It doesn't seem right to state "He's pretty unclear on economics, yes." and then go on to make an unqualified statement of amazement that soviets were able to maintain some level of parity as long as they did.

Like it or not Russia defeated the bulwark of the German war machine, there is no question they suffered the brunt of the German military force that would have easily overwhelmed other allied nations, even possibly the US. Russia did so using that inefficient system to allocate resources.

They did not do this by simply chucking their soldiers at the Germans with the threat of being shot by a Peoples Party Officer if they tried to run back, and often repeated myth of why Russia was able to halt and then pursue the Germans back to Berlin.

I am fully aware of the quality of Russian military equipment and military during WW2. (they had the best mass-produced tank in the war, one of the best air support fighters, and they had much simplified logistics vs. the US) However, after Stalin purged most of the officers, and the damage of WW2 to the industrial base, and then the results of planned economy (shrinking the overall size of the economy), it's pretty amazing they had the resources to maintain near-parity with the US for ~10-20 years. They only really achieved this by devoting a much larger fraction of their industrial base to the military than was done in the west.

Also, any discussion of Russia during WW2 needs to include Simo Hayha ("White Death"), just because he's the most amazing sniper in the history of the world.

> It's amazing that the soviets were able to maintain some level of parity as long as they did (maybe to 1960-1965 in most military forces)

They actually never had arms parity - USA had over a 20:1 ratio of nukes in the 1960's. The problem is, the :1 is still enough to wreck all sorts of havoc. Also, massively more infantry.

Edit: Sorry, my numbers were wrong, misremebered. 1964: USA 2,416 USSR 375 [1]. So more like 8:1... later on the USSR closed the gap, but the USA had better strategic positions with bases in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and West Germany, and they cut off Cuba from the USSR after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_arms_race

Within Europe, they had a massively superior conventional force, to the point that the US almost certainly would have initiated the use of nuclear weapons (tactical or strategic), after being overrun. Part of this is that they really only had to put their forces on their own border, and could support them with lines of communication entirely on land and within their own territory. The US had to pay a lot more to sustain forces in Europe, and keeping the Atlantic open during a major war would have been difficult.

At some point, nuclear forces are pretty much a binary thing -- either you have enough to guarantee a second-strike countervalue capability, or you don't. China seems to believe it can do this mission with ~200 warheads, today.