Yeah, US conservatives may like to think Star Wars and Reagan caused the USSR to push its military expenditure to the point that it crashed the economy, but the fact of the matter is that the USSR decreased military expenditure. It did not increase it. The only reaction to Star Wars was the creation of the Topol-M missile, which is hardened against all kinds of attack (first one went online in 1998). Russia is not scared of NMD per se; it is scared of the destabilizing effects it may have, esp. in Asia.
The harvard hacks didn't cause the collapse, but they spent a lot of time apologizing for it.
Chris Doss
The Russia Journal
------------------
At 10:14 PM 6/13/2002 -0400, pms wrote:
>Who always blame the communists. Funny you should mention the fall of the
>FSU. I keep noticing the US doing things just like the things that led to
>the fall of the SU.
I do not think it was the US that did the FSU in. It was mainly their internal problems and miscalculations. They needed reforms and they were experimenting with them since late 1950s (if we discount NEP in the 1920s). 1990 was just another step on that road. What they underestimated was what would happen once they open the Pandora box of abandoning central planning. Assuming that it was all the work of a few Harvard charlatans belongs to the genre of Rambo-style fantasies.