Word: kremlins
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...Stalin "conquered" Eastern Europe -- Exhibit A in the charge of Soviet expansionism -- but he did so in the final battles of World War II, not as a prelude to World War III. The Red Army had filled the vacuum left by the collapsing Wehrmacht. By the early 1950s, any Kremlin warmonger would have to contend with a Western Europe that was already firmly back on its feet and therefore no pushover, and also with an American doctrine warning that Soviet aggression would trigger nuclear retaliation against the U.S.S.R...
...always required a suspension of disbelief to imagine a sane Soviet leadership, no matter how cold-blooded, calculating that it could, in any meaningful sense, get away with an attack on the U.S. nuclear deterrent. Even if all American land-based missiles were destroyed, the men in the Kremlin would have to count on the distinct possibility that their country, and perhaps their command bunker, would sustain a pulverizing blow from U.S. submarine- and bomber- launched weapons...
...Midgetman intercontinental missiles, the B-1 and B-2 (Stealth) bombers and the Trident II submarine-launched missile. These programs are monuments to old thinking. They are throwbacks to the days when the strategists accepted, as an article of their dark faith, the vulnerability of the U.S. to Kremlin crapshooters...
...waging and quite possibly winning a war against the West, one has to accept as gospel a hoary and dubious cliche about the U.S.S.R.: the place is a hopeless mess where nothing works, with the prominent and crucial exception of two institutions -- the armed forces and the KGB. A Kremlin that cannot put food on its people's tables can put an SS-18 warhead on top of a Minuteman silo in North Dakota, some 5,000 miles away. Even though 15% to 20% of the grain harvested on the collective farms rots or falls off the back of trucks...
...decay" and that the U.S.S.R. might turn out to be "one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies." But unlike the little boy in the fable, Kennan was largely ignored by the crowd when he dared to say out loud that perhaps the emperor in the Kremlin was not quite so resplendent in his suit of armor. Now along comes Gorbachev to announce his nakedness to the world, and Yakovlev to confide that he too feels a chill...