Things we believed during the Cold War that ended up being wrong

So fast was the USSR's demise, in fact, that it still seems a fluke. Maybe if Gorbachev had reformed a little slower, or Ronald Reagan been a little weaker, or the GDR hadn't opened the Berlin Wall in panic, the Soviet Union would have managed to hold together. Political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquitawould disagree. In 2002, he applied tried-and-tested statistical forecasting models to the knowledge we had of the USSR prior to 1990. He concluded that there were enough factors in play to accurately predict the Soviet collapse as early as 1980. Impressively, it's only the imminent dissolution of the USSR we could have predicted from 1980. In terms of predicting who would win the Cold War, de Mesquita's model could have called it for the USA in 1948. His 1998 article using data available just after World War II predicts Allied victory with a 68 to 78 percent probability, a technical way of saying the Ruskies were doomed from the get-go.