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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

What’s your reasoning there? The Soviet economy wasn’t especially dependent on the American presidency.

"In later years, however, former Soviet officials cited SDI as a factor in the eventual collapse of their country, for it showed that the Soviet Union was politically unprepared for and economically incapable of competing in a new arms race with the United States, especially one led by someone as unrelenting as Reagan."

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ronald-Reagan/Relations...

It had a lot more to do with changes that were already in progress. The soviet union hadn’t been able to care for its citizens for a while. Most tellingly, life expectancy had been declining. In the late 70s/early 80/ there were elements within the us government strongly arguing, based on this and other data, that the USSR would collapse within a decade, but the cold warriors laughed at them.

It had a lot more to do with changes that were already in progress. The soviet union hadn’t been able to care for its citizens for a while. Most tellingly, life expectancy had been declining. In the late 70s/early 80s there were elements within the us government strongly arguing, based on this and other data, that the USSR would collapse within a decade, but the cold warriors laughed at them.

Note “a factor” - you could say the same about the peaceful space program, computer age, biotech, etc. Most of the world was advancing faster than the USSR in every way and there’s no reason to think that arc wouldn’t have continued under a second Carter administration.

I mean you can guess that might have happened, but I can't imagine a weak president like Carter saying "Tear down that wall" or calling USSR the evil empire.

He didn’t have Reagan’s stage presence to be sure, but did either of those really change what actually happened to the USSR? I’m pretty certain most of the work was being done by socioeconomic factors which weren’t affected by sound bites.

"And according to Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University and the history consultant for CBS News, many observers saw the speech as "disastrous." Communist leaders were critical of the remarks, and even West Berlin's then-mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, was wary.

"We were all a little more skeptical than American politicians -- the significance and the chances of tearing down the wall, there we were skeptical," he recalled in an interview years later.

"It was not well-received within the foreign policy community or the pundit class," Brinkley said, in an interview with CBS. "Many people called foul."

As Brinkley notes, however, history has been kind to the president's speech.

"It's seen as a turning point in Cold War," he said. "I think Reagan's speech bolstered the morale of the pro-democracy movement in East Germany."

"There was a movement that was growing and building toward liberalization and this gave great impetus to it in the aftermath," added Duberstein. "Even though people in the Soviet Union thought the speech was provocative, it worked."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/remembering-reagans-tear-down-t...

By announcing a complete vaporware known as SDI, while making a good impression it was very real, Reagan hinted at the possibility of changing the balance of power squarely to the American favor. The Soviets could not afford losing that balance, and they bought the Star Wars story -- hook, line and sinker -- so they went down the path of developing a similar system, and by doing so diverted even more money from the welfare of their citizens into the military-industrial complex. The citizens didn't like what was being left for them, so the system soon collapsed.

"developing a similar system"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative#R... says:

> In 2014, a declassified CIA paper stated that "In response to SDI, Moscow threatened a variety of military countermeasures in lieu of developing a parallel missile defense system".

The Soviets had very capable scientists who could figure out - like Bethe in the US - that SDI was not feasible, and the easy work-around is to launch more missiles, not build their own SDI.

Or for something more scholarly, from "Did Star Wars Help End the Cold War? Soviet Response to the SDI Program" at https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs25podvig.pdf Science & Global Security, 2017, 25.1: 3-27.

> The evidence on the Soviet response to SDI that emerges from the internal documents largely corroborates the view that the Soviet Union eventually realized that this program did not present a danger to its security because it could be relatively easily countered with simple and effective countermeasures.

I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear: I’m not advocating for this viewpoint (nor against it, actually); I’m just explaining how this “line of thinking” usually goes, since that was a question from GP.

To my understanding, the costs involved in the Soviet response to SDI were small, and had very little effect on national spending, so I don't see how that's important enough to mention. Surely the falling price of oil was more significant, yes? I'll bet the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan was also more expensive.

Since gadders' comment is flagged, I don't know the fuller context.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8cnm73/did_r...

Some commentary about why you gave that link would be nice. I think you meant as a way to say "looks like you are right"?

That is, as far as I can tell, it agrees with me ("responses to SDI were not a major factor in either the collapse of the Soviet Union, nor in the end of the Cold War"), including by citing the same source I gave, the paper by Pavel Podvig.

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