Interesting argument/discussion.
But some of the points are strange.
"Finally, technologically inferior armies may win battles or engagements, they hardly win wars."
They won the second world war. The Soviets were technologically inferior to the Germans. Yet they won. As Stalin himself said "quantity is its own quality". And they would have beaten the Axis whether or not the Allies landed in France or not. Might have taken a bit longer, but they could not lose teh war after Kurks. Ive never seen anyone even attempt to argue any differently.
As to whether the Allies could have gone on to beat the Soviets if they had turned on them..... (and Im not even going to bring up what "beating" them really is. A surrender? Allied control over the entire Soveit land mass?).
I doubt it. The Allied nuclear programme could not produce or have the means of delivering enough nuclear weapons within the four years it took the SOviets to catch up to ensure them being a war winning weapon against the soviets.
In the age of Hiroshima/Nagasaki style devices and the necessity to deliver them by slow large bomber planes.... I dont see how that would have stopped the soviets.
The two bombs over Japan killed a couple of hundred thousand people. The cost of those two bombs was about 500 million dollars per bomb in 1945 money. The entire projects cost 1/3 the cost of entire tank production for the war. By wars end the Hanford reactors were worn out and increased production would have required a rebuild.
Spending those sums of money to kill numbers of people that we know the soviets could absorb......its not viable.
Stalin knew everything about the Americ atomic bomb .... Robert Fuchs had told the Soviets and it still didnt seem to bother him.
That the Americans knew they probbaly couldnt beat the Soviets with conventional nuclear weapons underpinned the development of the neutron bomb which was solely designed to defeat huge slabs of Soviet armour which would have rolled over Europe and that was only thought of in 1958. Prior to that the Americans knew that normal nuclear weapons couldnt beat large scale tank armies which were the cornerstone of Soveit offensive might at the time.
WEstern allied forces were about 4.5 million men in Europe at the start of 1945. Soviet forces were 11.5 million men in 1945. They had 25000 operational tanks (Zaloga's "Red Army Handbook",).
Western allies had .... Shermans?
The allied navy was strong but that means nothing to Soviet Russia.
The argument that even if the Soviets pushed the allies out of europe, the US could win in the long run due to economic strength is tenuous at best as it assumes the Soviets had the same economic philosophy. It didnt.
With the soviets in control of europe, it had access to the largest slave population imaginable and as history shows, they were able to go from a green field site (the Urals) to mass production (Tankograd) in a matter of months simply because they didnt have the same scruples as the US when it came to worker rights/safety/pay.
While the arguments about who would have won if the allies attacked the Soviets in 1945 is pretty pointless, the assumption of an Allied/US victory over the Soviets based on either economy or technology is equally pointless.
And while the US had Patton and Montgomery....the Soviets had Zhukovs, Konievs and about fifty others. Who had blooded themselves on Mansteins and Rundstedts and had the promise of a bullet in the neck if they failed in their tasks.
The most Patton and Montgomery would have gotten if they had failed was an early retirement and a book deal.
I would imagine the bullet in the neck is the greater incentive.
p