Dwarkesh Patel

Of course, oil wasn't the only reason the Soviet Union fell apart.

Another big reason was the Sino-Soviet split.

The border between China and Russia is enormous, and it took a massive percentage of the Soviet Union's GDP to defend it.

We found this helpful map of the 69 border conflict on Wikipedia, but it's dense and hard to read if it's just on screen for a few seconds.

So again, we just had Nano Banana clean it up.

And now it's much easier to see the border itself and also where some of the fighting took place.

You can try Nano Banana Pro now in the Gemini app.

Go to gemini.google.com to get started.

All right, back to Sarah.

Okay, here's what I don't understand about the arms buildup during the Cold War.

So the Soviet Union is spending, I think, 2% of their GDP just on nuclear weapons alone at its peak.

And arms control advocates will make this quip, which is that, look, we've already got enough weapons to destroy the world many times over.

Why do we need more?

But that is sort of an interesting question.

What was the point of spending so much of GDP on the marginal nuclear weapon or marginal weapon system?

Okay, another question.

So Sino-Soviet split, this huge diplomatic coup where the Soviets have to put a million soldiers on the Siberian front against China, and they have to spend 2% of GDP just stationing and garrisoning this area.

Yeah.

which is obviously a lot.

That's often what many countries spend on defense as a whole, let alone just along one front.