Word: evening
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...attempted Soviet decapitating attack on American missiles, that danger has always been mired in a paradox. No matter how homicidal or even genocidal the enemy is thought to be, he is not supposed to be suicidal. Deterrence presupposes not only the capacity to retaliate but also sanity and the imperative of self-preservation on both sides. A madman bent on self- destruction is, almost by definition, impossible to deter. It has 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...
...Even now the nightmare of a Soviet nuclear attack continues to darken the waking hours of Western military and political leaders and the theoreticians who advise them. The Bush Administration remains committed to an expensive, redundant and provocative array of new strategic nuclear weapons -- the MX and 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...
...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 before it reaches the cities, a Soviet-led blitzkrieg through West Germany would be a masterpiece of military efficiency...
...drama of this past year was the implosion of the very idea of communism. Many card-carrying party intellectuals in Moscow, particularly of the younger generation, admit that perestroika too is a euphemism; it suggests fixing something that is broken, but it really means scrapping something that never worked, even as a blueprint for Soviet society, not to mention for world conquest...
...Even some of the most hardheaded Western diplomats stationed in Moscow as well as some of the most hard-line experts who have recently visited there are revising their views. They now say they doubt that Gorbachev's Kremlin or any imaginable successor's will undertake foreign adventures while the home front is in a state of such crisis, as it will be for a long, long time to come. A new consensus is emerging, that the Soviet threat is not what it used...