Re: Oldest SF not necessarily most dated?

> SF tends not to deal with sudden reversals or paradigm ****fts like this.
> =A0 First, they're unpredictable. =A0Second, writing stories about a
major=

> quantum jump doesn't serve the author's purpose: =A0During the Cold War,
> the point of writing stories about a future global thermonuclear war was
> to sound an antiwar theme. =A0What would have been the point of writing
a
> story in which the Soviet Union just collapses peacefully?

I remember one short story from early 80's (by Keith Laumer?) which
takes place some centuries or millenia from now. A star****p's captain
comments on the "first contact" situation the characters are in by
mentioning how old Soviet Union just collapsed from its economic
inefficiency. But that was just a throwaway line.

>=A0It would
> have been dismissed as unrealistic and pointless--during the Cold War,
> we couldn't just sit around and hope for the Soviet Union to collapse,
> any more than we could have just hoped for a meteorite to hit the
> Kremlin from outer space.

Yet "sit around and hope for the Soviet Union to collapse" was the
whole point of "containment" strategy. For 40 years NATO policy was to
maintain sufficient deterrent force to keep USSR from starting
expansionist wars, and wait for its unsustainable economy to... well..
cease sustaining. And it WORKED.