From: Allen Thomson (thomsona@flash.net) Subject: Re: NMD test fails! Newsgroups: alt.war.nuclear Date: 2000/07/09 [another person] wrote: > There were apparently people in CIA in the early 1980s (i.e. before > Star Wars really got going) who were looking at the trend data and > saw that they [the Soviets] were in big trouble. True. I was there and saw it, can confirm that many people knew that the Soviets were in considerable economic and societal trouble. But, however, nobody knew what it meant for the future. An example: I was on the small drafting team that wrote the Interagency Intelligence Assessment, "Possible Soviet Responses to the US Strategic Defense Initiative", now declassified and available at http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/m8310017.htm. Being a technical intelligence analyst in the Office of Scientific and Weapons Research, I was unqualified to have a professional opinion about the Soviet economy, but had certainly read enough "it's in trouble" reports. Accordingly, trying to get inputs to the assessment, I put in some placeholder no-brainer lines such as, "If they attempted to deploy new advanced systems not presently planned, while continuing their overall planned force modernization, significant additional levels of spending would be required. This would place substantial additional pressures on the Soviet economy and confront the leadership with difficult policy choices." Going around to the economic analysts to try [to get] them to provide more in-depth comments and projections, it turned out that no one was willing to do so. So the placeholders remained in place as the best and coordinated judgment of the Intelligence Community. > So some people argue that the handwriting was on the wall before > Star Wars really got moving. Yeah, and maybe it was -- but written in an obscure language, and containing a message few were willing to accept. I guarantee that if someone had gotten up in a National Intelligence Estimate coordination meeting in 1983 or 1985 and said that the Soviet Union had even a miniscule chance of collapse, they'd have been branded a kook. Look at the "responses" document, and you'll see such expressions as "In the far term, from 2005 onward, the Soviets will be able not only to refine responsive measures taken earlier..." This is by no means unique, as examination of declassified NIEs of the period will show. [In other words], we didn't have a clue what was coming. > Second, it is not clear how much the Soviets were spending on their > own Star Wars program and countermeasures to the US SDIO. How much > was this compared to their overall military budget? I have the > feeling that it was not that much more. So it is probably hard to > argue that they started spending more that hastened their demise. Correct. They had quite an extensive and diverse directed energy program dating back to the late 1960s, plus other R&D stuff. But compared to tanks, missiles, airplanes, submarines, ships, people, etc, it wasn't a big part of the budget. > Perhaps the better issue to look at is how the US SDIO plan affected > them from a psychological standpoint. They may have determined that > they simply could not keep up with the US (perhaps viewing this as > yet another lunar landing challenge that they would lose) and this > undercut their morale. Thus, it might not have "hastened" their > demise, but removed some of the fighting spirit that might have > allowed more hard-liners to hold on > longer. This is pretty much my own sense of the matter. Even at the time, we asked ourselves, "Why are the Soviets getting so spun up about SDI, which won't bear fruit for many years, maybe decades?" It could well be that they were not driven into bankruptcy, but rather a lethal nervous breakdown. Whatever: it's the results that counted.