[OldSchool]

Growing up during the cold war, it was dogma that a Soviet "bolt from the blue" could occur at any moment and end everything, everywhere. That gave the game deep relevance.

That threat was far less contrived than our current "war on terror" (two superpowers really did have a gazillion mega weapons) but history tells us that the most likely trigger for it happening would've been human or machine error, not some attempt at empire expansion.

Quite possibly the fall of the Soviet Union was a surprise to the powers that be, since it took ten years to develop a replacement war. Ten years during which we enjoyed one of the most prosperous and fiscally positive eras in modern US history.

[mikeyouse]

    Ten years during which we enjoyed one of the most
    prosperous and fiscally positive eras in modern US history.

Somewhat ironically, brought about in significant part due to the massive spending on R&D in communications and technology during the Cold War.

[justin66]

It's not obvious that the same or greater government spending on R&D would not have happened without the cold war.

In an alternate history where government spent the same percentage of GDP without a cold war (not a huge stretch, I think, since no cold war means no red scare and presumably some higher level of survival for the political left) the amount spent on research would presumably be a lot larger.

People love to look on the bright side of military spending but it's often a case of the broken glass fallacy. You spend a lot of money either destroying property or, at best, building stuff you hope very much will sit around unused. The economic activity that looks great often has an opportunity cost.

[Zigurd]

That's true, but at least it didn't ALL go to waste. "Star Wars" provided some engineers with interesting experience.

Homeland Security and hundreds of thousands of Blackwater contractors is like taking all that money and shoveling into a bonfire. The only "spinoff" I can think of is militarized policing. Ugh.

I suppose the lesson is that bad things can always be done even worse.

[gaius]

Well, yes and no. There are some things you can only do with a sense of desperate urgency driving you (this is the means by which startups beat entrenched players). Hence the code-breaking machines that give us computers, hence rader, satellites, jet engines, etc etc etc. Would these things have come about "naturally"? Maybe, maybe not. Why would you develop computers when you had clerks and a typing pool and that worked perfectly well?

[justin66]

> There are some things you can only do with a sense of desperate urgency driving you

I don't know how to prove or disprove this sentiment so I'm not going to say much about it other than to observe that some people manage to be pretty driven without a war threatening them, and a lot of the resources we desperately throw into a war are thrown into solving problems which are fundamentally uninteresting outside the context of that war.

The whole "war is great for the economy!" thing, in the context of something massive like WWII especially, is fundamentally arguing for the efficiency of a directed economy over a free market, which is pretty iffy.

> Hence the code-breaking machines that give us computers, hence rader, satellites, jet engines, etc etc etc.

The world had computers well before the war. Radar too, interestingly, and jet turbines. I'm not trying to be disingenuous: obviously getting radar up and running is less of a priority without WWII, and so on.

> Why would you develop computers when you had clerks and a typing pool and that worked perfectly well?

That particular conundrum took longer than the end of WWII to answer, though.

The interesting questions to me are whether something like a Manhattan Project are more of a distraction or a spur to people like Alan Turing and Johnny Von Neumann, and what would have happened to them and their field without the war and its spending. Maybe once the economy bounced back from the depression a computer industry would have begun quite a bit before it did on our timeline.

An awful lot of the visionary computer work was conducted with DARPA money over the years, but when you look at the career of someone like Robert Taylor, for example, you have to wonder if - in alternate history terms, I guess - you don't get Xerox PARC earlier or just in another context if you have less of the defense spending and more spending of our GDP on pure research.

[InclinedPlane]

> but history tells us that the most likely trigger for it happening would've been human or machine error, not some attempt at empire expansion

I think you're falling victim to the post hoc fallacy to some degree. Remember that the Cold War ended up only lasting about 4 decades or so, which limited the amount of time for incidents to occur that could have led to WWIII. Also remember that the process of succession of the leadership of the USSR was a very convoluted one. Most Soviet leaders remained in office until they died, which meant that a succession could occur at any moment, possibly even during a period where unusual things were happening with the party which might get sorted out quickly but could result in someone seizing power who might otherwise not had the chance. Also remember that dirty politics and coups were rampant in the communist sphere of influence and there is little reason to assume those tactics would not be used at home (as indeed they were). Especially considering the unsuccessful coup against Gorbachev. Given these things it's safe to say that there was absolutely no significant guarantee that the leader of the Soviet Union could be expected to be reasonable in any way. As indeed the example of Stalin plainly shows.

It's immanently possible both that the Cold War could have extended several years if not decades longer and an aggressive political figure akin to Stalin could have taken control of the Soviet Union almost at any point during its history.

Given these facts the idea that a pre-emptive nuclear strike from the Soviets could have occurred at any time during the Cold War was not as far fetched as we in the present, having avoided such a calamity, should assume. All it would have taken was the death of the General Secretary at an inopportune time and some sort of fight for supremacy within the party married with some sort of geopolitical state of high tension and a firebrand Soviet leader who ends up in control of a sufficient part of the armed forces (or perhaps all of them).

[egypturnash]

Here's two times we came close. They're both stories of Russians deciding not to pull the trigger based on faulty data, but I would not be surprised if there's a couple stories floating around of Americans making the same decision. It didn't need aggressive heads of state to happen at all.

http://militaryhistorynow.com/2013/07/15/the-men-who-saved-t...