Wretchard said:

“… in his famous book the Fate of the Earth predicted Ronald Reagan’s would probably precipitate a nuclear war. At the time most analysts in the CIA were predicting that the Soviet Union would last forever.”

If I had been asked in 1986, I would have predicted the Soviet Union would last for centuries and Reagan’s pursuit of third generation nuclear weapons would precipitate nuclear Armageddon. Obviously I was wrong on both counts but still believe my basic logic was correct.

Something I repeatedly observed while traveling in Eastern Europe was that Communism destroyed a culture’s basic integrity. People trapped in the Soviet block simply knuckled under and refused to buck the system. The whole society had become so corrupt that it was simply impossible to construct a viable opposition. What I failed to realize was the Soviet Empire would fail from the top-down. Gorbachev tried to repair a system that was so rotten that attempting to fix one thing only succeeded in breaking two other things. The chain reaction ultimately wrecked the whole system (we need to worry about this happening to us).

I also thought that orbiting nuclear pumped X-ray lasers (a third generation nuclear weapon) would ultimately lead to nuclear war. The Soviets didn’t have the technical ability to develope such weapons (in truth, neither did we). Had the United States begun deploying third generation nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union would have had no choice but to respond preemptively with submarine launched nuclear weapons and attempt nuclear decapitation. Fortunately the whole concept of nuclear pumped X-ray lasers was bogus and disaster averted.

It’s very important that people realize our survival of the Cold War was mainly through blind luck and/or the Grace of God. We must never again rely on Mutual Assured Destruction as a means of defense.