Quote:
Originally Posted by swiss
1st: They discovered fall-out before Chernobyl
2nd: Chernobyl was in 1986
3rd: The USSR collapsed in 1991
Conclusion: There were only 4 years left for the USSR. During that time they never had a realistic chance to win any war against the west.
We could also discuss how bad this Ukrainian disaster really was. The countermeasures in (W-)Europe were, maybe, a little over the top.
 |
I think I've been misunderstood. The potential war that Chenobyl might have helped avert would have been a non-nuclear attack on Poland by the USSR, when Poland rejected Communism (followed by most of the rest of Eastern Europe). I think I remember reading that, prior to Chenobyl, the USSR's response would have been military intervention in Eastern Europe if that happened, without using nukes, and supposedly not giving any justification for NATO to intervene. But post-Chenobyl, they (the USSR groupthink) realised that even without nuclear weapons, each side would attack the other's nuclear power stations, causing world-wide damage and giving NATO reason to respond too.