> I doubt the CIA were gaming Google in the 60s

Not Google but they were gaming ufo people. Thee was a good documentary about this called "Mirage Men"

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/14/men-in-black-ufo...

Mirage Men is great.

don't overestimate Soviet competence. Soviet system was completely submersed in the sea of utter incompetence, with occasional pockets of competence here and there

I don't know, I can't speak for their military leaders, but I've read Soviet physics papers and they had (funded and educated) some solid scientists.

Physics as a field doesn't have the same pressures and people aspiring to it as intelligence military analytics.

While I agree intel and physics are apples to oranges, the soviets had a pretty good intelligence arm and quite capable analytics. The soviets where very good at Human Intelligence:

http://sputniknews.com/military/20150928/1027670037/kgb-cia-...

Yeah, nothing tells true stories about KGB like the face of modern Russian propaganda machine.

The facts are easily verifiable read about Yuri Totrov. It is well documented by both sides.

Also in physics, you can't get away with politicking and reading the Party plenary speeches alone. That nuke better has to work and is easily verifiable: Beria, the head of Soviet secret police, personally compared the mushroom cloud photo of the U.S. test to the Soviet one, to ensure the bomb was copied correctly.

I wonder what he'd have concluded if it had looked different?!

That the discrepancies were the work of wreckers and saboteurs.

Probably followed by liquidation of the parties responsible.

It's more about "how can we waste their time" than it is about competence.

Don't underestimate either. Soviet/Russian rocket engines are still better than American.

>It's also beyond ridiculous to think that a superpower like the USSR couldn't completely evaluate any material that came their way.

Communist Russia was coming apart at the seams, and it took the US many years to realize it. There's a lot of complexity.

USSR. Russia has never been falling apart. Calling USSR Russia is HLN/Fox level discussion.

The terms were interchangeable back in the Cold War, everywhere outside academia; and there are interesting continuities between the Tsars and the Soviets. "Glasnost" and "perestroika" were first used in reference to Peter the Great's policies, and Great Russia (Russia proper) was known as Red Russia as far back as, I think, the 1400s.

Also: _The Structures of Everyday Life_ and _Simplicius Simplicissimus_ both touch on Russia, in ways that suggest that the country (post-Mongol-conquest) always did have a certain amount of proto-Sovietness to it -- alcohol sales as a state monopoly, for example, or arms always coming from royal treasuries.

It was used during the Cold War, because it was important to simplify, demonize the enemy. Russian Ivan with bottle of vodka, in a tank, driven by a brown bear with ushanka creates an a lot more simple image; you add Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Armenians, dozen of languages, without profound racial discrimination - and people will start having the Thoughts; counterproductive for the narrative of the Cold War.

Except right now?

》It's also beyond ridiculous to think that a superpower like the USSR couldn't completely evaluate any material that came their way.

The USSR was not much of a superpower in the technology side. They got ALL of their technology from western corporations in technology transfers and sales from 1917 to today. They constantly got "last years model" of weapons and tech. This is documented in a three volume scholarly work called "Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1917 - 1930, 1930-1945, 1945-1965". Also I find it funny this is released the same week the X-Files returns to Fox. Talk about the CIA / Entertainment nexus.

TLDR 10/10 would make this assessment again. USSR Tech:US/British Tech::Bizzaro:Superman. Like them or not, but it is actually quite hard to copy-paste Raytheon, General Dynamics, BAE Systems et al into a system that uses force as its key mechanism of control.