WI: The Soviet Union shrunk it's military.

It's the middle of the Cold War and brinkmanship is prevalent across the world. The stupid or smart people in the SU decide that doing an arms race is stupid and decides to largely reduce its fielded manpower and focus on economic and technological development. What happens? Does NATO invade, WarsawPact collapse, China invade, De-escalation for NATO??
 
NATO isn't suicidal enough to invade, even with an arms reduction. China... probably not, though Mao seems to have shrugged off the idea of China being nuked (we'd survive).

Second, and this is very key: when. "The middle of the Cold War" is very vague, and actors will do different things depending on when this specifically happens.
 
A smart Brezhnev would have cut back after the USSR reached parity in warheads with the USA in the late '60s. But Brezhnev wasn't smart, he wasn't an agent of change, even with him agreeing to the SALT talks later
 

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It's the middle of the Cold War and brinkmanship is prevalent across the world. The stupid or smart people in the SU decide that doing an arms race is stupid and decides to largely reduce its fielded manpower and focus on economic and technological development. What happens? Does NATO invade, WarsawPact collapse, China invade, De-escalation for NATO??
Depending on when you mean if Beria had won the struggle for power after Stalin's death he was willing to deescalate the Cold War and loosen up on communism to get aid from the West and trade them East Germany...if the allegations of the people who deposed him are to be believed. That probably just derails the Cold War rather than invites the West to invade.
 
If by "middle of the Cold War" you mean 1960s, then a shrinking of the Red Army probably means no intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Prague Spring demonstrated above all else that the Soviet Union and its authoritarian bloc could not coexist with market reform and openness, and thus could only be held together with the military. No military presence means no fear of an imminent military intervention, which means more "Springs" - but in Warsaw, Bucharest, East Berlin, etc. NATO wouldn't have to intervene, just as it didn't have to intervene in 1989. It would only have to push for concessions and watch the whole system fall apart.
 
If by "middle of the Cold War" you mean 1960s, then a shrinking of the Red Army probably means no intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Prague Spring demonstrated above all else that the Soviet Union and its authoritarian bloc could not coexist with market reform and openness, and thus could only be held together with the military.

reducing fielded manpower doesn't mean pull all Rifle and Mechanized Divisions for Pact areas and disband them.

The Invasion was with around 20 division, along with help from neighboring Pact Nations, around 300,000 men all up.

Invading with 200,000 would have also have done the job.

And it's not like LBJ was going to try to push for an invasion of Poland while the USSR and W.P was distracted. Everyone knew that.
 
Militarily they could have done it in mid 60's, enough strategic nuclear weapons to devastate Western Europe and the US, tactical nukes for escalation, mass militia and working assignments to keep up militarism, say, 20 divisions to keep up a tripwire force in East Germany and to perform brotherly interventions around the world.

For internal repression, Ministry of Interior troops. T-55 and BTR-50 are good enough to mow down dissenters, one does not need T-80 and BMP-2 for that.

For Navy, basically nuclear submarines (SSN and SSBN) are enough. Rest are basically a waste outside some small flag-waving cruiser force.
 
Clarifying here: does the period between the mid-50s to 1962, when the Red Army's active-duty manpower size shrunk from 5.76 million to ~3 million, not count?

It is conceivable that the Soviets could have kept their standing peacetime military manpower level at 3 million men, with the remainder to be filled in by the mobilization of reservists from the civilian populace in the event of war (the Soviet manpower system up to ~1970 was capable of remarkably swift mobilization tempos). Given that the Soviet groups of forces in Eastern Europe were always manned to a much higher degree in both qualitative and quantitative terms, this could have been more then enough to keep the Warsaw Pact forces in line as well as at least blunt any potential surprise attack while. They might have even been able to go lower: Khruschev in 1962 was planning to bring it down to around 1.8 million, although the Cuban Missile Crisis and it's aftermath put the kibosh on that. But then, as has been noted, this ran against the grain of the Brezhnevites who felt that shooting for maximum strength in conventional and nuclear forces was the only means to ensure Soviet security and damn the economic costs.

It's worth considering that the modern Russian Federation has an active military of around 1 million men despite actually having even larger land borders then the USSR to cover.
 
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Khanzeer

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Militarily they could have done it in mid 60's, enough strategic nuclear weapons to devastate Western Europe and the US, tactical nukes for escalation, mass militia and working assignments to keep up militarism, say, 20 divisions to keep up a tripwire force in East Germany and to perform brotherly interventions around the world.

For internal repression, Ministry of Interior troops. T-55 and BTR-50 are good enough to mow down dissenters, one does not need T-80 and BMP-2 for that.

For Navy, basically nuclear submarines (SSN and SSBN) are enough. Rest are basically a waste outside some small flag-waving cruiser force.
How would a drastic reduction at the end of 1970s look like ?
 
Does the SU still collapse, the Space Race end quickly or escalate, the Cold War extends itself longer?
USSR collapsed because both the people and much of the leadership couldn't ignore the rot of corruption and consumers not having their needs met, and most important didn't have a ruthless dictator running things anymore, with the revolving door or non-entities after Brezhnev didn't help, with no real policies beyond working the edges.
While not noticible to most, the rot was too far gone by time Gorby was in power.

To this day, I'm still suprised the the implosion of that country, and the soft landing of the remains
 
The Western view to the irrationality of Soviet arms buildup ignores the perfect storm of the massive collective trauma of Soviet society, and the paranoid siege mentality of old Bolsheviks that fit so well to the older Russian view of the world.

Since the West and the Chinese were obciously out to get them, sooner or later, the only peace possible was a peace built on raw power. This made the Gorbachev reforms and unilateral disarmament all the more radical.

It is ironic that Western narratives often point out to Reaganite spending as the sole and main reason for this, when the traditional - and much more likely - Soviet response would have been a North Korea-styled defiance to the end.
 
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