Quote from jprad:
Seriously, you need to do some DD on the Cold War. It began when WWII ended in '45 and lasted until the Soviet Union collapsed in 91.]
I never mentioned the Cold War, and I don't need to do
some DD on it. That's the pain about this MB. Somebody create a fiction about what someone else said, then goes on to hurl criticisms about it.
I mentioned the policy of MAD, only to demark the beginning of what I called the "madness". You were the one who is complaining that Reagan spent huge sums on defense. Well, there was a reason.
It was only with the advent of ballistic missile submarines, starting with the George Washington class in 1959, that a survivable nuclear force became possible and second strike capability credible. This was not fully understood until the 1960s when the strategy of mutually assured destruction was first fully described, largely by United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutually_assured_destruction
So, the beginning of MAD is defined in the early JFK years. That's about what I said.
According to history, the closest we ever came to a nuclear exchange was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That occurred during the fall of '62. The period of highest tension lasted two weeks in mid-October.
But, if you look at the chart, the market started correcting in April of that year. Did the market know about what was going on? Doubtful since Kennedy didn't make a public statement on it until a week before it ended in October.
OK, so the Bear Market of the MAD era started 1962.
The most recent bear market started about 6 months after Reed and Polosi took over Congress (August, 2006). Never discount the wisdom of markets.
In fact, if you look at the worst periods of the market you'll find that the corrections were caused by oil, financial mismanagement, computers and a host of other things, none of which involved the existence of nuclear weapons.
As I said, many people refuse to credit Reagan for ending the Cold War, perhaps yourself included. Some people even resort to denying that the MAD era was actually terrifying. My memory was that it was terrifying. I don't remember anything about computer problems, financial mismanagement during that long bear market (1965-1984?). I remember gas lines late in the era, It certainly wasn't terrifying.
The benchmark event in the ending of the MAD policy was Reagan's SDI initiative.
"This policy [winnable nuclear war] was further developed by the Reagan Administration with the announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (nicknamed "Star Wars"), the goal of which was to develop space-based technology to destroy Soviet missiles before they reached the U.S."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutually_assured_destruction
The Reagan detractors are almost as shrill as the GW Bush detractors. People are entitled to their opinions. But the fact is that, as of today, we have moved away from MAD. To test this, ask people you know how recently they have seen the movie I mentioned, "The Day After". Or better, ask anyone under 40 years of age if they have even heard of it.
