Are we talking about the same Posadists? The followers of the same Juan “Once we vanquish capitalism in glorious nuclear combat, the Space Brothers will deem us worthy to share their knowledge of perfected scientific socialism” Posadas?
Some historians aren’t sure there ever was a “missile gap,” at least the way the media described it sixty or seventy years ago. The USSR constantly broadcast propaganda about their achievements in missiles and rocketry, but in the 1950s, we weren’t having so much luck. Our rockets, designed by German scientists who went to the same schools as their German scientists, who may have been better at rocket science just on the basis of us being the ones who got to the moon first, blew up on the launch pad a LOT. These were the same guys who designed the V2, which got its payload somewhere within five miles of the intended target about 50% of the time, the other half of the time blowing up on the launch pad, blowing up moments after launch, disintegrating during reentry, overshooting the entire UK to land in the Atlantic Ocean, and so on. It may be that the Soviets didn’t trust their new toys.
As an aside, the Soviet philosophy in nuclear weapons design differed enormously from that of any Western nation. American nuclear weapons, for example, were designed to “fail safe,” to reduce the chance that an accident could result in an accidental nuclear detonation. Many features were designed into them to make them so that they could only detonate properly under certain very specific conditions, to reduce the likelihood of Plattsburg AFB taking the upper half of New York State with it if there was an “oops.” Ask any old Air Force “glowworm” with a 2W series MOS about that.
The Russians, on the other hand, deliberately designed theirs so that, for example, if the bomber carrying them were damaged and crashed, it’d probably detonate. Consider wonky ICBMs designed far too fast, with too few tests, blowing up on the launch pads, exactly like ours constantly did before around 1965. Consider the warheads detonating too. I wonder how many of the Soviet “above ground tests” in Siberia in the 1950s were accidents, a story concocted after the fact. They were never well publicized, but the Soviet military-industrial complex had little “oopses” all the time, right up until 1991. My favorite is “the “oops” at the illegal Soviet biological warfare lab, “Compound 19,
in Sverdlosk (now Ekaterinburg) in 1979. Given that the KGB came in and destroyed all records as the incident was in progress, you can probably add at least a couple of zeroes to the official body count. It wasn’t the only “oops” they had. A genocidal totalitarian police state that has no hesitation about killing all the witnesses and burning all the records can keep a lot of stuff quiet, at least until geiger counters start going off in neighboring countries.
No doubt, the USSR was ruled by malevolent psychopaths who desperately wanted to turn the entire planet into one vast gulag and saw the US as the principal obstacle to doing so. It is not for nothing that Leftists spent the entire Protracted Struggle working very hard, doing anything and everything they could, to facilitate a Soviet nuclear first strike against the US. They did this for decades. Their children are doing all the same things now, when they aren’t doxxing and harassing people on web pages for pony fans.
@IvanSatoru
I don’t know. Some of them might blame Reagan instead. Thirty-five years ago he pwn3d all the smug sanctimonious libs. Their smug sanctimonious SJW children still respond to images of his face or the sound of his voice with unreasoning rage. They’re just like Pavlov’s trained dogs. They weren’t even born when he left office.