But were it not for a change in U.S. grand strategy that altered the terms of the conflict and stood the Cold War on its head, the frightening stalemate of H-bomb “overkill” mutual assured destruction between NATO and the Warsaw Pact could have continued to this day, with no end yet in sight. The Berlin Wall might still be standing right now -- or, civilization as we know it might be lying in radioactive ruins.

It’s been said that all wars are fought, ultimately, for economic reasons. Competition for wealth and power, for ownership of territory (including ideological-religious “ownership”), or for control of natural resources and domination of markets, often triggers the outbreak of actual fighting -- whether with spears or cavalry charges or precision-guided cruise missiles. The key to the end of the Cold War was to escalate the economic aspect of the contest, by using the dynamic waltz between friendly and enemy weapons technology and tactics not to destroy materiel or people, but to drive to ruin the opposition’s treasury. Armaments systems and their crews, and scientists and engineers, became tools and enablers of a financial -- not military -- brinkmanship, a test of will and stamina which overwhelmed the USSR. In the global wrestling match between capitalism and communism, capitalism triumphed.

But economic warfare doesn’t happen in a vacuum, in the abstract. To fight at all, wrestlers need to grapple at specific times and places; they have to test one another’s strengths and weaknesses, both physical and mental, in practical ways. They must apply and break holds that goad each other and challenge endurance, according to styles and rules, until one succumbs.

Reflecting on all this caused me to make some connections and ask a thought-provoking question: Did the very success of the Kremlin’s spying against the United States help speed up the Soviet Union’s doom? I think it did. Here’s why:

One aspect of the Cold War in which most Western analysts concede the USSR definitely outperformed us was human-intelligence espionage (HumInt). The reasons usually given for this are two-fold, based on asymmetries between Washington’s and Moscow’s abilities and national cultures. First, the U.S. had unquestionably superior electronic means of intelligence gathering, so the USSR was forced to rely more on flesh-and-blood secret agents. Second, the U.S. was and is a free and open society, allowing easy travel and social mingling through which local turncoats could be recruited, whereas the USSR was a closed system in which paranoid KGB operatives tailed and harried every suspicious-looking foreign visitor, attaché, and diplomat.

Among Soviet espionage successes in the 1970s and 1980s, two stand out as being of particular importance in their impact on the Kremlin’s evolving behavior in one area widely regarded as crucial to -- if not epitomizing -- the entire Cold War face-off: submarine warfare.

The first case was former National Security Agency cryptologist Ronald W. Pelton’s betrayal of the U.S. Navy’s ongoing covert wiretapping operations against a key underwater telephone cable in the Sea of Okhotsk (off the northwest Pacific Ocean). This cable ran between major Soviet navy bases. It sat at fairly shallow depth well inside what the USSR insisted was its sovereign territory. Unknown to the Soviets, for several years American submariners and divers had been sneaking into the Sea of Okhotsk, planting high-capacity recording devices on this cable, and then later sneaking back to retrieve them -- and attach new, even better recorders. The insights on Soviet thinking obtained this way were very valuable, and the compromising and loss of this eavesdropping facility was a definite setback. (A similar wiretapping operation also went on against the Soviet Northern Fleet, near Murmansk and Polyarnyy on the other side of the world, but fortunately Pelton didn’t know about this, so it continued.)

The second case was the Walker spy ring. It was through the Walker espionage effort, which went on non-stop for many years, that the Soviet Navy a) realized how terribly noisy their own submarines were, b) understood how important it was for submarines to be very quiet, and c) stole top-secret American methods for making our own fast-attack SSNs, and SSBNs, be so quiet in comparison to theirs.

This information was important to the outcome of the Cold War because it shocked the Soviet Union into a series of reactions and counter-actions which were in the end prohibitively expensive. The main effects of this shock factor, which helped change the whole tone of the U.S./USSR struggle and turned the economic tide in our favor, ran something like this:

1. The Kremlin was forced to realize that NATO submarines were penetrating what it considered its most secure home waters with virtual impunity, coming and going at will, completely unsuspected and undetected.

2. The Kremlin was forced to admit to itself that its current generation of submarines, of whatever type and purpose, were hopelessly outclassed by Western designs. The USSR thus went on a crash program to catch up in the quality of its own undersea vessels. It also rethought, and changed, its operational doctrine for where its submarines would be deployed, and what they would be used for.

3. Among the new Soviet submarine classes to enter service, as a result of their peek into classified American data, was the Akula class of SSNs, sometimes referred to bitterly by U.S. submariners as the “Walker class.” Akulas were much harder to detect than their clunkier predecessors. But to design, retool, and construct a totally new class of sub is vastly more expensive that to continue serial production of an older, less capable class that already exists. The Akula was a military breakthrough for our enemy, but foretold an economic disaster, too.

4. Realizing the vulnerability of their boomers to NATO fast-attacks, the Soviets did two things. They started construction of better combat-survivable SSBNs, the most famous of which is the Typhoon class -- the largest submarines ever built, bigger than World War II cruisers. The other thing they began to do was hold their best SSBNs back in heavily defended “bastions” in their northernmost home waters, near and under the Arctic ice cap, where attack by American SSNs would be at its most difficult. But to assure the effectiveness of their Armageddon-threat boomers under this new bastion doctrine, they needed to continually invest in ever-longer-range and increasingly accurate submarine launched ballistic missiles and H-bomb warhead payloads -- to be able to hit pin-point hardened targets in the United States without coming near our shores. To maximize the security of these high-priced boomers with very-high-priced missiles aboard, they chose to assign their best SSNs, such as the Akulas, to escort and protect the boomers hiding within the bastions. They also developed surface ships whose primary mission was anti-submarine barrier and picket patrol, to further protect their SSBN sanctuaries -- the Sovremennyy and Udaloy destroyer classes among them. This concentration on defense of an inherently inflexible thermonuclear deterrent force, in constricted waters, seriously reduced the options for their fast-attack submarine fleet (and for their aspiring blue-water navy in general) to influence events anywhere else -- putting more and more strain on their building program. The self-inflicted economic wounds began to mount.

5. To continue to threaten the U.S. with shorter-range H-bomb-tipped ballistic missiles, so giving Washington less warning time in case of pre-emptive or first-strike surprise attack, older, noisier, and less mechanically reliable SSBNs were sent out across the Atlantic toward the North American coast. It was one of these second-string players, the Yankee-class K-219, that exploded, burned, and sank as a result of a missile-fuel accident a thousand miles off Cape Hatteras in 1986. (The Los Angeles-class fast attack sub USS Augusta was in trail of K-219 the whole time.) Fortunately, most of K-219’s crew was rescued, her twin nuclear reactors were shut down into safe condition, and in 18,000 feet of water an ecological disaster was averted. When Soviet robotic submersibles later visited the wreck, they found that intact missiles and warheads had already been removed from some of the undamaged missile tubes by someone else -- the Americans. Chalk this one up as an espionage coup for us, and as another goo d example of how the bastion doctrine was backfiring.

The bastion doctrine created other extremely costly problems for the Soviet Navy, in part because once the bastion strategy was recognized as such by U.S. spy submarines, the Naval War College (and others) developed and publicized an aggressive counter-strategy. This became known as the Maritime Strategy -- which instigated and validated a massive build-up in the size of the U.S. Navy. In time of war, and cooperating with other NATO forces, American supercarriers escorted in strength by cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and submarines, would penetrate the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea and directly attack Soviet naval and air bases. Other submarines (later-flight Los Angeles vessels, and the newer immensely capable hunter-killer Seawolf class) would simultaneously take on the bastions. These forces would also harry the vulnerable flank of any communist land offensive in Europe. Carefully staying below the nuclear threshold, as the White House used the Hot Line to let the Kremlin ask for peace terms, co nventional munitions would batter Soviet sea power assets into useless sunken hulks, smashed fuselages, burning ammo dumps, and obliterated command-and-control infrastructure. Marines might even storm ashore to form amphibious beachheads, behind Warsaw Pact lines.

The Maritime Strategy was known to be a high-risk warfighting strategy, but its mere existence on paper, and as practiced in naval exercises under watchful Soviet eyes while the size of our navy swelled, made it work -- with essentially no loss of life in combat.

The reason it worked was that the Soviet Navy had no choice but to build up more numerous and more effective assets in self defense. Things got so worrisome for the Kremlin, and so bad for the USSR’s perceived military situation, that for the first time the modern Soviet Northern Fleet sought to acquire large-deck aircraft carriers. Only a single one was ever even started, let alone finished, the non-nuclear-powered (and frequently renamed) Admiral Kuznetzov. This huge new monetary burden -- coming just as the Strategic Defense Initiative U.S. missile shield also began to enter the equation -- might have been the last straw. The workers’ paradise of Marxist-Leninist ideology, or the Evil Empire if you prefer (depending which side you were on) went bankrupt and collapsed.

And all because of spies who told Moscow how bad at one time their submarines were compared to ours, plus some major competition from Ronald Reagan’s six-hundred-ship navy and the many thousands of men and women who crewed it. If the Soviets had never had those spies, our armed forces might still be fighting America’s longest war, this past Veterans’ Day might have had a terribly different meaning, and the Berlin Wall and East German border might still mark the forward edge of the Iron Curtain. Ironic, isn’t it?

JoeBuff.Com / Joe Buff Inc. Joe Buff, President Dutchess County, New York E-Mail readermail@JoeBuff.Com