Sarah Paine: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Here’s what I don’t understand about the arms buildup during the Cold War. The Soviet Union is spending 2% of their GDP just on nuclear weapons alone at its peak. Arms control advocates will make this quip, which is that we’ve already got enough weapons to destroy the world many times over. Why do we need more? But that is sort of an interesting question. What was the point of spending so much of GDP on the marginal nuclear weapon or marginal weapon system? I don’t know the answer, but you read the plans about these things and you wonder what people are thinking. We were trying to develop tactical nukes. There was only a little trick with that. Whoever deployed it would be within the blast range of the tactical nuke. You’re going, “Who develops a weapon like that?” Apparently we did. Luckily we didn’t deploy it. I don’t know the answer of why we had such massive redundancy in these nuclear weapons, why the arsenals were so massive. I don’t know the story on how you maintain these things and how long they last. It doesn’t make much more sense to me than it does to you. Another question. Sino-Soviet split, this huge diplomatic coup. The Soviets had to put a million soldiers on the Siberian front against China. They had to spend 2% of GDP just stationing and garrisoning this area, which is obviously a lot. That’s often what many countries spend on defense as a whole, let alone just along one front. At the same time, 2% GDP, well if they just had one or two more years of extra economic growth or faster growth, that could make up for this huge diplomatic coup. Again this goes back to the point of, if some domestic policy just caused slightly higher economic growth rates, that would make up for the biggest diplomatic coup of the entire Cold War. It goes back to economy first, diplomacy second.…

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