Do you dispute that they had or have the nukes to basically take out the US? Regardless of their military, they had the capacity to inflict massive nuclear damage.
No... no dispute there at all.
My point is that the Soviets never had a strong enough military to invade western Europe sucessfully (after 1948, anyway), much less the US mainland, and their only defense against us was the threat of a massive nuclear first-or-retaliatory strike. The Soviets attempted to dominate the world by supporting "wars of liberation" waged by local communistic movements and by the subversion of western institutions. Their progeny are still very active in western nations today.
The Soviet Union was an institutionalized lie: the local party apparatchiks lied to Moscow, the local collective farmers lied to Moscow, and Moscow lied to the masses. Coincidentally, their threats of nuclear doom were mostly lies and/or bluster as well. After their fall, we discovered that their military infrastructure was crumbling, and their supply system could NOT have sustained much of a deployment outside their European borders. Look at what happened to them in a pi$$ant country like Afghanistan. Even their strategic forces were in a pitiful state of disarray. It is estimated that only about 30% of their strategic forces could effectively respond if called to action. Granted that this would have been enough to devastate the US (and with our retaliation; the world); they knew this as well as we did.
My point is that the USSR was more a nightmare than a real threat; politicians on both sides of the Cold War used this threat to further their own agendas.