Word: two
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...prepared to match and thwart? The short answer: the capability to win World War III. And what would World War III be like? Again, the short answer: it would be like the beginning of World War II. The minds and computers of Western defense experts have long concentrated on two dangers, each a variant of a devastating episode that occurred about a half-century ago. One is an armored attack on Western Europe, a replay of Hitler's dash to the English Channel. The other is a nuclear Pearl Harbor, a bolt-from-the-blue attack by Soviet intercontinental ballistic...
...order to believe the Soviet Union is capable of 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...
...Jean-Francois Revel, the distinguished French journalist and philosopher, wrote a widely read book, How Democracies Perish. It began: "Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes . . . It will have lasted a little over two centuries, to judge by the speed of growth of the forces bent on its destruction." Principal among those superior hostile forces was world communism...
...Institute for Strategic Studies solemnly concluded that the unilateral cuts that Gorbachev has already announced "will, once complete, virtually eliminate the surprise attack threat which has so long concerned NATO planners." In November the Pentagon said virtually the same thing. That certification is all the more meaningful coming from two organizations that have long believed such a threat existed not only on paper but in the real world...
...potential conflicts that are almost sure to attend the disintegration of communist rule in the East. But NATO is at best a stopgap until something more up-to-date and effective can be devised to take its place. The Western alliance was invented to maintain the standoff between two giant blocs. But the great ideological divide of the Iron Curtain is giving way to messier divisions among nation-states and nationalities within states. NATO is simply not constituted or equipped to deal with trouble between two highly uncomradely Warsaw Pact members, Hungary and Rumania, or between two feuding republics...