Quote:
Originally Posted by StainlessSteelCynic
Oh yes indeed. That particular quote - "Much of the new policy of the Americans in publicising the latest Soviet weapons systems and military strengths is aimed at maintaining US levels of defence expenditure against an increasingly recalcitrant Congress." - strikes me in the same way as you, was it a genuine mistake due to ignorance, over-estimation brought about by fear/paranoia or deliberate hyperbole to get more money for the military budget?
|
A large part of it was the 1976 creation of Team B, the outside "experts" (all of hawkish inclination) who were convinced that the National Intelligence Estimate was underestimating the Soviet threat and that detente was an existential danger to the United States. As an example of the quality of their work, one of their arguments was that the Soviets were working on a submarine that was acoustically undetectable, and the fact that we had no evidence of it was evidence that the system worked.
Post-collapse documents showed that the CIA was actually overestimating the Soviet military (from 1978-85, the low end of their range of estimates for the number of Russian nuclear warheads exceeded the actual number every year, and from 1974-86 the rate of modernization was overestimated every year). The Team B estimates were even higher - they claimed there would be 500 Backfire bombers by 1984. Fewer than 250 were in service in 1984, and less than 500 were built by the time production ended in 1997. Team B also overestimated the bomber's range. They believed Soviet missiles were more accurate than they were, and that the USSR was about to deploy a mobile anti-ballistic missile system. They anticipated wide deployment of the SS-16 (which never entered service) and conversion of the SS-20 to ICBM status (which never happened). They also anticipated the near-term entry into service of Soviet charged particle beam weapons.
As bizarre as it sounds now, the Soviet capabilities in T2K are actually less than what Team B was presenting to the government as official estimates (although probably slightly more than what the CIA's Team A was presenting).