This is a great question. Thank you for asking it! I love these excellent questions I get in the Q&A.
In order to start a nuclear war, you need to be a fanatic. You need to believe in your cause to the extent where you’d make huge sacrifices for it, possibly even die.
By the time nuclear weapons were invented, there were no such fanatics in the USSR. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, there were fewer believers in communism in the USSR than there are Trump supporters at the meeting of specialists in “gender-affirming medicine.” Not among the regular people and most certainly not among the leadership of the country would you be able to find anybody who believed in the victory of international proletariat.
It was World War II that killed communist idealism. Soviet soldiers saw Europe. They saw that even the devastated, bombed out Europe had a standard of living nobody in the USSR could imagine. People who were evacuated deep into the country discovered such depths of materialism and corruption that they got cured of any communist belief forever.
In the 1970s and 1980s, there were many, and I mean MANY, more sincere communist believers in the US than in the USSR. Soviet people were plunged into extreme materialism. Materialistic people don’t want a nuclear holocaust. They want TVs, washers, and furniture.
The West suffered back then from the exact same incapacity to comprehend people in the region as it does now. Westerners imagined hordes of commie fanatics ready to erase civilization in service of an idea. But the Soviet problem was the exact opposite of a powerful ideology. It was the incapacity to take any idea seriously that was the real issue. It was the extreme cynicism of people who have soured on the very concept of an idea and a belief. You can imagine what the arrival of capitalism did to such people. One can be very happy in capitalism as long as one has an organizing idea beyond wanting to acquire material objects. But if you don’t, it destroys you.
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