The Cold War

There was a poster that once hung on the walls of the "head shops" of the sixties and seventies that went, "Suppose they had a war and nobody came". After the four years I spent in the army 1977-81 I came to believe that a more accurate quote would be, "Suppose they had a war, and everyone was too drunk to fight."
When I was in the army alcohol was a big problem. Every night somebody would be pie eyed drunk. Everyone drank a LOT, except for the guys shooting up heroin. Two of our best mechanics/track drivers were strung out on heroin. It did kind of weigh on our minds that a massive Russian army lay in wait about fifteen miles away with 45,000 tanks at its command. At that period of time we had 7,000 tanks, and it was debatable if their tanks were better or worse than theirs. Then I read in "Time" magazine this Russian defector who said that on any given night in the Russian barracks, out of a platoon of around thirty men, only one or two were not pie eyed drunk.
The reason this situation still scared me is that I believed that a dynamic Russian commander could come along, and relatively quickly whip the Russian Army into shape. We had a battalion commander who did a remarkable job of getting us ready for a huge field problem in about three weeks. We worked fourteen hour days getting ready, and when the time came we performed splendidly in a major field problem, in spite of the fact that a month earlier we had been an organization of malcontents, bummed out because we had to endure military discipline with a perpetual hangover.
In a situation this complex it is impossible to know what would have happened if we had remained on our original course.. There were a few wild cards in the deck. The prospect of chemical warfare was one of the most dangerous. A single droplet of VX nerve agent the size of the eye of Abraham Lincoln on an American penny was enough to kill anyone exposed to it. It made me mad one time that this woman was talking about how horrible it was that America had such a weapon - we had some nerve agent stashed away far from the front lines in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. The Russians had far more of the stuff, and it was deployed near the front lines. One third of their short and intermediate delivery capability was geared for the delivery of chemical weapons. Every combat vehicle the Russians had built since World War II had an overpressure system that kept the air pressure inside the tank higher than the air pressure outside the tank.
Then, of course, there were nuclear weapons.
I can't honestly say I know what would have happened if the U.S. and Russia would have fought a conventional war. One major problem was that none of the civilian populations in Western Europe had any protection against chemical warfare. Maybe a war would not have come if we had not begun the crash rebuilding of our military in 1980. We don't know, but if face with the same situation, I still would have voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 again.