Reply #23: I went with number 2 [View All]

[JackSwift]

and I have a B.S. degree in the poli sciences and spent a few years on this very subject. Certainly there were McCarthyites and Nixonians who used the cold war for political gain, and others who used it for monetary gain. Those types will always be with us. But keep in mind that Stalin was one of history's most evil and dangerous men. He was never adventerous enough to take us on directly, but he did wage a low level war against us until the end of his life. Kruschnev was a harmless blowhard, pure and simple and he lost his job over it. Brezhnev was somewhere in between, and the Soviet equivilent of Reagan. He bankrupted the USSR by trying to achieve military superiority. He kept his intentions secret. I thought at the time that it was Russian paranoia, but I remember people who sincerely believed that the Soviets had an aggressive agenda and plenty of circumstantial evidence to back that up. The Soviets were an extreme danger to their immediate neighbors, such as Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, but for defensive reasons that only involved us because we rightly felt that this was blatant imperialism.

Ironically, it was the spying, and the Walker spy ring in this country that convinced the Soviets that our intentions were defensive, and our electronic spying on the Soviets that convinced even Reagan that the Soviets had defensive intentions. That, and younger generation of leaders like Gorbachev simply ended the cold war. The WWII generation remembered that a quarter of the population had died in WWII, and they weren't going to allow any risk of that happening again. And the world was a miserable place for it.