What if the USSR wins the Cold War?

[WWTVICTOR]

I am interested to know your opinion on the topic of the Cold War.

What if the USSR wins the Cold War?

Please share your views!

 

[bombshoo]

You know, giving the U.S. a couple of minor setbacks isn't really doing anything to fix the deep problems the USSR or Communism has by the 1970s. Heck, even making the West completely lose all sanity and nuke itself isn't enough to fix these by that point. Just because the West starts failing it doesn't necessarily follow that the USSR is going to do any better. I mean, I sort of fail to see how the death of a U.S. president and a failed space mission is enough to make every other country on the planet willingly surrender its sovereignty and join a fairly backward state within two decades. Regardless of how the West is doing the USSR is still going to have massive problems with efficiency and technology.

Also keeping Agnew alive as President is probably worse for the country than killing him.

 

[WWTVICTOR]

You are absolutely right, but that is just an proposed story to see the gaining influence of the USSR, I don't mean that the United States ad her allied states will lose tht Cold War suddenly after the disintegration of a manned spacecraft to moon and an assassination of Richard Nixon. I doubt that why does the uncompleted story catch your attention so much and the story is simply just for focusing 'What if the USSR won the Cold War'.

 

[NedimNapoleon]

Why is Macedonia a separate state, it belonged to the SFRY (Yugoslavia)

 

[Louis XXIV]

I don't really even know what "wins the Cold War" means. We can ex post say the US won because the Soviet Union collapsed, but no one really predicted that. And there's never been a reason to think the converse would be true. Even if it were, what would be the end? The Eastern Bloc readily joined NATO because of a reaction to Soviet military intervention in their countries. There's no reason to think Western countries would join the Warsaw Pact if US influence dropped. In fact, the success of Yugoslavia suggests they wouldn't do this even if they were Communist.

Also, once again, you can't paper over the internal problems in the Eastern Bloc starting, at a minimum, with Brezhnev. You can't change the problems with the Soviet bureaucracy that essentially turned it into a gerontocracy that was too slow to adapt. You can't change the resource problems inside the Soviet Union that led to long lines or the massive deficits in Warsaw Pact countries that had made them dependent on the west. All this would happen even if the Soviet Union "won" the Cold War.

 

[Ramius75]

IF USSR wins... it means communism actually works...

not so bad news after all...

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

Besides not explaining what a "win" would be in a Cold War, the whole timeline makes no sense. The space missions were just prestige ventures. They had no impact on the US prevailing in the Cold War. Nixon did not contribute to the US "winning" the Cold War, nor did any other president, for that matter. The USSR's own flaws helped it fail more than any American policy.

 

[Ajidica]

The space missions were just prestige ventures. They had no impact on the US prevailing in the Cold War.

I was under the impression that the space missions, combined with 'Star Wars' forced the Soviets into spending more then they could handle which resulted in declining domestic developments and a stagnating economy.

 

[Leoreth]

I don't see any causative relation between the events mentioned here at all ... how does the USSR making it to the moon persuade all Warsaw Pact states to join the USSR?

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I was under the impression that the space missions, combined with 'Star Wars' forced the Soviets into spending more then they could handle which resulted in declining domestic developments and a stagnating economy.

It caused the to SU waste money, one can say that. But for that to be of actually importance, one would have to assume that if the money wasted there would not have been wasted there, the SU would not have collapsed and accordingly the reasons for this collapse would have been successfully fought off. However, such a link seems to me to be all in all fantasy, created and designed as a propaganda tool demonstrating the greatness of the US in defeating enemies.
I mean think about it. What this basically says is: The SU collapsed because in the 80s it spend more money on rockets. Doesn't this strike you as rather simplistic? Not to say: Shallow and stupid?

 

[Renner]

I don't see any causative relation between the events mentioned here at all ... how does the USSR making it to the moon persuade all Warsaw Pact states to join the USSR?

Because the moon is obviously the perfect place for the Alan Parson's Project.

 

[innonimatu]

Because the moon is obviously the perfect place for the Alan Parson's Project.

Please, some things from the 1980s are best forgotten!

 

[Skwink]

Then I am born and at the age of 1, I take my state and create the nation of Cascadia. Then we defeat the WCR while Sarah Palin runs around telling the commies they can't take our guns.

But as shown, it would collapse. Communism can't sustain a large group of people for long.

 

[sophie]

The rocket exploding wouldn't have mattered anyway since the moon landing was faked, man!

 

[Dachs]

Please, some things from the 1980s are best forgotten!

"Sirius" is one of the best songs ever. Entrance music for Jordan's Bulls and for the Super Bowl Champion 2009-10 New Orleans Saints.

 

[GoodGame]

Is it "legal" to write What If's in this sub-forum?


Anyways, Apollo 11 already happened, right?

And who replaces Nixon?

Seems there are a couple of points of departures. Why not just one? I.e. Nixon dies and no entente with China to split China from the USSR.

No Apollo 11 = Nixon dies in an air crash = communist revolutions in several European states....LOL WUT?

 

[Skwink]

Nixon was the glue man.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

I was under the impression that the space missions, combined with 'Star Wars' forced the Soviets into spending more then they could handle which resulted in declining domestic developments and a stagnating economy.

It was Star Wars that resulted in overspending, but by then, the Soviet economy was so over-stretched that it only hastened its demise.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Is it "legal" to write What If's in this sub-forum?

Counterfactuals themselves tend to be overly speculative and certainly not definitive. However, if they're backed up by rational arguments, they can often lead to informative discussions that help people conceptualize why things turned out the way they did. For example, I learned about the massive production disparity between the United States and Japan in World War II from one of those "what if Japan won WWII threads."

The problem is this thread has such loosely defined criteria and shaky grasp of the concepts that it's very difficult to have a meaningful, productive discussion.

 

[Hornblower]

You lost me when you put a base on the moon in 1983