40 years ago.

[funked]

Revvin, I was kidding.  Go order yourself an extra-large sense of humor, tell them funked sent you.  

[Cabby]

Quote:

"the cold war was over years ago, no winners just a end to a worrying period in time"

What "Cold War" are you talking about???  The one i'am aware of had a very definite winner......

Cabby

[Dowding]

What was the end result cabby?

Massive amounts of resources poured into a bottomless pit of arms development to create more powerful weapons to point at each other and scare the crap out of both populations. A crippled, unstable country still holding enough nukes to vaporise large parts of the Earth. The segregation of a continent into one that is vastly wealthy and another which is tremendously poor.

Was it really worth it? It was a pyrric victory really, in a pointless war. Hardly something to be proud of and definitely not man's finest hour.

Like Toad says, we are fortunate we are still here to discuss it.

[Toad]

No, Dowding, I think you miss it.

It WAS clearly a waste but it had to be done. If you really think about it, there was no other way.

The debut of atomic weapons was a watershed event in the history of mankind. This fact made  

IMO, the Cold War was man's attempt to come to grips with the new reality ... that we truly could end human life on earth... with the turn of a few keys in remote silos.

We wasted resources, scared each other witless ... true. But maybe that had to happen for us ALL to see that this was a pointless, zero-sum, losing game.

I hope it is over and that the lesson has been absorbed by all.

I have my doubts, however. Some nations are still rushing to build more of these weapons.

What a shame if we have to do this all over again.

[Dinger]

Sorry, what hurts is that both sides had their share of humans and of amazinhunks.  In the end, the amazinhunks won out, and we had the cold war.
Sorry guys, you wanna believe the commies started it?  Uhhh... The commies rose up against the old regime.  Those of us with an economic interest in the old regime worked to combat that.
Now, fast forward to post-WW2, who's the bad guy?  In one corner, there's the Dictatorship of Stalin, the man who introduced the world to the industrial application of the airbrush.
On the other hand, there's the Henry Ford-(btw, big financial supporter of "nationalist movements" in places like Germany in the early thirties)inspired amurricans who wanna claim that the God-hating communists had been planning to take us over from day one.  Given the clear and present danger to the American Way of Life™, we had no choice but to challenge their pinko asses.
The answer, as our Russian colleagues are happy to point out, can probably be obtained by "reading between the lines".
For those of you scoring at home: morons and ideologues on both sides got us in to this fcin' mess.  And the USA is probly the only country left not to realize that morons and ideologues are essentially identical.

Dinger
(pissed off, stinking drunk, "sure, I'm going to hell; my wits have left me, but common sense hasn't")

[Cabby]

Quote:

"; my wits have left me, but common sense hasn't")"

You could have fooled me........

Yeh, kiddies, wars suck(even cold ones)so it's always a good idea to WIN 'em if you are gonna participate.  Some of the Old World "enlightened" nations can be SO beastly to the losers.

Another advantage of winning the Cold War is that the authors of some of the revisionist BS posted above have been relegated to the looney fringe of the old-and-in-the-way Leftover...er Left Wing.......

Cabby

[This message has been edited by cabby (edited 04-14-2001).]

[Dinger]

Ahh, Cabby,
<smooch>
We haven't won the cold war, we've only changed the battleground. Hell, we still want to spend ridiculous amounts of money on ridiculous projects like SDI II.
 Sure we outspent the rooskies, but don't even start to think about what we could have done with that money if both sides weren't so terribly afraid of the Other Guy.
  On the other hand, if we won the Cold War, then we would have brought Democratic Enlightenment and the Glory of Capitalism to the former Warsaw Pact countries.  The standard of living in those places will have skyrocketed, and the happy masses will once again breathe the fresh air of Freedom.
  As it stands, those lucky to have jobs work for GE Capital.
  Now, that's not entirely true.  I remember seeing a lot of well employed Russians, Bulgarians, Rumanians and Ukrainians last year when I was on Cyprus.  They were working in the sex-slave industry.
  Yee-haw! We kicked them Rooskies asses! Now all their women are belong to us!
  So in the end, our side is still looking to fight the cold war with somebody, and the other side has suffered 10 years of turmoil.  Our war has not been won, and human tragedy no matter for celebration, regardless of what the gun-toting bible-thumpin' redneck right wing might claim.
  Now, if I did believe that we had won, I certainly wouldn't think it prudent to celebrate the fact.  Perhaps this example will illuminate my prospective.  Last year I was in Lebanon, or more precisely between the Lebanon and the Translebanon -- you know, you drive along the road and see Zsu-23s emplacements, nice arrangements of SA arty, T-72s, the works.  Over some of these camps there's the flag of Lebanon; Over others, that of Syria; still others have the flag of the Hezbollah.
I stop at some place and buy a coke, paying with a US dollar bill.
The guy selling it to me does so while muttering some anti-american insult in arabic.  I smile and think "Scoreboard".

[This message has been edited by Dinger (edited 04-15-2001).]

[Sandman_SBM]

I'm still waiting for that "peace dividend".

So far... massive base closures, reduction in force, acquisition reform that so far has more failures than successes... and... oh hey... my taxes haven't went down yet...

[easymo]

 Before you fellas run out to the garage to start beating that sword into a plowshare.   You might remember that there are entire generation of Russians that were taught from birth to hate Americans. Not to mention a few hundred million Chinese that think we are all thugs and bully's.

  It ain't over, until its over.

[Sandman_SBM]

...and it won't EVER be over.

[Toad]

 

Originally posted by Sandman_SBM:
I'm still waiting for that "peace dividend". my taxes haven't went down yet...

Hey, been watching what's happening in Congress lately?  

[Toad]

of money on ridiculous projects like SDI II.

Wonder what you'd think about SDI defense after the Chinese lob the first nuke at LA in say 10 years or so.  

Or are you still a MAD doctrine kind of guy?
 

[Dinger]

Let's see.
China lobs a nuke at Los Angeles.
US deploys all kinds of gee-whiz technology:  Orbital X-ray lasers, 747-mountain lasters, brilliant pebbles, the works.
whooosh! we miss.
Hollywood beach turns into glass.
Eh. Who cares about LA anyway?

The only way SDI "Works" is by scaring the other guy into spending more money than he can afford on equally ridiculous countertechnologies.

[This message has been edited by Dinger (edited 04-15-2001).]

[Toad]

Dinger,

I'll bet there were two different crowds hanging out around the bicycle shop in Dayton too.

Most of them were probably telling Orville and Wilbur that it was the dumbest, most expensive waste of time they had ever heard of.

The few were probably saying that this would be really nice. How can I help?

Galileo probably had the same situation.

 

[Dinger]

Hehehe.  You're absolutely right Toad.  SDI is gonna cause a paradigm shift of Galilean proportions.  We will realize without a doubt that the universe actually revolves around a soft-xray laser just outside the Earth's atmosphere. Or like Wilbur and Orville, herald in a new era in transportation.  In a couple generations, we'll wonder how anyone ever got by without a big-ass antimissile laser on their jet transports.
Technology Transfer, is the "Trickle Down Theory" applied to science.  It's cheaper to do the research without wasting money.