Never in the postwar era has the Soviet threat been depicted in more alarming colors than today. It is this threat that is used to justify soaring U.S. military spending. But just how real is that threat? If the Soviet leadership is as aggressive as many U.S. policymakers claim, is the Soviet military machine strong enough to carry out their plans?

Most of us know the Soviet threat only as an ever-present warning from the Pentagon or the Oval Office, or as an endless wave of fearsome tanks and disciplined soldiers rolling through Red Square. But despite the billions of dollars the American people furnish to our military to meet that threat, we know very little about the reality of Soviet military power.

Andrew Cockburn takes us inside the Soviet military machine as it exists today, shows how it works and how and why it doesn't work: the harsh, desperate reality of the life of the Soviet soldier, the quality of the officer corps, the way weapons really get built in the Soviet Union, the politics within the high command and the battles between the military and its civilian masters. Drawing on interviews with scores of emigrés for firsthand accounts of a Soviet soldier's life, samizdat documents, and U.S. intelligence sources, he draws a picture of a military machine very different from the one we have been taught to fear. It is a world in which ill-trained soldiers are driven by boredom and misery to find solace in lethal "home brews," in which intrigue and flattery are more useful career tools for an ambitious officer than straightforward military skills, in which military industries operate with gross inefficiency because of bureaucratic inertia and a touching faith in Western military practices. Cockburn presents the real balance of military power: how Pentagon analysts count Soviet patrol boats as a threat to the U.S. coastline, how no Soviet weapon is too obsolete or worn out for inclusion in the "threat estimate," how the combat effectiveness of the Soviet forces has actually declined in the last decade. He shows how, despite what both Soviet and American generals claim, the Soviet nuclear forces are no more capable of actually fighting and winning a nuclear war than those of the U.S.

Here, for the first time, is a true portrait of The Threat, one that will be as unwelcome in Moscow as in the Pentagon.