QUOTE (Realkh @ Feb 7 2007, 20:06 )

I would consider any country that singled handedly could killoff humanity as dangerous.
In that case the UK, the US, India, Pakistan and China are all real dangeorus as well, are they?
But you're completely missing the point mate.
The cold war, was exactly what it's name implies, a war of propaganada in which no one was talking to each other, everyone was extremely secretive, propaganda was escalated from week to week, and threats were invented and assumed based on the current fears or opinons of
one's own people and government on a daily basis.
I'll give you a real example, when my wife studied in the US in 1982, on a few occasions she was asked by other students "Aren't you afriad living in a country [Sweden] so close to the Soviet Union, they could invade and kill you all at any time?"
That was the view of quite a few people (at least in Missouri) in the early 80s, that "Russia" was a global threat and was going to invade and destroy the world, and their osldiers were 9 foot tall and ate babies.
All this was fear that had fed on fear and propaganda since 1945.
The success or lack of it of Soviet troops in battles has absolutely nothing to do with the Soviet Union's geopolitical and military policies of the day.
If that was the case you would have to say that US troops are crap because US policy in Vietnam was crap and that's why they lost the war.
WRONG! It wasn't the US armed forces that lost that war it was US political military policies that lost that war.
You can't confuse and compare two very different aspects i.e.
1. The presence, use, success or failure of an armed forces in a foreign environment
and
2. The political military motives and policies of the government at home controlling those armed forces at a strategic political level.
I mentioned the skill or lack of it among Soviet troops as another reason why we didn't see a Soviet invasion as a threat. A naive view perhaps but still one that held especially after we saw how poorly they handled Afghanistan.