Shorter/Longer/Opposite Cold War

Since the Search Function Gremlins are at it again, I'll proceed with the assumption that this is an original idea. How could the cold war last longer? How could it end sooner? Could NATO have intervened in Hungary without starting WWIII? Could a US that backed down on the Cuban Missile Crisis and pulled out after the Tet Offensive been seen as a paper tiger? Could a successful August Coup have kept the USSR alive for another decade at least? Perhaps the USSR invades Poland, ending a "Warsaw Spring" Any ideas? (that don't involve nukes)
 
If the US backed down in '62 it would be a massive hit to their credibility.
So, I think this means it would end earlier with a Soviet victory.
 
If the US backed down in '62 it would be a massive hit to their credibility.
So, I think this means it would end earlier with a Soviet victory.

I don't think the USSR can 'win' the Cold War unless they introduce economic reform a la Deng Xiaoping. Their economic system will fall apart at some point.

I could see somebody other than Gorbachev taking power, a hardliner. Said hardliner keeps the Warsaw Pact in line even though his economy is disintegrating and through harsh repression manages to keep an impoverished, highly militarized USSR going until the time frame of, say, 1995-1999 after which communism falls violently and the former Warsaw Pact is added to the Third World. That's only one way to go about it though.
 
I don't think the USSR can 'win' the Cold War unless they introduce economic reform a la Deng Xiaoping. Their economic system will fall apart at some point.

The USSR unquestionably would need economic reforms to survive, but that doesn't necessarily have to mean Deng-style pseudocapitalism. However, most of the other possibilities have never been tried on a large scale so there's no way to know if they would work or not.

With a PoD well before WWII, there's a very slim chance the USSR could develop and field mass atomic forces before any of its competitors, leading to a Communist-dominated world. It would require ASBish levels of bad luck and incompetence for their competitors, however. Something like: a non-Hitler fascist comes to power in Germany and gets western Europe embroiled in a war that the Soviets are able to stay out of, that basically wrecks the continent. The US goes isolationist and mildly fascist, so that they're not interested in Jewish refugees, and the Jewish physicists go east to Russia as the least bad destination available. Soviets build and field a few hundred atom bombs before anyone notices, along with an intercontinental bomber force, then use those to enforce a monopoly on atomic weaponry.
 
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