ABSTRACT
It is unfashionable to talk about it in such terms today, given the Western triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but one of the most controversial issues during the Cold War was the difference between the Soviet armed forces as they really were and as they were portrayed by the US military bureaucracy and its allies abroad. As Andrew Cockburn argued in the early 1980s in his seminal study of the Soviet military machine, the difference could be accounted for “by a deliberate and continuous inflation of the threat by the American military” resulting “in the emergence of a ‘war economy’ in the United States, with wide sections of the community directly dependent on a high rate of defense spending, as well as on an ongoing atmosphere of fear, fear of the Soviets and of universal nuclear immolation”.1
