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Declassified Bunker of the USSR

englishrussia.com

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Re: Declassified Bunker of the USSR

#21

Post by kiba »

patrickk wrote: post #19
adriand wrote: post #12

I love this line: "Now a museum of cold war is organized in the bunker where one can try on respirators, protective gear, hold different guns, etc." You know, the usual sort of museum experience. As interesting as this is, it's also tragic if you think about the vast resources humankind has spent on building terrible weapons and defenses against those weapons. Imagine how much farther we would be ahead as a society i…

I agree with you in one sense, however the huge military expenditure allowed Silicon Valley to emerge. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=secret+histor... You could drive yourself mad playing a game of "what if we did things this way instead?"

Arguably, silicon valley could have arise in another place or we could have continued on a different technological path.

Re: Declassified Bunker of the USSR

#24

Post by arethuza »

DuncanIdaho wrote: post #14
adriand wrote: post #12

I love this line: "Now a museum of cold war is organized in the bunker where one can try on respirators, protective gear, hold different guns, etc." You know, the usual sort of museum experience. As interesting as this is, it's also tragic if you think about the vast resources humankind has spent on building terrible weapons and defenses against those weapons. Imagine how much farther we would be ahead as a society i…

Arguably the nuclear weapons have prevented continuation of WW2, where USSR and US would duke it out in the 50's and 60's. Just wanted to point out that world of geopolitics and strategy is way more nuanced than an average person believes.

"nuclear weapons have prevented continuation of WW2"

I would tend to agree with that. However, the levels of weaponry that were deployed were arguably far higher than was actually required to achieve effective mutual deterrence - by a huge factor. If you actually read the details of what would have happened if the Cuban Missile Crisis or Able Archer 83 had ended as shooting wars then prepare to have your blood run cold and we did get very close to indeed to shooting wars - particularly in the case of Cuba.

Somewhat ironically, given that I am British, a child of the 70s/80s and not a Conservative, one of the actual heroes of the Cold War was actually Reagan - not for his "Evil Empire" rhetoric but because he actually had the decency to believe that your average Soviet citizen was just as decent as your average America, Brit or German. He was, by all accounts, so shocked when he heared intelligence reports of how terrified the Soviet leadership were of a possible NATO first strike that he deciced to open up a dialogue with the Soviets. For most of the Cold War it was the Soviets who were afraid of NATO - perhaps justifiably so as I am not aware of any military leaders in the Warsaw Pact who actively tried to start a nuclear war, which is not something we can say about the West.

Re: Declassified Bunker of the USSR

#26

Post by smacktoward »

If you want to visit a similar facility in the US, there's one at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia:

http://www.greenbrier.com/play-here/the-bunker.aspx

The Greenbrier bunker was built in the late 1950s/early 1960s as the emergency relocation point for the U.S. Congress in the event of a nuclear war. Its existence was kept secret until 1992, when a Washington Post story revealed it:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/daily/july/25/bri...

There are other similar facilities from the same era now known to the public, like Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, Mount Weather in Virginia, and Raven Rock ("Site R") in Pennsylvania, but since those all still have some operational role they offer less access to the public than the Greenbrier bunker (which was decommissioned after the Post story) does.

Re: Declassified Bunker of the USSR

#27

Post by gwern »

patrickk wrote: post #19
adriand wrote: post #12

I love this line: "Now a museum of cold war is organized in the bunker where one can try on respirators, protective gear, hold different guns, etc." You know, the usual sort of museum experience. As interesting as this is, it's also tragic if you think about the vast resources humankind has spent on building terrible weapons and defenses against those weapons. Imagine how much farther we would be ahead as a society i…

I agree with you in one sense, however the huge military expenditure allowed Silicon Valley to emerge. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=secret+histor... You could drive yourself mad playing a game of "what if we did things this way instead?"

This seems like a classic broken window fallacy. I don't think you really appreciate how huge the huge is:

> The cost of the Cold War was staggering; for the US the bill was $19.65 trillion (1948-1991) in 2010 dollars, of which $8,731.5 billion (also in 2010 dollars) was expended directly for nuclear arms.[34], [35] Precise data for the dollar cost of the Cold War to the USSR are not available, however it is generally believed that the Soviet Union spent 12-13% of its GDP on military programs in direct support of the Cold War...If Soviet expenditures for the Cold War were indeed on a par with those of the US, then the approximate dollar value for whole endeavor by both sides would be in the range of $40 trillion 2010 US dollars. To put that into perspective, that is also, give or take, the approximate net worth of the United States of America, at current market value, e.g., $50-60 trillion US!

http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/06/21/the-armories-of-...

So, to justify spending the entire net worth of the present-day US - with the emergence of Silicon Valley already priced in - you point to Silicon Valley? This is a broken window to end all broken windows.

Re: Declassified Bunker of the USSR

#30

Post by js2 »

adriand wrote: post #12

I love this line: "Now a museum of cold war is organized in the bunker where one can try on respirators, protective gear, hold different guns, etc." You know, the usual sort of museum experience. As interesting as this is, it's also tragic if you think about the vast resources humankind has spent on building terrible weapons and defenses against those weapons. Imagine how much farther we would be ahead as a society i…

I would quote from Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex Speech, but it should really be read in its entirety:

http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/indust.html

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