Sarah Paine

That's Pentagonese for large military systems.

But anyway, it's a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarine.

They say that this is the item.

The way deterrence theory worked during the Cold War, and I believe now as well, is in order to deter the other side, you have to have a reliable second strike capability.

So if they thought of lobbing a nuke at you, they would be guaranteed that you would have the second strike to lob a nuke back.

Therefore, they're never going to lob the first nuke.

When Jimmy Carter became president, he was a graduate of Annapolis and also a submariner.

The United States began a much more aggressive deployment of its fleet, and that's continued even more so under Reagan, where we're taking our submarines and we're targeting Soviet submarines in their home water bastions.

So the Soviets are thinking that we're going to be able to destroy their strike and strike capability on our first strike, and they're having a heart attack.

So here you have Valery Boldin, a longtime aide to Gorbachev, saying, look...

the most powerful strength of the United States is the naval fleet, and we aren't going to get one, or our geography actually isn't set up to use one the way the United States can.

And then you have Marshal Yazov saying, for the Americans, the main means of atomic attack is the fleet.

So when you get Marshal Akhmeyev, who's visiting the United States in 1987, at the end of the Cold War, he will kill himself, but he's still around in 87, and he's telling his American hosts,

You know where our submarines are, but we don't know where yours are.

It's destabilizing you.

You, the United States Navy, are the problem.

Go Navy.

And here's this host, Admiral Trost, who's going, yeah, the inability of the Soviet Union to maintain a strong defensive capability led to the demise of the Soviet Union and to the removal of the Soviets as a major threat to us.

So, you can make a perfectly good argument to say the Soviet Union could not counter technologically or financially the U.S.

submarine threat to its retaliatory nuclear forces, so war termination was the only thing it could do.