[quote]TooHuman wrote:
Lol. My parents and grandparents lived it. Also no one fed this to me. The Russians were already spending like crazy. The additional spending on the military had a net negative effect on our deficit which offset the net benefits gained by accelerating the Soviet spending.
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No. Read:
‘After his election as president in 1980, Ronald Reagan changed the American strategy against the Soviets from a policy of containment to one of pursuing victory. The core of this strategy was economic warfare. Exploiting the inherent weakness of the Soviet economy(which was smaller than the economy of California alone), Reagan turned the dollar into a weapon, subjecting the Soviet economy to unrelenting pressure. He began by forging an alliance with Saudi Arabia and convincing the desert kingdom to increase its oil production, thereby lowering world oil prices. This move undercut the Soviets’ chief economic export - oil - and forced them to ramp up production to compete.
Reagan also pushed for a technological embargo on the Soviet Union, but he arranged for the Soviets to get hold of one particular type of technology. According to Thomas Reed, who was a member of Reagan’s National Security Council, the United States allowed the Soviets to steal technology specifically designed to malfunction. This was a clever maneuver, especially because the Soviets were planting Soviet intelligence officers into all their supposedly friendly delegations - for example, every Soviet cosmonaut who worked with the Apollo/Soyuz flight was a KGB officer. “Within a few months, the shipments began,” Reed recalled. “Improved” - that is to say, erratic - computer chips were designed to pass quality-acceptance tests before entry into the Soviet service. Only later would they sporadically fail, frazzling the nerves of harried users." Used to sabotage the Soviet oil and fuel system, these chips caused the largest natural gas explosion in world history - a blast along a trans-Siberian pipeline so large that measuring agencies thought a 3-kiloton nuclear device had been detonated.
The program was called “Farewell,” and as Reed pointed out, the "campaign was cold-eyed economic warfare, put in place to inflict a price on the Soviet Union for corrupting the lofty ideals of detente. While there were no physical casualties from the pipeline explosion, there was significant damage to the Soviet economy. Its ultimate bankruptcy, not a bloody battle or nuclear exchange, is what brought the Cold War to an end.’ - Secret Weapon Kevin Freeman
