Delta Force
Banned
What if in the 1980s the Soviet Union had converted a large part of its military industrial complex over to industrial and commercial applications in order to get out of stagnation? Rather than playing along with Reagan's conventional arms race and SDI attempts, the Soviets withdraw from the nuclear arms treaties, make more nuclear weapons, and inform the United States that any deployment of an SDI system will be treated as an attempt to destroy the Soviet Union. Does the Soviet Union last any longer by starting a nuclear arms race with America and avoiding trying to compete in conventional arms and SDI (nuclear bombs are pretty cheap), or would this ultimately have little effect on its demise? Also, could the Soviet Union potentially make the United States economy fail in the 1990s due to massive deficit spending by doing this? I know there was concern in the 1980s that a few more years of the arms race might have caused major problems for the American economy.