paradise, but couldn't deliver. Once the local realized that lower-class people living in the Capitalist world still were better of than they were the USSR was doomed to fall or become a DPRK-style Gulag.
At the time a lot of Japanese were resentful of the US-Japan relationship because US was threatening trade restrictions to reduce the trade imbalance. The Japanese were forced to cut back exports and invest their money in the US, which they never got back. And of course a major irritant in the relationship was US military presence in Japan.Japan was a strong US ally, but on the other hand they could trade tech to the USSR as Japanese-US relations could get rocky at times however if Japan went natural they’d need a bigger military than the OTL JDF. Also the Soviets would need to hand back the Kuril Islands at least.
Or maybe the USSR can cut an under the table deal with Japanese corporations and deal with them directly, in order to gain tech...
Unless we are talking highly specialized tools required only in limited numbers, then only the ability to mass-produce is de-facto the ability to replicate.They could in fact replicate most/all of it mass-productions is the main issue since you need new productions lines, or re-fit old ones, quality control for the USSR was variable depending on the industry. (and the individual factory)
You are right there. But they didn't. Having to stand in line for the most basic neccessities (the famous (at least in Germany) queues in front of bakeries for example) in the age of industrialized farming isn't fooling anyone.Meh goverments always promise to be the hottiest thing since sliced bread. It also must be said the USSR started out with much lower living standards than the west and everyone knew it, Russia was always poor but having lower living standards than the west wont imperial the regime so long as things are steadily improving.
Unless we are talking highly specialized tools required only in limited numbers, then only the ability to mass-produce is de-facto the ability to replicate.
You are right there. But they didn't. Having to stand in line for the most basic neccessities (the famous (at least in Germany) queues in front of bakeries for example) in the age of industrialized farming isn't fooling anyone.
It's not like they didn't have quite a few decades of a grace period after Stalin and WW2.
I think that you need the USSR to have no Brezhnev stagnation, more international economic partners, a more detente-like foreign policy, less military spending, and for the USA to keep failing at containment so that they waste tons of resources trying to win over small countries and thus wreck their own economy.
not entirely. Some of those things (towards the end particularly) are unlikely, but I don't see why they're impossible.You mean a flock of ASBs?