Scott, it's not my intention to bash your alternate history. Although I disagree with some of your assessments- I think that you're right on the money, in some cases- I don't think your ideas are outlandish or completely implausible. I just beg to differ on several key points.
I would like to point out that the PRC fought the U.S.-led U.N. force in Korea to a stalemate. Yes, the U.S. military was in a pretty sorry state in 1950 (my Dad is a veteran of the Korean War) but the Chinese army was, by comparison, even more poorly equipped. Both forces had recent combat experience, so I'm not sure how to rate that. The PRC, clearly, had a manpower advantage. Anyway, that was, by and large, a conventional war and one that the U.S. could not win outright. I imagine the results may have been different if the U.S. was also simultaneously fighting the Soviets in Europe.
I think it's a tad unreasonable to place so much stock in the U.S.' historical success in fighting a two-front war. Plain and simple, the U.S. won the two-front war (in WWII) because of its own barely tapped industrial capacity and the blood, sweat, and tears of the USSR. If the Soviets hadn't been kicking the crap out of the Germans on the Ostfront, the Western Allies could never have landed in Europe (Italy maybe, but they would have been bottled up there easily). Yes, the USSR probably could not have had the success it did if it weren't for Lend Lease or the disruption to Germany's war industries of the Western Allies' strategic bombing campaign, but without the massive casualties it inflicted in the east, the Germans would have been able to repel any attempt at liberating western Europe.
I like Kato's explanation for the survival and resurgence of the Soviet Union: the U.S.S.R. finds sizeable oil and natural gas deposits near the border with China in the late eighties. Maybe, because of detante, it began to sell some of this to western countries for hard currency, preventing the collapse of its command economy AND allowing it to modernize its military. At the same time, tension over the newly lucrative border regions with China began to rise. This explanation would both explain the Soviet Union's survival into the nineties and set the stage for the show down with the PRC central to the v1.0 canon.
Anyway, we both prefer our own backstories and that's fine. We can agree to disagree. I enjoy a good, honest, civil, intellectual debate, though.
I think that if we are going to continue this part of the debate, we should probably start a new thread (or revive an old, pertinent one).
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