[hoopladler]

>Surely the Cold War would have been a real war if not for nukes, no? I don't think the US and Russia were avoiding conflict because "the UN made it illegal."

No way, no how. Russia's economy, at their peak, was 1/7th of the size of the USA's. At the end of WW2, it's unlikely they could have beaten western Europe, let alone kept the US out, who were clocking 50% of world GDP at the end of '45.

Equally, the USA could have never beaten Russia in the USSR itself. The entire nation was an absolute fortress. The armies of tanks, that would be vulnerable to air power in an offensive war, would be absolutely unstoppable in a defensive war, where you don't have long supply lines.

[scarmig]

The 1/7 GDP figure is misleading. It is absolutely true that everyone had an incentive back then to overstate the USSR's position: Communists and sympathizers for ego gratification, American liberals to use as an argument for government intervention in the economy and internal reform, and the American Right to ramp up militarism and domestic repression. That said, the revisionism that argues that it had no more power on the world stage than South Africa based on spurious GDP comparisons is just as off base.

GDP captures something meaningful, but in terms of ability to project power it's only somewhat correlated. In a Communist state, it captures even less, because pricing mechanisms are all off kilter.

For much of the USSR's post WW2 existence, it could likely have invaded and taken much of continental Europe using only conventional weapons. The USA had troops stationed in Germany not in hopes of stopping any invasion, but to buy a little bit of time and to make its defensive pledges plausible to allies: thousands of American dead would mean it would have to join in a total war, instead of calculating costs and benefits of total war (which would be unacceptable). Even then, other counties worried about America's commitment to an incredibly costly war with the USSR: that's part of why France developed its own nuclear deterrent and left NATO.

Discussion of whether the USA or USSR would "win" an all out war between them is almost besides the point: they both possessed enough military power that the only way to win would be to, um, not to play.

[hoopladler]

>revisionism that argues that it had no more power on the world stage than South Africa based on spurious GDP comparisons is just as off base.

I don't think you're entirely wrong, but I think there are two factors at play here:

1. The USSR's power projection was really good because it's really hard to convince people to fight for capitalism. For communism, on the other hand, you always have a million volunteers.

2. The USSR's military credibility when it comes to a land war in Europe was based on the fact that they were preparing for a near-home or home defense scenario. So, instead of investing in expensive fleets, aircraft carriers, and bombers, they invested in tanks, close-support aircraft, and anti-air stuff. The Atlantic would prevent the US from effectively responding to massive columns of tanks, since tanks are very heavy and hard to transport and supply. However, it also means that the USSR wouldn't be going anywhere with its massive war machine. It wouldn't have any ability to threaten anything outside of euroope. So the obvious result of any conventional war would have been the US conventionally bombing every Russian city to dust.

[iwintermute]

Name at least one reason to “fight for communism”?

[fiblye]

GDP is absolutely irrelevant to warfare.

The Soviets lost to the incredibly poor country of Afghanistan. Vietnam's GDP was/is a small fraction of Russia's, yet America still lost and communism spread through the region. If war came to Western Europe again, I find it unlikely that America could've won.

[simonh]

the cist of tye war to Russia was also ruinous and maintaining that level of conventional forces would have been a real priblem. Bear in mind they got a lot of material support from the Allies during the war and continuing without that would have been very painful.

One of the first things Kruschev did was cut ground forces by a third, to rely on missiles for a deterrence based defence because they realisec they couldnt match the west in conventional capability.