[steven2012]

I asked a coworker who was from Russia about what their experience was during the Cold War, and whether or not people were afraid of nuclear war. He said that everyone in Russia just laughed it off, and they knew that nothing would ever happen.

This is in stark contrast to everyone in the US that I knew. We were bombarded with propaganda about how nuclear war could occur at any second. Movies like "The Day After" (which I was too scared to watch), "Red Dawn", etc, just made things worse. It's funny when you look back how suckered in Americans were vs Russians. It was basically like the 1950s Red-Scare all over again, or as some would say, today's war against terrorism.

[rdtsc]

> He said that everyone in Russia just laughed it off, and they knew that nothing would ever happen.

That is in large true. There was no constantl stream of news on dangers of evil empires and scare us with total annihilation. At least in the 80s it wasn't happening as far as I remember. "American imperialists" was still used in propaganda and news but it wasn't serious. Or rather few took propaganda seriously. Heck by 80's the hottest thing in Soviet Union were American jeans, music, products, movies. All that was underground, the forbidden fruit if you wish.

Now what you should be worried about it that you have been brainwashed. There was no equivalent real life credible threat to the extent it was dramatized and inflated in American propaganda. You should be worried perhaps that in a country with supposedly a free press and open criticism people were mislead in a much large and degree than in a totalitarian communism country. CIA and other intelligence agencies chronically overestimated and inflated figures and threat models in order to get more funding. That should worry you. That is happening today as well when it comes to war on terror.

Another point is a joke I like to tell people and (I've mentioned this before, so I apologize to those) -- when the Soviet Union fell we found out "everything they told us about Communism was a lie and everything they told us about the American style Capitalism was true". I'll leave it at that joke.

[tptacek]

Could you be a little more specific about exactly how Americans were misled about the threat of war with the Soviet Union?

[rdtsc]

A few links:

http://news.antiwar.com/2011/09/28/cia-documents-us-drastica...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B

Also a quote from senator senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Raymond Garthoff, a C.I.A. military analyst, from early 2000s "there were consistent overestimates of the threat every year from 1978 to 1985."

Even without this it is possibly just to look at the rhetoric and the push for an accelerated arms race, spending on the Star Wars programs. Just looking back at was found on the other side, its economy, rusting machinery, terrible inefficiency, military machines running on vacuum tubes. Was that threat level warranted? No, there was no equivalent threat on the other side to justify it.

[tptacek]

The belief that the Cold War was ineptly prosecuted, or that military spending during the Cold War was inefficient (or even corrupt) is distinct from the belief that nuclear war wasn't a realistic threat.

I'm actually having a hard time understanding the notion that nuclear war wasn't a realistic threat. We "overestimated" the Soviet capability, but all estimates available were so far past the margin of global catastrophe that they're not really relevant.

Again: if you want to construct an argument that politically-motivated overestimations of the Soviet nuclear arsenal were used to drive spending to profit contractors: sure. But it does not follow that nuclear war was off the table!

[steven2012]

Of course you're having a hard time understanding it. It's because you've been so brainwashed as a kid growing up in the 70s and 80s (just like me), believing that the Soviet Union was the "Evil Empire", and that they were so freaking evil, that they would destroy themselves just so that they could take down the US.

In fact, the Soviet Union was made up of people who loved their friends and family and didn't want to destroy the world, just like Americans. And they were no more willing to start nuclear war than Americans were. And given the fact that there was completely Mutually Assured Destruction, there was no point for the Soviet Union to ever launch a nuclear strike.

So, sure, there was always the possibility of nuclear war, just like there is currently the possibility of a nuclear war against China, or India, Pakistan, North Korea, etc. But it's not nearly as likely as we were brainwashed to believe as kids.

Instead, Reagan used this as a tool to increase support for a build-up of nuclear weapons, to increase military spending, and ultimately turned the US from the world's largest creditor to the world's largest debtor. Some might say that he saved the world from the Soviet Union by crippling them financially by goading them into an arms race that they couldn't win financially. But it was definitely on the heels of a massive propaganda campaign that none of us realized, until you actually compare notes with people who lives in the Soviet Union at the time, and understand the actually threat levels.

[rdtsc]

> Again: if you want to construct an argument that politically-motivated overestimations of the Soviet nuclear arsenal were used to drive spending to profit contractors: sure. But it does not follow that nuclear war was off the table!

My argument was about a matter of degree. I didn't mean to say the nuclear war was off the table. But we now know that neither side was really ready to launch. It should have been the job of the intelligence agencies to correctly assess that but they didn't.

Then someone else took that and ran with it without double checking and added on a heavy layer of propaganda about evil empire and how communists were about to destroy the free world and so on.

As an addendum, as a good indication the Soviets were never going to attack first, was that they built Периметр (Perimeter) -- their dead hand device. They did that because they thought Americans would launch first. And if that happened the wanted to have a second strike (retaliatory) capability. If they were the evil empire and always wanted to attack first (like the Americans believed) they would have no incentive to build that system.

[tptacek]

I guess I'm not seeing how game theory doesn't day both sides want a "dead hand" device. It's a commitment scheme.

[jerf]

"It's funny when you look back how suckered in Americans were vs Russians."

Were they, though? There's a difference between "the bad thing didn't happen" and "the bad thing couldn't happen". Perhaps we were too concerned about it back then, but I sometimes fear we're too casual about it today. History strongly suggests the "total extinction" scenarios are overblown ("nuclear winter" is likely not a viable threat, though things could be cooled for a while, we know because other big particulate events didn't result in anywhere near the scary predictions, the dangers of fallout are generally grossly overstated), but they can still end civilization as we know it in mere minutes. They may "only" be able to wipe out all major cities on Earth rather than actually kill every human, but... that's still a bit of a problem.

[caf]

Indeed. The Dead Hand is recommended reading (http://thedeadhandbook.com/)

[tzs]

> It's funny when you look back how suckered in Americans were vs Russians.

Another possible interpretation of your data would be that Americans were better informed of the risks, and so were afraid. Russians, on the other hand, lived in a society with very tight control on all media, and so anything that might cause unrest was censored.

There's more evidence for this interpretation than for yours. In particular, note that in the US we had access to numerous non-government sources of information and analysis, most of which agreed that nuclear war was a real risk.

[Houshalter]

Was the fear really overblown though? I mean it didn't happen, but several incidents came disturbingly close. And if we were destroyed, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. Not being destroyed is the only observable result, so that observation tells you nothing about what the probabilities actually were.

[cafard]

Might I suggest that your sample was a bit narrow? I can remember being pretty troubled at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis (yes, I'm that old), seeing that our city was thought to be in range of said missiles by the chart on the front page of the paper.

But from then on, most of the scare stuff seemed to be from the disarmament advocates--think of Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth and the nuclear winter it envisioned. Yes, there were the survivalist nuts, but there weren't that many.

[steve19]

The Russians came close to initiating accidental nuclear war [0] Sure, nobody wanted a nuclear war (MAD [1]) but a mistake or oversight could easily have triggered an accidental war.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

[dragonwriter]

"Intentional nuclear war based on false indications" would be more accurate than "Accidental nuclear war".

For that incident, at least.

[ars]

Doesn't this say more about the morals of America vs Russia than anything else?

Russians knew Americans would never do that to them, but Americans did not. (It doesn't matter if Russians would or would not, that's how they were viewed.)

[steven2012]

I'm not sure what you mean by "morals". If you're implying that Russian knew that the US would never attack, but the Americans couldn't trust that the Russians would never attack, then that would still be propaganda at work.

If some Americans actually believed that the Russians were so maniacal that they would attack, even in spite of Mutual Assured Destruction, then those Americans were foolishly suckered in by propaganda.

[Helianthus]

... It's not like we have any clear examples where the world was moments away from nuclear war or anything.

Now you might say that this was a result of American paranoia and that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But thinking that Russian expectations on the matter weren't naive is somewhat naive.

[cousin_it]

Yeah, Russians thought better of Americans and also of themselves. (Nuclear war is suicidal for everyone, no matter who attacks first.)