Thanks Pablo for those thoughts and the link—very interesting to read in his own words.
I completely agree that stopping a ‘sprint’ project is very hard—probably harder than not beginning one. The US didn’t slow down on ICBMs in 1960-2 either.
We can see some of the mechanisms by which this occurs around biological weapons programs. Nixon unilaterally ended the US one; Brezhnev increased the size of the secret Soviet one. So in the USSR there was a big political/military/industrial complex with a stake in the growth of the program and substantial lobbying power, and it shaped Soviet perceptions of ‘sunk costs’, precedent, doctrine, strategic need for a weapons technology, identities and norms; while in the US the oppossite occured.
Thanks Pablo for those thoughts and the link—very interesting to read in his own words.
I completely agree that stopping a ‘sprint’ project is very hard—probably harder than not beginning one. The US didn’t slow down on ICBMs in 1960-2 either.
We can see some of the mechanisms by which this occurs around biological weapons programs. Nixon unilaterally ended the US one; Brezhnev increased the size of the secret Soviet one. So in the USSR there was a big political/military/industrial complex with a stake in the growth of the program and substantial lobbying power, and it shaped Soviet perceptions of ‘sunk costs’, precedent, doctrine, strategic need for a weapons technology, identities and norms; while in the US the oppossite occured.