I wonder if someone at DARPA or whatever thought of using remote controlled planes/primitive drones as a delivery device for explosives to stop tanks at the time.
@@Marylandbrony Darpa absolutely thought about that sort of thing. But it was wildly expensive at the time, and the technology available off the shelf for remote control was pre-digital and easy to jam. Microprocessors technically existed, but were wildly immature. Video cameras and transmitters were heavy, batteries were terrible and heavy, electric motors were less efficient than modern ones, etc. So there were a million little steps before drones with robust controls, video, range, and payload suddenly got "hobby" cheap. But yeah, the first attempts at TV guided bombs go back as far as WWII, when the tech was even worse and more expensive. By 1976, the US did have television guided Maverick missiles, which are basically the great grand parent of modern FPV drones. Flight time of those missiles was only a minute or two, so hardware of the day could power the TV electronics for that long.
Guess they've solved that problem, with that new hypersonic weapon. From what I surmise, they have made nuclear weapons obsolete. Same damage, without all that pesky radiation.
Whatever editor was putting bits of stock footage together probably didn't know the difference, even if they did have access to declassified footage of a T-72. Luckily for us, most of the Soviet equipment wasn't anywhere near as capable as claimed. And then, just 3 years or so after this broadcast, the Soviets decided to invade Afghanistan 😬
@@mrkeoghyup, they realized their coordination had broken down so much since Bagration. If they wanted the west their only chsnce was 1945 but the us had the A bomb so that wasnt going to happen
Putting the overestimation of the soviet threat to one side for a minute, the information density and lack of over-dramatisation in the presentation really shows how far modern reporting has fallen.
Maybe but considering 90% of the Warsaw pact switched sides after the fall of the wall including it's so called little sibling. I'd say it's more of a fight where one is wobbling back up after being knocked down.
@@RAAM855 Accurate description. Reminds me of when a retired athlete makes a comeback. They may come back strong but they’ll just never reach that initial glory they once had
One of the reasons so many people who lived through the decades before 1991 (including myself) always had the underlying fear of Russian attack was the fact that there was very little comminication or intel coming out of the USSR. There was no Internet and much of what was going on behind the Iron Curtain was usually a mystery. The USSR was much like a black hole for those of us living in the West. Our satellite technology and espionage could only go so far when trying to figure out what was happening. But then in the 1980's, the USSR decided to into Afghanistan '79-'89 and got stuck, and in 1986 the Chernobyl disaster in Ukhraine really started to show the West all the cracks in Warsaw Pact readiness. That and Gorbachev's opening up with Glasnost and Perestroika. One more thing...Desert Storm in January 1991 confirmed the Soviet weapons quality.
And then 20yrs in Afghanistan showed the US weapons quality. $1 Trillion spent per year to run around for 20yrs chasing cavemen wearing pajamas and sandals. I'm sure the Russians, Chinese and North Koreans are trembling.
I didnt notice him till around mid 90s when i noticed him on election night and noticed afterwards that he wouldnt go away, around that same time I got Phill Collins and Bob Hoskins confused into one enity as well as Badeel from Badeel and Skinner and that band the Lightening Seeds, cause they collaborated once but the lead singer kinda looked like Badeel anyway. With Phill Collins i remembrr he did the sountrack to some film which maybe Bob hoskins was in and thrn i just assumed he gave up one career and took up another, there was no internet then to clear up these misconceptions, so with that peter snow bloke i just assumed he was the election bloke over staying his welcome.
I've only seen him as an old man doing those 3D battles documentaries with his son. I didn't know his history with television. I think with age his voice got deeper. Same speaking pace but his voice did change in timbre and tone. Or maybe it's just the different microphones used in the last 40 years.
@emilmlodnicki3835 'time commander, please introduce your team of generals, ' 'ummm yes, im keith from Slouth and this Mark, Sue and Florance we work in HR management together..'
At 1:40 the map shows Finland and Sweden as NATO-members, which they became not until 2023 and 2024. So this footage from 1976 was almost 50 years ahead of its time. - In reality, Finland's no 1 priority in 1976 was to be a trusted neighbour of the mighty Soviet Union while Sweden's neutrality was more west-oriented.
@@Acheron666 true for Sweden, but Finland, not really, Finland had only been allowed to buy missile-capable fighter jets 14 years before this for the express purpose of stopping NATO spy planes from overflying Finnish Lapland on their way to USSR, the Soviets pretty much went to UNSC and demanded Finland be allowed to possess missiles, then turned to Finland and said they'd sell Finland some 30 MiG-21F-13Cs which were only just starting to enter service in Warsaw Pact at the time, then again in 1976 Finland might have well used the MiGs and J-35 Drakens to 'kindly' tell the Soviet bombers to go around Finnish airspace.
@@hullutsuhnathat's the funny part of the situation, the neutrality of both of these countries in the event of WW3 was purely theoretical. The USSR assumed that Sweden and Finland would join NATO in the event of war, so there was no point in taking risks and they should be treated as NATO countries from the beginning. Sweden assumed that in the event of war it would join NATO which would come to their aid, and NATO assumed that it would come to Sweden's aid so as not to create a threat to Norway if the Soviets occupied Sweden. Finland was a bit worse, no one planned to help it because there would be no way to even help it. Finland would not last even a day under the pressure of the Leningrad and Baltic military districts, so there was no point in even trying.
This was made in 1976 and it shows. During the 1970s there was a vast overestimation of Soviet capacity than their actual performance merited. However, that wasn't clear until we saw some of that Soviet material in operation years later. There is also a political component: This was during the post-Vietnam malaise and a general feeling of well malaise especially in the US.
This overestimation was largely based on Soviet performance in WW2. Keep in mind however, the Walker spy ring had yet to be exposed at the time of the production of this documentary, and by the mid to late 80s, the technical espionage provided by the Walkers in combination with Russian technical advances produced truly exceptional submarines, especially their latest boomers and Akulas. We had NO idea about any of this.
@@chrisstrawn4108 True enough. The compromised signal security could have been devasting but we now know (based on declass Soviet reports at the time) that the USSR cut corners that would have drastically hindered them in an actual war. For example the MiG-25 was considered to be a super-plane until we actually had a defector give one to us. Then we found it it was largely junk. This was not an isolated case.
Nah. The Soviet Union during the 70s was at its peak. People just look at the Chechen wars or Ukraine (wrongly I should say) as a representation of the quality of the Soviet army; especially during this period.
Preparing for a war can be seen to be a racket. Failing to prepare for a war is suicidal. It's an insurance policy. Back in the 70s it was a fully protected comprehensive policy, today it's 3rd party only.l
The Soviet Union owned the vast oil fields in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The Red Army, unlike the modern Russian Army, was also fully motorised and understood logistics.
not all 40k tanks would move at the same time, they would obviously fight in waves and most of tanks would be destroyed anyway. The low Quality of these tanks was also by design.Transport would be done by train, only the last km to destruction would be on own power.
We now know that the Russian military equipment is not as feared, many of these mentioned have been used in Ukraine and wiped out with very little explosives. Them days, it was not Russia, but the USSR, vastly greater size due to all the other countries it invaded, most of whom are no longer in the USSR, and many in fact are now in NATO. The fact is, nuclear weapons have been increasing rapidly in the 60's and 70's, reaching a peak in the 80's (when I felt we were closing to WWIII then the 70's). Today, we are less capable to responding to Russia, this is due to the ever ongoing lack of support for the armed forces (all parties are guilty of this), we, for too long, have relied upon NATO, with Trump soon to arrive, NATO as-is is at risk and likely to become a more European alliance. Today, I feel we're much closer to war than I have felt all my life (nearly 60), I just hope things improve and quickly before it's too late.
There was no way the western nations could afford to match Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional forces so they decided on a first use policy for tactical nuclear weapons, to hopefully deter Soviet aggression. It was a risky policy, to say the least. I'm amazed that we survived that period.
Well, apart from the US (who essentially bankrupted the USSR) but they didn't have sufficient numbers in Europe due to commitments elsewhere. It would have taken them around 4 weeks to deploy and reinforce. I would say "afford to match" since the NATO equipment was of better quality, with better training - but I get what you're saying - they did have an overwhelming advantage.
10 years ago - in 2014 - while going through some old books i had found a book from 1980 titled "Nuclear war between USA and USSR". I thought i would never need that book again and thought about giving it away. But finally i was keeping it because of sentimentality. Now - even it is from 1980 - it's interesting to read it again because the nuclear tactics are still the same.
If only we knew now what we knew then. The Soviets knew they were technologically inferior to the West in many areas which is why they went on a major military spending splurge to reach parity with us. It did incredible harm to their economy with almost every industrial sector tied in some form or another to its military-industrial complex. That, coupled with the inherent inefficiencies of the planned economy, albeit it did show remarkable performance when concentrated on certain projects i.e Sputnik, the race for the bomb; to the detriment of other sectors. When they mention the Soviet navy doubling in 9 years, I cannot help but see similar parallels to what the media is saying today about the expansion of the People's Liberation Army Navy. This is fascinating, to say the least. I was too young to experience the Cold War being born in 1986 but speaking to people of an age that can remember, it was a frightening time. Only by the 1980s did people come to believe the Soviets were probably vastly overestimated. I remember my dad saying the proof was in the pudding when Western weaponry vs Iraqi Soviet weaponry in the Gulf War was not even a contest. Although I have read this is misleading as the export models of Soviet weaponry were inferior to the one's the Soviets kept for themselves.
But so would we on Saddam if he'd used chemical weapons on British troops. We all have them. We all lie & say we don't. Porton Down doesn't make industrial dyes, y know.
Less than 10 years later the Russians struggled to take the tiny breakaway republic of Chechnya Ichkeria, so I doubt their chances invading Western Europe.
There is something rather strange about this video in that he seems to have a blue tinge around his head early on in the video which suggests that he was filmed in front of a blue screen and the background was then filled in with a computer image. The blue screen was the predecessor to "the green screen", the thing is that neither of these technologies were available in 1976...
Notice how the first thing the Brits say, 23 seconds into the video on "How Britain would Fight the Soviet Union", is "AMERICA BY NOW SHOULD BE SENDING REINFORCEMENT AIRCRAFT".... 🤭🤡 Why not just title the video "How Britain has no chance of fighting anyone without the US"?
Starmer has cut our defence budget down to the bone. Luckily Russia’s forces are also down from what they used to be in the 80’s, but he’s still left us vulnerable.
Am not a (UK) Reaganite but RR did well to recognise the Soviet Union for the horror that it was, and beat it by spending hard on arms, pushing the Soviet economy harder than it could bear in its efforts to compete.
Remember, this was prior to the introduction of the A-10 and the AH-64. As well as the Soviets getting bogged down for a decade in Afghanistan. A lot can change in a short period of time.
We the westerns has been bogged 20 years in Afganistan and later in 2022 we said Russia would have collpsed in 6 weeks of war against our weapon systems...we are in the december 2024...never understimate Russia.
"The Soviets have been spending unsustainable amounts of money expanding their forces. Assuming they keep doing that forever..." Well, that didn't really turn out to be possible for them. Frankly, some of the "if things continue like this..." projections from that era seem kind of obviously flawed in retrospect. But at the time, nobody would have believed you that the USSR would just poof itself within about 15 years. The Berlin Wall was done within 13 years.
Sticking to facts has never been a strong point for neither BBC not for ITN. There are better words for it, but I think "sloppy reporting" is more diplomatic.
Europe was so small then. Now so many Europeans and Americans will happily let the world look that way again. We simply have to start learning lessons for longer than the generation that participated is still alive.
Yeah I thought this Cold War bullshit finished in 1989 with fall of wall in Berlin, I remember watching it on tv even though in happened 35 years ago!!
As in WW2 the Soviet advantage was in numbers rather than technical advantage. Their soldiers and tanks were less capable but they could keep throwing them into battle until they won. Other Warsaw Pact countries were much better trained. Countering this was logistically challenging with US troops having to pass through flights & ports. In NATO war game exercises, it was inevitably the West which had to resort to the use of nuclear weapons first to hold back the Warsaw Pact advance. They were also by then forced to use them on home territory.
They are as tall as skyscrapers. Usually you see them from the side, though, and they're so long it hides that fact. But that shot is looking at them from the front (or back).
1976 😮 look how professional everyone was back then ,😎👍 this is what we need in 2024 we need to ban all social media and re-educate the youth of Gen Z to be professional and non violent to each other 👍
The Chieftain tank, one of my favourite NATO tanks of the 70s; I built several Airfix kits of it. Time to re-read Harold Coyle's "Team Yankee". I had no idea the Shackleton was still being used by the UK in 1976, thought they'd all been retired or sold to friendly foreign air forces.
Let's take a moment to appreciate how much has changed for the better since 1970ties. 38.000 was the number of strategic warheads deployed in 1975. Today than number stands at 3.700. Nowhere near enough for "Threads" type apocalypse.
@@ultimatesnacks6190 Frankly- I dont see that happening. If anything strategic warheads got more accurate, so you're looking at way less collateral damage. And nowhere near the amount of dust in the atmosphere . IT is a different story but I take global communication breakdown over few years with no sun any day.
We haven't changed much, we could always talk a good fight, and of course we could always use the assumption that everything we had was a lot better than what they had even if we didn't have much of it! Fear mongering is always the m.o of western governments to escalate the tax take, which they do frequently, but they usually spaff it away with little result, it was ever thus. Most wars are avoidable non more so than the present war, but poor men can die while rich men ( who live far from the bombs) get richer
The UK was not alone, so they should have warning prior. Both West Germany and The Netherlands would have provided some delay and confirmation about intentions.
1970s and 1980s Soviets were not to be fucked with. They had the bodies and the resources. In as little as two decades the oligarchs have left Russia's defense capacity barren. Also, the Ukraine SSR was the brains of the defense apparatus.
Given current events, it's laughable what we used to think about the USSR/Russia, but such is life I suppose. Also interesting that they show Sweden and Finland in NATO, but not Turkey.
It's incredibly sad to see how far the UK's military has fallen since the days of when this video was filmed. Their soldiers, sailors, and pilots are still top notch but there aren't nearly enough of them and the government has cut their funding and by extension their weapons & equipment down to the point where they wouldn't be able to sustain serious combat for more than a few weeks. Some of the other NATO allies are in a similar condition but most have started to address those issues. It doesn't seem like the UK has, not under the long list of recent governments and Prime Ministers.
26:08 Thats the situation i feel we have found ourselves in today 😓 Not that Russia themselves is outpacing our technology because there not even close. But thay missle technology on all sides in general has advanced so far that immediate use of Nuclear weapons will be absolutely necessary within miniutes, hours or days of a conventional war starting as the technology can easily be used to overwhelm any Nations defenses as anti Nuclear missle air defenses at least what we know as the civilian public are not nearly on an equal level as Nuclear missle offensive capabilities. But who knows maybe the US or UK or NATO has some super crazy anti Nuclear missle tech we aren't aware of yet. 🤷♂️
The fact that the Soviet Union pumped so much money from its state budget into the armed forces had its price. Health care was inadequate, the supply of consumer goods to the population was poor, and the housing sector was bad because it was standard for two families to share an apartment and each family had only one room for privacy and single people had to share an apartment with several people. In the countryside in the villages, nothing had changed since the 19th century, hardly any cars, the means of transportation was the horse. The houses were made of wood and had no water, gas or electricity. In addition, there was a great contrast in the agricultural production communities, because there were tractors and other diesel-powered agricultural vehicles. Hardly anything has changed in Russia today. People in the countryside still grow vegetables in their small gardens and Aztec tobacco, which they process into cigarettes. The cigarettes are only filled with 25 percent Aztec tobacco, the rest consists of a cardboard tube and a longer homemade filter. Aztec tobacco is extremely strong tobacco with a very high nicotine content, and someone who smokes a whole cigarette filled with Aztec tobacco would suffer nicotine poisoning. Aztec tobacco is no longer industrially processed into cigarettes in Russia, as there is no longer a market for it, since Western cigarette brands entered Russia.
If we knew their true capabilities we'd be a bit relaxed about it, it was just a massive bluff relying on massive meat attacks with extremely poor trained "soldiers".
A lot of their gear was rubbish - including their attack aircraft. The mig could match a western aircraft for speed.... for about 15 minutes until it burnt it's engine out but this wasn't known at the time. Only after a Russian pilot defected the west could see how badly these aircraft were manufactured.
@bfc3057 They were important, but not the all-encompassing factor that is publicised. The Red Army was in trouble even before the Stingers' introduction to the conflict.
I like how those air defence blokes calmly talking as if they are have a five o'clock tea at the Ritz. In reality, I think with Russian aircraft within 30 minutes, they would be screaming, hysterically laughing, rolling on the floor and jumping all over the place and forget all the commands and algorithms. Panic would prevail.
They had a mock up of Honest John at the Air Museum in Texas I want to. Made a video about it. To be fair, they had more tanks than airplanes on display, lol
In 1990 the Soviets had 45thousand nuclear warheads that's more than USA biggest stockpile of 31,255 nuclear warheads , Britain's peak 520 and France 540 scary stuff
In the 80's the Soviets made a simulated strike on a US carrier group using tu22m bombers, and they would have came out on top, a recent simulation proved that to be correct.
It's weird to see British praising Exocet knowing that 6 years later these missiles destroyed 2 British ships.
You'd hardly praise a weapon if it couldn't hurt you.
They luckily escaped with their Aircraft carrier which could have been heavily damaged by Exocet.
@@milangacik994 Luck?
At least they weren't lobbed at them by the Commies!
Just imagine how Kalashnicov felt.....
Thanks ITN, very reassuring indeed.
People lived in fear of this for DECADES back in the day.
The media really are slime. One of the things you notice here is the report is full of overhyping Russian capabilities just like nowadays.
@@MagicNash89 It felt less scary than now.
@@lucidmoment71 Were you alive at the time? It was a terrifying in those days.
I was alive then it’s worse now than it was back then
That auto-loading T-72 never dreamed of $400 FPV drones.
I wonder if someone at DARPA or whatever thought of using remote controlled planes/primitive drones as a delivery device for explosives to stop tanks at the time.
@@Marylandbrony Darpa absolutely thought about that sort of thing. But it was wildly expensive at the time, and the technology available off the shelf for remote control was pre-digital and easy to jam. Microprocessors technically existed, but were wildly immature. Video cameras and transmitters were heavy, batteries were terrible and heavy, electric motors were less efficient than modern ones, etc. So there were a million little steps before drones with robust controls, video, range, and payload suddenly got "hobby" cheap.
But yeah, the first attempts at TV guided bombs go back as far as WWII, when the tech was even worse and more expensive. By 1976, the US did have television guided Maverick missiles, which are basically the great grand parent of modern FPV drones. Flight time of those missiles was only a minute or two, so hardware of the day could power the TV electronics for that long.
Never dreamed they'd be turret tossing to the Moon either 🤭
PMSL 😂😂
Too right mate 😂
>$400 dollar fpv drones
They used to say that “the problem with defending W Germany is that all these towns are one kiloton apart”
Guess they've solved that problem, with that new hypersonic weapon.
From what I surmise, they have made nuclear weapons obsolete.
Same damage, without all that pesky radiation.
I've never heard that and I served in Germany.
Orbital kinetic penetrators could do far more damage without all that inconveniencing radiation...
@@Robert_Douglass That was a theory that was already debunked.
@@TheRealBillBob How so? First I've ever heard that it was. Or maybe that's what we're meant to think?
"new T-72" shows T-64
such was the nature of intel back in the day
It isn't Intelligence, it's Television Production. They're going to use whatever stock images they bother to dig up from whatever archive they have.
Whatever editor was putting bits of stock footage together probably didn't know the difference, even if they did have access to declassified footage of a T-72.
Luckily for us, most of the Soviet equipment wasn't anywhere near as capable as claimed. And then, just 3 years or so after this broadcast, the Soviets decided to invade Afghanistan 😬
@@mrkeoghyup, they realized their coordination had broken down so much since Bagration. If they wanted the west their only chsnce was 1945 but the us had the A bomb so that wasnt going to happen
Its a news report not an intel briefing
This isn't intelligence ... it's television production (ha!)
If Peter Snow's hair & outfit didn't stop the Soviet Union, nothing would.
Oh wow. It is too. 😂
Putting the overestimation of the soviet threat to one side for a minute, the information density and lack of over-dramatisation in the presentation really shows how far modern reporting has fallen.
No it doesn't
No it doesn't
@@michaelwilson6483 Yes it does
@@michaelwilson6483 Yes it does
@@michaelwilson6483 yes it does....
Next up, 'Threads - The Musical'
Count me in for that. ^
Threads was such a good and interesting film. Very disturbing
Singing:
"Dreaming of our beds
Threads,
Look at all those Freds,
Dead!"
I'm telling you it's a show stopper.
😂
Including memorable tracks such as 'oops love, you’ve gone and pissed yourself'
Nice to see Peter Snow has some sort of ballistic hairpiece on for protection.
He's looks great, like Saul Goodman crossed with Patrick Moore 😂
@ 🤣🤣
Cold war never ended. Just had a little break.
When cooler heads of state in the west did not upset the bear ...don't upset the bear...let's not go the way of Poland france and Germany
Yes I agree with you and have also said this myself having served during the Cold War in the RAF and later for 6 years in the Territorial Army.
@@markjoachenU do know the bear is already upset and that NATO could easily take on multiple copies of Russia right?
Maybe but considering 90% of the Warsaw pact switched sides after the fall of the wall including it's so called little sibling. I'd say it's more of a fight where one is wobbling back up after being knocked down.
@@RAAM855 Accurate description. Reminds me of when a retired athlete makes a comeback. They may come back strong but they’ll just never reach that initial glory they once had
One of the reasons so many people who lived through the decades before 1991 (including myself) always had the underlying fear of Russian attack was the fact that there was very little comminication or intel coming out of the USSR. There was no Internet and much of what was going on behind the Iron Curtain was usually a mystery. The USSR was much like a black hole for those of us living in the West. Our satellite technology and espionage could only go so far when trying to figure out what was happening. But then in the 1980's, the USSR decided to into Afghanistan '79-'89 and got stuck, and in 1986 the Chernobyl disaster in Ukhraine really started to show the West all the cracks in Warsaw Pact readiness. That and Gorbachev's opening up with Glasnost and Perestroika. One more thing...Desert Storm in January 1991 confirmed the Soviet weapons quality.
And then 20yrs in Afghanistan showed the US weapons quality. $1 Trillion spent per year to run around for 20yrs chasing cavemen wearing pajamas and sandals. I'm sure the Russians, Chinese and North Koreans are trembling.
Wow, Peter Snow's unforgettable and iconic voice is very consistent throughout the decades.
I didnt notice him till around mid 90s when i noticed him on election night and noticed afterwards that he wouldnt go away, around that same time I got Phill Collins and Bob Hoskins confused into one enity as well as Badeel from Badeel and Skinner and that band the Lightening Seeds, cause they collaborated once but the lead singer kinda looked like Badeel anyway. With Phill Collins i remembrr he did the sountrack to some film which maybe Bob hoskins was in and thrn i just assumed he gave up one career and took up another, there was no internet then to clear up these misconceptions, so with that peter snow bloke i just assumed he was the election bloke over staying his welcome.
I've only seen him as an old man doing those 3D battles documentaries with his son. I didn't know his history with television. I think with age his voice got deeper. Same speaking pace but his voice did change in timbre and tone. Or maybe it's just the different microphones used in the last 40 years.
@emilmlodnicki3835 'time commander, please introduce your team of generals, ' 'ummm yes, im keith from Slouth and this Mark, Sue and Florance we work in HR management together..'
Commie he would have been on the soviet side
So good. I hope he gets to
narrate 2025.
At 1:40 the map shows Finland and Sweden as NATO-members, which they became not until 2023 and 2024. So this footage from 1976 was almost 50 years ahead of its time. - In reality, Finland's no 1 priority in 1976 was to be a trusted neighbour of the mighty Soviet Union while Sweden's neutrality was more west-oriented.
The soviets would have attacked them anyway
Alternate history YO!
Finland and Sweden weren’t NATO members back then, true……But they did train with and were allied with NATO
@@Acheron666 true for Sweden, but Finland, not really, Finland had only been allowed to buy missile-capable fighter jets 14 years before this for the express purpose of stopping NATO spy planes from overflying Finnish Lapland on their way to USSR, the Soviets pretty much went to UNSC and demanded Finland be allowed to possess missiles, then turned to Finland and said they'd sell Finland some 30 MiG-21F-13Cs which were only just starting to enter service in Warsaw Pact at the time, then again in 1976 Finland might have well used the MiGs and J-35 Drakens to 'kindly' tell the Soviet bombers to go around Finnish airspace.
@@hullutsuhnathat's the funny part of the situation, the neutrality of both of these countries in the event of WW3 was purely theoretical. The USSR assumed that Sweden and Finland would join NATO in the event of war, so there was no point in taking risks and they should be treated as NATO countries from the beginning. Sweden assumed that in the event of war it would join NATO which would come to their aid, and NATO assumed that it would come to Sweden's aid so as not to create a threat to Norway if the Soviets occupied Sweden. Finland was a bit worse, no one planned to help it because there would be no way to even help it. Finland would not last even a day under the pressure of the Leningrad and Baltic military districts, so there was no point in even trying.
This was made in 1976 and it shows. During the 1970s there was a vast overestimation of Soviet capacity than their actual performance merited. However, that wasn't clear until we saw some of that Soviet material in operation years later. There is also a political component: This was during the post-Vietnam malaise and a general feeling of well malaise especially in the US.
This overestimation was largely based on Soviet performance in WW2. Keep in mind however, the Walker spy ring had yet to be exposed at the time of the production of this documentary, and by the mid to late 80s, the technical espionage provided by the Walkers in combination with Russian technical advances produced truly exceptional submarines, especially their latest boomers and Akulas. We had NO idea about any of this.
@@chrisstrawn4108 True enough. The compromised signal security could have been devasting but we now know (based on declass Soviet reports at the time) that the USSR cut corners that would have drastically hindered them in an actual war. For example the MiG-25 was considered to be a super-plane until we actually had a defector give one to us. Then we found it it was largely junk. This was not an isolated case.
Doom and gloom sells, baby.
Nah. The Soviet Union during the 70s was at its peak. People just look at the Chechen wars or Ukraine (wrongly I should say) as a representation of the quality of the Soviet army; especially during this period.
We didn't know that T-72s and MiG-23s were complete garbage, they hadn't shot at us yet.
"...and so this is why it is so crucial to give countless more billions to the arms industries".
War's a racket.
Preparing for a war can be seen to be a racket. Failing to prepare for a war is suicidal.
It's an insurance policy. Back in the 70s it was a fully protected comprehensive policy, today it's 3rd party only.l
I'm surprised you were allowed to report stuff like this in the 70s. Blimey those Exocets Look dangerous I hope they don't get into the wrong hands.
Like the Argentinians you mean
Britain does not have enough troops to fill Wembley stadium. They could probably fill Wimbledon.
Clear, concise and to the point.
And heavily exagerated…….
and a load of bulls***t
@@paulnunnink7338What led you to that conclusion?
@@alzeNLWhat led you to that conclusion?
The Soviets had 40,000 tanks poised to invade the West. How they planned to fuel all those tanks is another question!
Being they one of the best oil makers of the world we can assume they had how...
The Soviet Union owned the vast oil fields in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The Red Army, unlike the modern Russian Army, was also fully motorised and understood logistics.
Russia is a leading oil producer. Next question?
not all 40k tanks would move at the same time, they would obviously fight in waves and most of tanks would be destroyed anyway. The low Quality of these tanks was also by design.Transport would be done by train, only the last km to destruction would be on own power.
Weird to hear things like "the new T-72" considering how much they're used nowadays.
Didn’t think anyone actually used the pen holders on a parka’s sleeve. Enter Peter Snow…
American aviators kept 3 pens in the sleeve of their flight suits.
Hilarious
The Shackleton was pretty much obsolete in the mid-70s!
its doing its best.
WHEN THE WIND BLOWS
13:58 Lads in the Royal Navy saw this and were like "I'm glad the Frenchies and their Exocets are on our side 🙂"
We now know that the Russian military equipment is not as feared, many of these mentioned have been used in Ukraine and wiped out with very little explosives. Them days, it was not Russia, but the USSR, vastly greater size due to all the other countries it invaded, most of whom are no longer in the USSR, and many in fact are now in NATO.
The fact is, nuclear weapons have been increasing rapidly in the 60's and 70's, reaching a peak in the 80's (when I felt we were closing to WWIII then the 70's).
Today, we are less capable to responding to Russia, this is due to the ever ongoing lack of support for the armed forces (all parties are guilty of this), we, for too long, have relied upon NATO, with Trump soon to arrive, NATO as-is is at risk and likely to become a more European alliance.
Today, I feel we're much closer to war than I have felt all my life (nearly 60), I just hope things improve and quickly before it's too late.
There was no way the western nations could afford to match Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional forces so they decided on a first use policy for tactical nuclear weapons, to hopefully deter Soviet aggression. It was a risky policy, to say the least. I'm amazed that we survived that period.
Well, apart from the US (who essentially bankrupted the USSR) but they didn't have sufficient numbers in Europe due to commitments elsewhere. It would have taken them around 4 weeks to deploy and reinforce. I would say "afford to match" since the NATO equipment was of better quality, with better training - but I get what you're saying - they did have an overwhelming advantage.
And now we have to get through this period.
@@1985indeed Which would, indeed, be more amazing. That was ideology, this is money...
@@tohellorbarbados4902 no this is still Ideology...
We got lucky with Able Archer 83
I remember Peter Snow with his son on Battlefield Britain and Twentieth Century Battlefields.
10 years ago - in 2014 - while going through some old books i had found a book from 1980 titled "Nuclear war between USA and USSR".
I thought i would never need that book again and thought about giving it away.
But finally i was keeping it because of sentimentality.
Now - even it is from 1980 - it's interesting to read it again because the nuclear tactics are still the same.
If only we knew now what we knew then. The Soviets knew they were technologically inferior to the West in many areas which is why they went on a major military spending splurge to reach parity with us. It did incredible harm to their economy with almost every industrial sector tied in some form or another to its military-industrial complex. That, coupled with the inherent inefficiencies of the planned economy, albeit it did show remarkable performance when concentrated on certain projects i.e Sputnik, the race for the bomb; to the detriment of other sectors.
When they mention the Soviet navy doubling in 9 years, I cannot help but see similar parallels to what the media is saying today about the expansion of the People's Liberation Army Navy. This is fascinating, to say the least. I was too young to experience the Cold War being born in 1986 but speaking to people of an age that can remember, it was a frightening time. Only by the 1980s did people come to believe the Soviets were probably vastly overestimated. I remember my dad saying the proof was in the pudding when Western weaponry vs Iraqi Soviet weaponry in the Gulf War was not even a contest. Although I have read this is misleading as the export models of Soviet weaponry were inferior to the one's the Soviets kept for themselves.
I think that estimate was about 30 thousand warheads short.
After 1990 it was revealed that the Soviet Union would have used tactictal nukes right away.
But so would we on Saddam if he'd used chemical weapons on British troops. We all have them. We all lie & say we don't. Porton Down doesn't make industrial dyes, y know.
Less than 10 years later the Russians struggled to take the tiny breakaway republic of Chechnya Ichkeria, so I doubt their chances invading Western Europe.
" These men are Bursting with WAR "
Grandstand’s post game analysis certainly was different in the 80s.
😂
It was great. I am a new subscriber. Love your channel. Keep up the good work.
So psyched for the Sequel!
There is something rather strange about this video in that he seems to have a blue tinge around his head early on in the video which suggests that he was filmed in front of a blue screen and the background was then filled in with a computer image. The blue screen was the predecessor to "the green screen", the thing is that neither of these technologies were available in 1976...
NATO (excluding the US) must envy its power in the 70's and 80's. Today, it's a pale shadow of that past!
Fairly accurate and dispassionate.
Notice how the first thing the Brits say, 23 seconds into the video on "How Britain would Fight the Soviet Union", is "AMERICA BY NOW SHOULD BE SENDING REINFORCEMENT AIRCRAFT".... 🤭🤡
Why not just title the video "How Britain has no chance of fighting anyone without the US"?
So true a comment
Very reassuring report that the Brits were broadcasting this everywhere in 1976.
Starmer has cut our defence budget down to the bone. Luckily Russia’s forces are also down from what they used to be in the 80’s, but he’s still left us vulnerable.
The Russian military’s actual performance in the present Ukraine war puts that video into perspective.
The Russian army today is a far cry from what it used to be (but that 70s huge forces was unsustainable).
Yes, a lot can change in half a century.
To be fair, both countries would have been on the same side.
Am not a (UK) Reaganite but RR did well to recognise the Soviet Union for the horror that it was, and beat it by spending hard on arms, pushing the Soviet economy harder than it could bear in its efforts to compete.
Well you have to remember that in 1976 we would have been fighting the Ukrainians so perhaps we are right to have been worried
Remember, this was prior to the introduction of the A-10 and the AH-64. As well as the Soviets getting bogged down for a decade in Afghanistan. A lot can change in a short period of time.
The A 10 lived in 76 in Germany at Sembach
Ya,.... Because America hasn't gotten bogged down in Afghanistan, and other unnecessary wars. 😂
We the westerns has been bogged 20 years in Afganistan and later in 2022 we said Russia would have collpsed in 6 weeks of war against our weapon systems...we are in the december 2024...never understimate Russia.
"The Soviets have been spending unsustainable amounts of money expanding their forces. Assuming they keep doing that forever..." Well, that didn't really turn out to be possible for them. Frankly, some of the "if things continue like this..." projections from that era seem kind of obviously flawed in retrospect. But at the time, nobody would have believed you that the USSR would just poof itself within about 15 years. The Berlin Wall was done within 13 years.
I was in Berlin in June 1989. Nobody saw the wall coming down even then. It was assumed by everyone we talked to it would just be there forever
You make it sound as if the analysis was wrong,
when in fact it was spot on.
Talking about british warships and then mentioning Exocet.. such foreshadowing.
Typical sloppy ITN reporting. On map 1:40 the NATO map (blue) is wrong.
You do know this was made in 1976??
@@nicholasnagySweden was not in NATO up in 1976 😂
@@nicholasnagy So? Do you know that the year of joining NATO for Portugal is 1949, for Turkey 1952?
But then, what is a fact for sloppy ITN?
Sticking to facts has never been a strong point for neither BBC not for ITN. There are better words for it, but I think "sloppy reporting" is more diplomatic.
@@hrafnofthule5962 Is this really what you think @metegokce697 means? Really?
4:08 Hitler had many more than 50 U-boats.
They built over 1000! In ww2
Why, do we not get reports like this anymore?
Good timing. I wonder if this still applies: 25:56
The Soviet Union is not just Russia
But they controlled it.
Warsaw Pact
Russia and "friends". Or more like their colonies. Are you happy now?
very interesting
Peter's wig is more frightening than any nuke.
This is like a combination of WW3 technology with WW2 stratagy ....
And then they went broke....
Europe was so small then. Now so many Europeans and Americans will happily let the world look that way again. We simply have to start learning lessons for longer than the generation that participated is still alive.
Yeah I thought this Cold War bullshit finished in 1989 with fall of wall in Berlin, I remember watching it on tv even though in happened 35 years ago!!
22:35 That's a pretty chill response to WWIII beginning 😂
As in WW2 the Soviet advantage was in numbers rather than technical advantage. Their soldiers and tanks were less capable but they could keep throwing them into battle until they won. Other Warsaw Pact countries were much better trained.
Countering this was logistically challenging with US troops having to pass through flights & ports.
In NATO war game exercises, it was inevitably the West which had to resort to the use of nuclear weapons first to hold back the Warsaw Pact advance. They were also by then forced to use them on home territory.
If you count all the F35 and Typhoons as front line fighters Britain in 2024 has more front line fighters than in 1976.
But that is far from their only role so they're not
Let's not forget Britian's new battle tank, "The Jaguar EV Rainbow Warrior".
3:19 whats going on with the war ship, looks like a skyscraper 😂
They are as tall as skyscrapers. Usually you see them from the side, though, and they're so long it hides that fact. But that shot is looking at them from the front (or back).
Just wait till you see Japanese battleships
I’m reminded of a line from King of the Hill: “but that was back when we didn’t know the Russians were incompetent”
1976 😮 look how professional everyone was back then ,😎👍 this is what we need in 2024 we need to ban all social media and re-educate the youth of Gen Z to be professional and non violent to each other 👍
Loving the Peter Snow bulletproof Pocadot tie, no soviet weapons could penetrate that thing
The Chieftain tank, one of my favourite NATO tanks of the 70s; I built several Airfix kits of it.
Time to re-read Harold Coyle's "Team Yankee".
I had no idea the Shackleton was still being used by the UK in 1976, thought they'd all been retired or sold to friendly foreign air forces.
The media always seems to be on your enemies side
This is what's happening right now...
Meanwhile UK "Cannot fly jets as drones are near airfields"
Correction.
The USA can’t fly jets as drones are near airfields.
Those are American airbases.
"What are the Russians up to?" A question we've been asking for three hundred years and are still no nearer an answer.
This aged well
Only scramble at 20 miles from coast?
I grew up on 80's cold war time programs/ reports. In a funny way i miss them
More relevant than ever. The stuff of nightmares.
It is crazy watching this now. I wonder if the majority of T72s are hulks in Ukraine now.
I was born in USSR, but now live in UK. Very interesting to see what the perspective was at the time on the other side.
Let's take a moment to appreciate how much has changed for the better since 1970ties. 38.000 was the number of strategic warheads deployed in 1975. Today than number stands at 3.700. Nowhere near enough for "Threads" type apocalypse.
Annie Jacobsen’s, nuclear war released this year says it would actually be worse due to advancements in nuclear delivery mechanisms and IT attacks.
@@ultimatesnacks6190 Frankly- I dont see that happening. If anything strategic warheads got more accurate, so you're looking at way less collateral damage. And nowhere near the amount of dust in the atmosphere . IT is a different story but I take global communication breakdown over few years with no sun any day.
@@mazatlan79PI’ll take the word of someone who’s spent 2 decades reporting on this and interviewing the experts, thanks.
@@ultimatesnacks6190 Enjoy life in fear then :)
@ as opposed to being frightened of facts. Let’s hope that blusterous belief saves your wee cotton socks
Tut, tut - Russian this and Russian that. It was the Soviet navy (e.g.), not the Russian one. 3:25
Tomato tomato
We haven't changed much, we could always talk a good fight, and of course we could always use the assumption that everything we had was a lot better than what they had even if we didn't have much of it! Fear mongering is always the m.o of western governments to escalate the tax take, which they do frequently, but they usually spaff it away with little result, it was ever thus. Most wars are avoidable non more so than the present war, but poor men can die while rich men ( who live far from the bombs) get richer
Bob Marley has entered the chat.
23:53 Thinking there’d be sirens on jets is hilarious.
Personally I now know without a doubt the world is fek in mad...
Humans seem to never learn from past mistakes...
Each generation thinks it’s better than the last while last generation thinks it’s better than the present and no one learns anything
The UK was not alone, so they should have warning prior. Both West Germany and The Netherlands would have provided some delay and confirmation about intentions.
1 day warning in advance haha thats rich
1976 was the same as 2022; Over-estimating the power of the Russian Bear.
1970s and 1980s Soviets were not to be fucked with. They had the bodies and the resources. In as little as two decades the oligarchs have left Russia's defense capacity barren.
Also, the Ukraine SSR was the brains of the defense apparatus.
Given current events, it's laughable what we used to think about the USSR/Russia, but such is life I suppose.
Also interesting that they show Sweden and Finland in NATO, but not Turkey.
Basically America assume Europe and Britain take the majority of the hit and they'll be ok 😅
Seriously someone from Nato should watch this
It's incredibly sad to see how far the UK's military has fallen since the days of when this video was filmed. Their soldiers, sailors, and pilots are still top notch but there aren't nearly enough of them and the government has cut their funding and by extension their weapons & equipment down to the point where they wouldn't be able to sustain serious combat for more than a few weeks. Some of the other NATO allies are in a similar condition but most have started to address those issues. It doesn't seem like the UK has, not under the long list of recent governments and Prime Ministers.
26:08 Thats the situation i feel we have found ourselves in today 😓 Not that Russia themselves is outpacing our technology because there not even close. But thay missle technology on all sides in general has advanced so far that immediate use of Nuclear weapons will be absolutely necessary within miniutes, hours or days of a conventional war starting as the technology can easily be used to overwhelm any Nations defenses as anti Nuclear missle air defenses at least what we know as the civilian public are not nearly on an equal level as Nuclear missle offensive capabilities. But who knows maybe the US or UK or NATO has some super crazy anti Nuclear missle tech we aren't aware of yet. 🤷♂️
Cool!
The fact that the Soviet Union pumped so much money from its state budget into the armed forces had its price. Health care was inadequate, the supply of consumer goods to the population was poor, and the housing sector was bad because it was standard for two families to share an apartment and each family had only one room for privacy and single people had to share an apartment with several people. In the countryside in the villages, nothing had changed since the 19th century, hardly any cars, the means of transportation was the horse. The houses were made of wood and had no water, gas or electricity. In addition, there was a great contrast in the agricultural production communities, because there were tractors and other diesel-powered agricultural vehicles. Hardly anything has changed in Russia today. People in the countryside still grow vegetables in their small gardens and Aztec tobacco, which they process into cigarettes. The cigarettes are only filled with 25 percent Aztec tobacco, the rest consists of a cardboard tube and a longer homemade filter. Aztec tobacco is extremely strong tobacco with a very high nicotine content, and someone who smokes a whole cigarette filled with Aztec tobacco would suffer nicotine poisoning. Aztec tobacco is no longer industrially processed into cigarettes in Russia, as there is no longer a market for it, since Western cigarette brands entered Russia.
If we knew their true capabilities we'd be a bit relaxed about it, it was just a massive bluff relying on massive meat attacks with extremely poor trained "soldiers".
A lot of their gear was rubbish - including their attack aircraft. The mig could match a western aircraft for speed.... for about 15 minutes until it burnt it's engine out but this wasn't known at the time. Only after a Russian pilot defected the west could see how badly these aircraft were manufactured.
back in the day, if they'd had a corrupt general selling stuff off to buy a luxury boat, he'd have gone missing
No evidence of meat wave attacks, not one video shows this tactic.
Then came Afghanistan, and the Red Army's reputation was shredded. Until then, they had an invincible image. The Afghan War changed history.
It was the US-supplied Stinger handheld SA missiles that changed Afghanistan.
@bfc3057 They were important, but not the all-encompassing factor that is publicised. The Red Army was in trouble even before the Stingers' introduction to the conflict.
@@GarysActionManChannel1970 they turned the tide
@@GarysActionManChannel1970 The afghans suffered tremendous casualties 10 times that of russians. They failed politically. Sounds familiar?
@u2beuser714 The Soviet Afghan War was far bloodier than NATO War in the 00s/early 2010s. It came close to the casualty rate of Vietnam
Peter Snow was a magnificent presenter.
Was he related to john snow?
John Snow was Peter's cousin. Dan Snow is Peter's son and has presented many military documentaries.
I like how those air defence blokes calmly talking as if they are have a five o'clock tea at the Ritz. In reality, I think with Russian aircraft within 30 minutes, they would be screaming, hysterically laughing, rolling on the floor and jumping all over the place and forget all the commands and algorithms. Panic would prevail.
They had a mock up of Honest John at the Air Museum in Texas I want to. Made a video about it. To be fair, they had more tanks than airplanes on display, lol
In 1990 the Soviets had 45thousand nuclear warheads that's more than USA biggest stockpile of 31,255 nuclear warheads , Britain's peak 520 and France 540 scary stuff
The problem is that Russia has developed missiles which do not give it a chance for an immediate response.
In the 80's the Soviets made a simulated strike on a US carrier group using tu22m bombers, and they would have came out on top, a recent simulation proved that to be correct.
Decade later, they were gonski. Shows you that things change and change fast
5:15 the issue of this still being the army in 2025 might be a problem