The year was 1977 and a science adjacent space opera was in the cinemas and people loved it.
It features spaceships laser guns, magical forces and every story beat of the classical
Hero’s journey with a young protagonist being drawn into conflict and eventually fighting
the evil forces. This movie is of course called Star wars and has nothing to do with this video.
Instead we are talking about something known as the strategic defence
initiative which was a military program the US missile defense agency worked on
during the 1980s. The stated goal was to create weapons that can protect the
united states from a nuclear war. It was of course nick named the star wars programme.
There was a second goal, that was to re-start cold war arms races between USSR and USA, the story
goes that the USSR could not afford this arms race and that this caused the collapse of he USSR 7
years later. Because of this some conservatives will tell you that Reagan won the cold war,
even though he was out of office when the soviet bloc fell.
Is this correct? Was it really the Star Wars programme that made the USSR dissolve?
It’s complicated, that’s why the video is so long. We will discuss the cold war, the purpose
of the star wars programm, the things the USSR faced while regan talked about his his missile
shield and eventually I’ll answer whether Regan really bankrupted the USSR and won the cold war.
If that sounds interesting to you and you want to hear more then stick with me while I thank
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Our story like many stars in the cold war, famously the USA and friends who loved capitalism
and free markets and the USSR and friends who really loved state socialism
had a bit of an disagreement over the future of all mankind. It was about the
better way to organise and run a society. For this these countries would fund and arm
movements all around the world to promote their ideology and way of life. While there were many
wars like in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and half of Africa, the two superpowers never went
to war. And that is down to a major player in the story I am telling here. Nuclear weapons.
As you know in 1945 the second world war in the pacific ended after Japan was hit with two
nuclear bombs. Whether those nuclear bombings were justified is sadly a contentious topic,
they were not, Japan was on the brink already and those nukes mostly killed civilians.
As you know only 3 years later the soviet union surprised the world by building and testing it’s
own nuclear weapon way faster than anyone in the capitalist west assumed they could do it.
This was because of the help of spies that worked right in the American nuclear weapons
development program. True heroes of socialism. The threat of nuclear war now existed, but
initially people were not that scared of it. The US had assembled many nuclear weapons between 1945
and the soviet test in 1948, so for a few years at the start of the cold war America had a so called
bomb gap, which means there was a large difference between the nuclear capability of the countries.
Back then the way to get a nuclear bomb to the enemy was a plane,
there was nothing else that could carry those things that far. And this likewise
made people not respect nuclear weapons. You see bombers that carry nukes are large and slow.
So if you install plenty of radar stations like NORAD you can see the bombers coming hours ahead
of them arriving at their targets. And then you can use anti aircraft canons or small manoeuvrable
fighter planes to shoot down those bombers. So for a long time both sides invested huge
amounts of money into their bomber fleets and their fighter planes. Because bombers
can only be built so fast there was worry of a bomber gap in the soviet favour, meaning
the soviets could attack more targets increasing the likelihood some bombers would get through.
If you watch doctor Strangelove which is a movie from the 50s you see that the entire nuclear
attack is based on planes which was accurate to the times. This is also why there were public
fallout shelters, the idea was there would be many hours of warnings before a nuclear attack
so everyone could get to the bunker in time. This changed. During world war two germany had
a problem. And that was that their bombers kept being shot down by the royal air force,
so they greenlit a program to create a way to deliver bombs without them being
able to be shot down. This ended in the V2. A missile that was able to fly from France to
London and flying so fast and in such a parabola as to be unable to be shot down. After the war
both the US and USSR used the research of this time to build their own missiles. These missiles
would be so fast and fly so high that nothing could stop them once they were in the air.
So with time the vulnerable bombers were not the main force of nuclear war anymore,
they were slow and could be shot down. Missiles would now rule the cold war. Naturally there
were arguments about a missile gap at this point. And this is when a famous situation arose. MAD,
mutually assured destruction. Since missiles can not be shot down a country was powerless against
them, once they were in the air it was over. So both sides developed a policy of shooting back.
If enemy ICBMs were identified they would fire back with everything they have. And this was
made public. So both sides knew, launching a nuclear attack would end in the destruction of
both of them. Ironically this constant threat of nuclear war cooled down the cold war. Before
that many thought they could nuke the USSR and just shoot down their bombers, now with missiles
everyone knew that nuclear war, was not winnable. MAD is a great name for this position because it
is entirely mad. One missile fired by a rogue team or one of a thousand radar dishes malfunctioning,
a Norwegian sounding rocket, all of that could cause a nuclear response and eradicate society
as we know it. And that happened a lot, there are many stories of the US or USSR almost launching
nuclear weapons because they thought the others fired first. Nuclear submarines that can fire
from anywhere and hit targets in 5 minutes did not make the situation more stable.
So many people hated MAD and searched other solutions. This includes, Ronald Regan,
an actor turned president who I don’t like. I have many reasons, his pro war rhetoric and escalation
of the cold war only being one issue. He is also the one who changed the dominant American ideology
from conservative Keynesianism to neoliberalism, if you are a normal person and wondering what
the hell that means, I made a whole video on the different types of liberal capitalists.
In short neoliberalism is by far worse than what came before it,
and I am not just saying that because I am a communist. Anyways because Reagan did not
like MAD he started searching for ways around it. And the only way to do that is to somehow
disable the threat coming from soviet ICBMs. So he proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative,
nicknamed the star wars program. The goals of the plan were very vague and not thought out
well at all. The idea was to create a sort of protective shield around the united states.
You see an ICBM has 3 phases it goes though. First the boost phase where it gets up to speed, many
times the speed of sound, in the second phase it is in space where there is no air resistance so it
keeps going at the same speed and direction as before, and then it re-enters the atmosphere in
an almost vertical angle to get to their target. MAD was based on avoiding the first phase,
don’t do anything that causes them to be launched. Regan’s Star Wars program was intended
to stop the missiles while they are cruising through space towards the united states.
For this they wanted to use lasers, neutrons, conventional explosives or other nukes.
The idea was that if a nuke went off next to an ICBM that ICBM would be destroyed
and not reach it’s goal. The secondary goal of Reagan was to re-start the strategic arms race.
He knew that by the 80s the soviet union was not doing well, they had trouble financing things
and were losing many soldiers in Afghanistan. Regan thought, and said that re-starting the arms
race would bankrupt the soviet union and win the cold war. To keep a long story short regan spent
50 billion dollars on testing his laser defense systems but ultimately it was concluded that
every single idea regan had for missile defense was either impossible or 50 years in the future.
The programme was put on ice once Clinton became president.
So yes they failed to provide a nuke shield for the united states but did they
at least bankrupt the USSR? We know the USSR collapsed soon after regans presidency ended.
I think it’s time to look at what the USSR was doing during the story I told about the US.
The USSR was busy stagnating. The GDP did not grow and more importantly people’s lives were no longer
improving. Why was this? There are many factors but I think the most significant one lies with
the soviet leadership. You see by the 70s the party became very content with the situation.
They did no longer dream of a socialist world republic that leads the world in living standards,
instead they kept going, business as usual, everything as it was. Which was a good deal
for the party leadership because they already had better lives than the average person.
In short the soviet leadership had become content and decadent leading to general
economic trouble for the state. So eventually when Brezhnev and his two successors died
the party was willing to try their luck with a new young man with radical ideas, Gorbachev.
All of the things that happened under Gorbachev already have a video on their
own so I will not go into every detail here. But basically he started introducing
market features into the economy. He allowed companies to trade and sell things for profit
to companies and individuals after they fulfilled their quotas.
He also cut spending of the state by basically stopping aid. You see in the USSR if a company
employed 100 people and made no profit the state would step in and subsidize that company,
the loigic was that it is better to keep an non-efficient business running than to
allow 100 people to be unemployed. The USSR did not demand that every business is profitable,
that is a capitalist idea. In the USSR having 0% unemployment was the main goal, not profit.
Until Gorbachev came and ended that programme. Immediately spiking unemployment and ironically
increasing state spending because now those people were on unemployment benefits. Basically
Gorbachev tried to reform the USSR out of stagnation and mostly made things worse,
there are many more examples but we are moving on for the sake of time.
You can see that the USSR was in trouble, so Reagan’s plan to bankrupt the USSR made some
sense, but I ask yet again, did it work? Well if the star wars program was actually responsible
for the USSR to bankrupt itself then we should see that in military spending, since
it was supposedly re-starting the arms race. And if we look at soviet military spending as
% of GDP we see something very interesting. The USSR did actually spend more on it’s military
in this period when compared to the USA, but curiously that high spending started BEFORE
Reagan and his star wars project. Why was that? Well the USSR was at war. The soviet Afghan war,
basically Afghanistan had a socialist revolution and immediately fell into a civil war so the
socialist faction asked the USSR to support them, the then Leader was Brezhnev and he decided that
a land invasion of Afghanistan was a great idea so he sent in 600 thousand soldiers and enough tanks
to pull off Tiananmen square 200 times over. The war was an awful idea, Afghanistan has
many mountains with caves, and that is where the mujahideen were hiding
and preparing ambushes from. And when the soviets came with their tanks they
shot them with American weapons. Yes, this was the cold war, the US sponsored the enemy of the USSR.
Interestingly if you watch the movie Rambo 3 which takes place in Afghanistan with
the Russians as the bad guys you will see this credit at the end. “This movie is dedicated to
the brave mujahedeen fighters of Afghanistan.” Which is funny, because of course eventually
the USSR left Afghanistan and the US invaded and now the mujahedeen are the bad guys so
they changed the credits in the re-releases. Fun fact: Every country that attempted to conquer
Afghanistan in a land invasion failed, from alexander the great to the US military, nobody
could do it, it’s like invading Russia in winter. In the end the soviet Afghan war would kill about
1 million people combined and not achieve anything besides costing the USSR a lot of money. But this
would be later, we are still in the mid-80s. In the middle of Gorbachev reforming everything
about the soviet economy and slowly destroying it top down there was an event. In 1986 the residents
of the Atomgrad named Pripyat were awoken by a huge explosion. It was the Vladimir Illyich Lenin
nuclear power plant, commonly known as Chernobyl. This was a huge disaster for everyone.
Because of the problems with bureaucracy we talked about before the reaction of the state was slow,
millions were exposed to heightened radiation levels, huge paraded for may day took place,
even in Kiev which was exposed to way higher than normal radiation.
What followed was a huge effort to take care of this thing. The reactor core was not only open and
emitting enough radiation to 100% kill someone within under a second of exposure, it was also
on fire and spewing radioactive dust into the atmosphere, contaminating huge swaths of land.
The whole thing was a humanitarian and PR disaster for the USSR.
And once the fire was out and they had built a containment building
they needed to clean up. The area was still dangerously radioactive so they had to
burry the top soil under itself, kill all animals, cut down all trees and way more.
To do this they employed 600 thousand so called liquidators, these were men
who were taken out of their normal jobs in which they took part in economic activity
to deal with this issue. This was tremendously expensive for the USSR and it had a significantly
greater impact on the collapse of the USSR than the star wars programme could have ever caused.
In total the Chernobyl clean up made up over 10% of the soviet GDP, the military spending
did not even increase by one percent because of Reagan’s wannabee arms race. If anything
bankrupted the USSR it was Chernobyl. Star wars did not bankrupt the USSR and Regan
played no part in the collaspse of the USSR, he did not end the cold war and deserves no credit,
if anyone deserves credit for collapsing the USSR it is Gorbachev and the party leadership.
Actually, the collapse of the USSR was never a financial issue at all, it was a social issue.
So as I mentioned the reforms Gorbachev brought spiked unemployment which was not
great for the people, then inflation took hold and suddenly people couldn’t buy food anymore.
The images of this period are still shown to everyone to show how communism no food, but really
the food issues in the 80s only came about after Gorbachev had tried to introduce market features.
But it is true, looking at empty shelves like this proves the failure of communism.
Wait why is that image full HD? They did not have that in the 80s. OHHH it’s an image of an Austrian
store from literally a week ago. I guess using that logic capitalism just failed or something.
Or maybe economics is more complicated than showing single images from select places.
But yes the soviet people were miserable. And then Gorbachev introduced glasnost and perestroika
which basically allowed the media to do whatever and it made all actions of the party
public knowledge, they even opened the state archives which were classified until then.
This openness allowed the media to be sensationalist so they were, talking about
how horrible the party was and more importantly, talking about how the different member states of
the USSR should split up into many nations and ending the union of states that had achieved so
much. Eventually the member states declared themselves independent form the USSR and it
ceased to exist by December if 1991. The successor states all established
capitalism and that caused life expectancy to drop so much that I heard some people compare it to
genocide. I think that is a bit sensationalist but you do you. If you want to hear the entire
story of the collapse of the USSR I have a video on it, this one was very oversimplified
because I decided to dedicate 5 minutes to talking about the nuclear arms race and how ICBMs work.
So yea in conclusion the USSR failed because of a corrupt decadent leadership, incompetent reforms
by Gorbachev, the soviet Afghan war, Chernobyl and nationalism gripping the member states. Frankly
the USA had nothing to do with it, and Reagan and his Star wars programme made no difference
to the process that ended the soviet union. So from now on if you hear someone say regan
ended the cold war send them this video. At this point I would wrap up the video and say thanks for
watching but I left a note at this section 3 days ago and it just says “Socialism will be back”,
I have no idea what I meant by this, maybe I wanted to write a paragraph about how the collapse
of the USSR doesn’t mean socialism is over? But that seems so obvious, I genuinely don’t
know what past me meant by that when she wrote it. But anyways thank you all for watching, make
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