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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

Both "Better red than dead" and "better dead than red" were slogans thrown around in my youth here in the UK in the 70s and 80s.

Utter craziness - all of it.

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This attitude is part of 'better to be dead than a slave'. I think many people saw what the Nazis did in the occupied territories and their thinking was influenced by that (extending it to, what would happen if the Soviets invaded our lands).

By the 70s and 80s, people knew (or had the option to know - many chose not to know) what the Soviets did to people at home, so it wasn't totally out of whack to assume what would happen if they invaded.

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

People often forget how awful the west treated the bottom of its society at the time. For a black in the South, the soviet union (or more likely Cuba/communist latin country) probably looked pretty good.

That's not to excuse or downplay these country's mistakes. Let's just not forget our own.

Criticism of the US for segregation was a common tactic used in Soviet propaganda.

Roughly to the same extent that criticism of the soviets was a common tactic used in western propaganda.

It was used as a form of misdirection, a way to change the subject when someone brought up stalin's genocide.

Well, had it been my choice between a nuclear war where 90%-95% of the population of the UK would have died in optimistic scenarios and surrendering to the Soviets (and yes, I am fully aware of how badly they treated people in their own country and the countries they controlled) I know which one I would have chosen.

But that wasn't what the choice was.

It was between maintaining the capability of such a nuclear war to deter aggression, and not maintaining it and surely having been invaded by the Soviets.

For the madness that MAD was, for all intents and purposes, it actually worked.

That pretty much would have been the choice if, for whatever reason, a shooting war had started - which it nearly did on a number of occasions.

Of course, deterrence based on MAD is the least worst idea - but once shooting actually started, what is the rational thing to do?

That's the point of deterrence. It didn't start. The moral thing to do if it started would have been to not fire the missiles. But any leak or hint of such an intent would have had disastrous effect on the deterrent, and is thus an extremely dangerous idea for any leader to actually entertain. One can hope that leaders would have privately decided against and that the letters of last resort were sealed and destroyed for that reason.

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