But only having the capability to do it in the last stretch of the Cold War, the one where they were in the process of winning the whole thing. Fortunately for the USA its system was incapable of taking the shock of centralized planning of a modern technologically advanced economy *and* building an enormous, technologically complex military-industrial complex, or otherwise the 21st Century would be the Soviet century. And unlike the USA the USSR was actually building the capability to fight and win a general nuclear exchange and believed it was actually feasible to do this.