> There is a reason that the USSR lost the Cold War.
Russia didn't lose a damn thing. They were poor village-dwellers before the Cold War, and poor city-dwellers after the Cold War. If anyone lost, it was the US -- the military-industrial complex screwed our economy, corrupted our democracy, and spawned successive petro-fundamentalisms ("we'll use our big guns to take their oil") and market fundamentalisms ("we'll use our big guns to sell them bogus derivatives"), each more self-destructive than the next.
The only winning move of the Cold War, to paraphrase the great movie "Wargames", was not to play.
-- DRR