The nuclear deterrent kept ‘em right where they were. Then, as Shevrednze (? whew...) said to Gorbachev, “the whole thing has gone rotten”, and a bunch of hardware got sold to China. That was really nice of the Russians, eh? ;’) It was good that a ground war never took place during the Cold War (two major threats or more toward West Berlin, during the Truman administration, and again during, hmm, the Missile Crisis), because judging from WWII, huge losses don’t phase the overall ground movements of the Red Army.
True. The Sov's weren't troubled by casualties.
We took the threat seriously. Since Ike NATO depended on the reserved right to first use of nukes to deter a Soviet ground attack and their superior numbers. But in post-Vietnam America, especially with Jimmuh in the White House, there was a lot of suspicion that the Sov's would not be met with a nuke response and we would have to slug out a conventional war. We were concerned the Sov's sized up the situation the same way and might just be tempted.
Thankfully, it never happened. They got bogged down in Afghanistan.
In hindsight it may look silly, now that we know how near collapse the Soviet economy was and how bad training and morale were in their army, but at the time our intel seemed to think they were formidable.
What were you saying about that comet? :-))