semi-OT Soviet May Day parades and some speculation on GDW

[StainlessSteelCynic]

The following article mentions how the Soviet Union apparently duped US intelligence during a particular May Day parade in the 1950s and made it appear as though they had many more Myasishchev M-4 "Bison" bombers than they actually possessed.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/mil...edium=referral

It's an interesting though small article without much in the way of supporting links but it raises a pertinent question in regard to T2k.

We know both sides practiced a level of deception so that the other side would not know exactly what they had and a lot of info was kept strictly secret from the public for quite some time.
When the writers were compiling info for the game, we know they had limited resources and basically had to use public access resources (such as asking military attaches, military publicity officers, consult various books and research papers and so on) to get the info on WarPac forces.

This is entirely in the realms of speculating on the writer's situation in the 1980s but I wonder how much the misinformation ploys influenced what military writers thought and what they wrote for public consumption? Could this be part of the reason why the GDW staffers wrote the Soviet forces as being more powerful than what they actually were? Beyond the usual propaganda to influence the military budget or hype that media corporations used to sell newspapers that is.

[WallShadow]

Along a similar line:
If the US and Soviet Union had gone to nukes in October 1962, we would have been calling Russia's ICBM bluff. The ACTUAL nukes on Cuban soil would have made any landings a serious mess.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

As a follow on from my original post, this article about Soviet bio-weapons research mentions a US disinformation programme to fool the Soviets regarding US bio-weapon research and production which apparently influenced the Soviets to continue advancing their own bio-weapon research.
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/...apons-program/

[raketenjagdpanzer]

Well it wasn't just the Soviets. I've mentioned the program before, but CBS ran a rather...shall we say...biased, five-night-long attack on the Reagan defense budget for '81 that basically had us at the Soviets' mercy, entitled The Defense of the United States of America (spoiler alert: they <3 Carter's "hollow force" doctrine); then there was the rather ridiculous speculative docu-drama First Strike which had the US crumbling under a decapitation strike, suffering 15m casualties, and surrendering to the USSR in a matter of days if not hours. Oddly enough the government appeared to participate willingly in that piece of trash.

So it wasn't just GDW...

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Originally Posted by raketenjagdpanzer

Well it wasn't just the Soviets. I've mentioned the program before, but CBS ran a rather...shall we say...biased, five-night-long attack on the Reagan defense budget for '81 that basically had us at the Soviets' mercy, entitled The Defense of the United States of America (spoiler alert: they <3 Carter's "hollow force" doctrine); then there was the rather ridiculous speculative docu-drama First Strike which had the US crumbling under a decapitation strike, suffering 15m casualties, and surrendering to the USSR in a matter of days if not hours. Oddly enough the government appeared to participate willingly in that piece of trash.

So it wasn't just GDW...

Ah very interesting! Being on the other side of the planet I never saw the broadcasts you mentioned (and considering I was in my late teens in the early 80s I really wasn't paying attention to that sort of thing anyway... girls, parties, alcohol, get a job or go to college, those things kind of dominated my world view at that time!)
It reminds me in a way of the 1952 movie Invasion USA (no, definitely not the Chuck Norris one!) that really played on the Red Menace & Red Scare fears of the time.