Was the Soviet Collapse inevitable following the end of WW2?

SsgtC

Banned
About as much as US boomers and missiles on the Soviet borders were, yes. So what? The capacity to use them as a offensive weapon does not suddenly mean they were not a deterrent in intention.
I agree that they were meant to act as a deterrent. To me though, I think this is a situation where the law of unintended consequences reared its ugly head. As a consequence of discovering nuclear missiles just minutes away from them, the US reacted violently. Multiple units were put on alert, and some even began movement, to invade Cuba. REFORGER units were also moved to a higher level in preparation for rapidly shifting them to Europe. And least but not least, US nuclear forces went to a hair trigger alert. Literally one false move and everything would have flown. The Soviets were clearly not expecting that kind of reaction.

What the leadership of the USSR failed to realise was how these weapons would be seen by the Americans. Now, this was a constant failing on both sides during the Cold War, but I don't think it was ever as bad as in 1962. Regardless of what the intent was for the weapons, the United States could only see them as one thing, and one thing only: weapons to be used for a surprise, first strike.

Because whether the Soviets intended to announce their presence on Cuba or not, the fact remains that they hadn't yet. And the US had no way of knowing that they would. And any post discovery declarations by the USSR that they had intended to inform the US all along would have sounded hollow.
 
And any post discovery declarations by the USSR that they had intended to inform the US all along would have sounded hollow.

Especially with the trap Stevenson set at the UN, getting the Soviets to go on record that there were absolutely no nuclear forces in Cuba

Millions of Americans were glued to their television sets on that fateful day in October 1962 as Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said he had "one simple question" for his Soviet counterpart: "Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the U.S.S.R. has placed, and is placing, medium- and intermediate-range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no -- don't wait for the translation -- yes or no?"

Valerian A. Zorin, the poker-faced Soviet ambassador, squirmed in his chair. The Kremlin had failed to inform him about the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba. He had no instructions from Moscow. Trying to wiggle out of the trap that Stevenson had set for him, Zorin equivocated. "I am not in an American courtroom, sir. . . . You will have your answer in due course."

Stevenson, an intellectual politician who usually shied away from confrontation, twisted the knife. "I am prepared to wait for an answer until Hell freezes over, if that is your decision. I am also prepared to present the evidence in this room." After waiting for the laughter over Zorin's discomfiture to subside, Stevenson proceeded to unveil a series of poster-size black-and-white photographs putting the lie to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's claim that the Soviet Union did not have offensive weapons deployed in Cuba.
 
There's no evidence the Soviets intended the SS-4 and SS-5s to act as any more of a first-strike weapon then the rest of their strategic arsenal and plenty that they conceived of the emplacement as a direct response to the American emplacement of missiles in Turkey. By all accounts, Khrushchev was baffled by the American enragement over the deployment.

But what we know now versus what U.S. policymakers perceived then are two quite different things. And it is the perceptions that matter.

And it's pretty clear from what has been said by the principals in the Crisis and what has been declassified that pretty much everyone across the American spectrum saw the SS-4s in Cuba as a massive escalation - and an unacceptable one. Comparisons to Turkey and the Jupiters there limp to a real degree because a) Turkey had been in the American orbit since about '47, and American nuclear-armed bombers had been operating out of there since the mid-50's; b) Jupiter flight time from Turkey to Moscow isn't appreciably longer than Jupiter flight time from Italy; c) Russia had a long, rich, meaty history of being surrounded by enemies (esp. in the Straits), but America had not. Americans still thought of the Monroe Doctrine as a real thing, whether it really was or not. Maybe this isn't fair, but geopolitics rarely are.

The problem was that Krushchev was bountifully ignorant of American mindsets (and not just Kennedy's). The entire project really was a "hare-brained" scheme, basically certain to provoke a direct confrontation with the United States (regardless of who was president) which the Soviets really could not win.
 
The USA had a recent history of being caught with their pants down but "underestimating" what the other side would do. By this I mean Pearl Harbor and the North Korean invasion of the south. In those cases there was time for the US to take an eight count, and win in the later rounds. With nuclear weapons this was not an acceptable plan of action. Maybe the Soviets would have stopped with a few missiles in Cuba, and maybe not. Adding tactical nuclear capable bombers, more missiles, etc was going to be quite easy once the initial missiles are up and running.

It is always difficult for intelligence services to get inside of the opposition's head. Counting missile launchers is relatively easy, knowing why they are where they are and how they might be used is much more difficult. One always has to be prepared for the worst.
 
The USA had a recent history of being caught with their pants down but "underestimating" what the other side would do. By this I mean Pearl Harbor and the North Korean invasion of the south. In those cases there was time for the US to take an eight count, and win in the later rounds. With nuclear weapons this was not an acceptable plan of action. Maybe the Soviets would have stopped with a few missiles in Cuba, and maybe not. Adding tactical nuclear capable bombers, more missiles, etc was going to be quite easy once the initial missiles are up and running.

It is always difficult for intelligence services to get inside of the opposition's head. Counting missile launchers is relatively easy, knowing why they are where they are and how they might be used is much more difficult. One always has to be prepared for the worst.

This is a good point.

Munich + Pearl Harbor + Korea all fresh in the rear view mirror = "We're gonna worst case this thing."
 
USSR takes the Chinese route and goes to capitalism around 1970. The "Communist" party still rules the roost but much much more of a free enterprise system is set up. Much less effort to subsidize basket case third world countries like Ethiopia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Egypt, Vietnam. No invasion of Afghanistan. Encourage of fertility with subsidies for children. A much more prosperous and technologically advanced economy.
 
I think that a lot of Westerners on this board (and especially the Americans and many other non-communist/socialist westerners) are approaching the issue of deterrence vs. first strike regarding the missiles in Cuba from their own limited perspective. To whit: the West were the Good Guys and the Soviets were the Bad Guys, so it just has to have been this way.

Mind you, I'll be the first to admit that there is truth to this. There is no doubt that Soviet ideology was aggressively expansionist. They had announced their intent to conquer the world, and built an army that was clearly designed for an attack on Europe. Heck, they even practiced the attack with only the thinnest of disguises. They also went back and forth several times trying to decide if the ideologically* correct answer was that a nuclear war was winnable or not, and certainly had drawn up plans for a possible first-strike at least once. The documents that were released and various interviews with involved parties after the dissolution of the USSR prove all of this, and US Cold War militarism was in majority a response to this. (It's unfortunate that some sort of inertia has carried this militarism at least partially to the modern day.) Another problem was that the Soviets could never understand that last part, about the West not being a threat to their existence militarily. Or, if they did understand this then they chose to respond to the West's non-military threat in a very militant fashion, which admittedly would have been a smart move on their part since they couldn't possibly win otherwise. But Russia had been nearly destroyed by Western invasions too many times, and they never quite understood how the West had changed after WWII in a way that made further such adventures impossible. Which, it's hard to blame them, really. That kind of thing will scar a nation. But many here, I think, if anything underestimate the degree of Soviet paranoia. That entire government was one gigantic Kafkaesque Strangelovian nightmare, and arguably the greatest existential threat that the human race has faced since the bottleneck. They were engaging in massive projection- they were psychologically incapable of not believing that there was some sort of secret Western Deep State, unaccountable to the public and actually pulling the strings, and which was intent upon their destruction. They could not believe a thing the West said about their intentions (unless it was something the Soviets had forced upon them).

However...

In this particular instance the missiles probably were meant to be deterrent. The proven intent to announce their existence is a strong argument here. Even though they were intent upon rolling tanks over Europe as a short-term goal, the Soviets feared the US nuclear capability. They would have preferred to keep a war non-nuclear so that they could invade Europe without their divisions being vaporized, and through the early 1960s their nuclear capability was almost laughably inferior. So, even though they were an aggressive entity they had an intense interest in nuclear deterrence, at least until they could catch up. And if the US was (admittedly) in an highly irrational phase in the 1960s, well, they probably still hadn't reached parity with their Soviet opponents. The West really had incredibly poor information on Soviet intentions through at least the mid-1970s, and to some degree this was intentional on the part of the Soviets. And, as I have said, the belief that Soviet intentions were aggressively expansionistic at the least was actually true even if limited intentions regarding the Cuban missiles specifically and nuclear weapons in general was always a bit of a black hole. Yes, the US had it's warmongers too, but policy was deterrence**, and they could not have deterrence with a viable decapitating first-strike capability sitting in Cuba regardless of what the intent was. The US capability could potentially be destroyed before they could retaliate. Result- no deterrence, the immolation of the United States, and World Communism victorious. Once the US tolerated their existence at all they would be unable to stop the deployment of even more capable IRBMs to Cuba. Arguments that "well, the West was already doing this to the Soviets" are puerile and hollow. The Soviet missiles were safe from Western IRBMs, even from Turkey- they were in the Far East. So I agree that realistically speaking and taking into account what was known and/or believed at the time the missiles could not be allowed in Cuba from the American perspective.

Could. Not.

For the many reasons already discussed.

* I distrust ideology. ANY ideology. I prefer rationalism.

** Again, this is proven by released documents. A more public major indicator is how either side wished to emplace their single ABM system in the (admittedly much later) ABM Treaty. The US chose to protect their missile fields. This is a deterrent; if the Soviets launched a first-strike it increased the chances of US nuclear capability surviving to retaliate. The Soviets OTOH chose to protect Moscow, which can be argued was an attempt to save their own @$$es from the US response after a Soviet first-strike. Put another way, they weren't bothering to protect their missile fields because they were intending to launch them first anyway, so they didn't need to worry about it. (As I said, the Soviet position on winnable nuclear wars flipped back and forth a few times.)
 
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