“I believe it. The Soviets do not share our fear of nuclear war and mass murder.”
No, they do share our fears, otherwise the Cold War would have gone hot. Several times, both during and after the Cold War, the Russian military took careful measures to confirm with American officials before launching at us. There were several instances where their radar misinterpreted something for American ICBMs, each time they got on the horn with Washington to ask what it was. That is not the action of a State hungry for nuclear annihilation.
The Russians understand that the nuclear situation is like a Mexican stand-off, the first to launch are the first to die.
The Russians are rational. Of course the price of nuclear war was too high to pursue their expansionist doctrine in the Cold War, but their military doctrine is quite different than ours; their strategy is that if they do have to fight a nuclear war they plan on doing their best to win it. We seem to think we don’t have to try to win, but just not let the enemy win. Subtle but significant.
So they take the subject arguably more seriously than we do, which is more defeatist, as is shown by our total abandonment of civil defense in a nuclear war, as well as our dismantlement of a national surface to air missile force in the 1970s when we took down the Nike Hercules system in the US. The Russians continue to modernize theirs.
And the whole concept of nuclear winter is as questionable as the global warming “theory”, having much agenda packed behind it from the anti-nuclear groups in the 1980s who were for unilateral disarmament. The Soviets played along with that free propaganda to their advantage, but they were claimed not to be believers in the end. Some volcanos probably put out more smoke and ash, but the Nuclear Winter idea is nothing that can be proven until tried, not that I want that, but what matters is what our potential adversaries think on the subject.
They have only the fear of losing. They do not fear starting the war and winning.
That is not the action of a State hungry for nuclear annihilation.
The USSR is a country that has killed some 60 million people, and is still today developing their chemical and biological weapons to kill people in mass numbers, even after we have long disarmed such weapons. They tested many of these weapons out on their own people to check their effectiveness. They are also modernizing their nuclear weapons, and have their fingers all over world-wide Islamic and Communist terrorism, as well as close friendships with such groups and regimes that preach mass genocide of our people (Iran). You are simply naive.