Great. So now maybe you could address the issue of the Apollo rocks more generally, as well as the historiography of the Cold War.
One piece of evidence against the Cold War was JFK's attempt to establish a collaboration with Russia on the Moon Landing in 1963. This doesn't sound like "enemies" to me... They said "no thanks, but good luck with that" -- soon after JFK was assassinated. JFK wouldn't go into Vietnam? Was exhibiting doubts about Apollo's mission, possibly willing to pull the plug? Anti-Banks/CIA? Who knows -- why he was assassinated. BUT -- 1963 we see he doesn't seem to be too concerned by Cold War... maybe that was part of it... the DoD profiteers wanted the Cold War to be something that struck fear in Americans to justify govt spending to mitigate these fears.
I'm half-talking-from-my-ass here -- I'm sure. I haven't researched it thoroughly, but only enough to know there was a LOT of shady stuff going on. And I do not put much trust in govt feeding us fear narratives about "the enemy" - which then justifies spending. I'm leery at best.
The X Files was not a documentary.
You know, some of us were born
before 1980 and have first-hand memories of all of this. When she was in high school my wife got chased through East Berlin by a bunch of soldiers after taking pictures of a monument. We saw the news stories out of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan as they happened. We saw the reports from Vietnam on the news every night.
To think
all of that was fake or staged requires an exceptionally shallow mind.
The Cold War was
very real and very scary. I winced every time Reagan joked about bombing Moscow on a hot mic. Tornado drills in elementary school served double duty as nuke drills. Every day carried the very real possibility of nuclear flaming death from over the horizon. I am not exaggerating.
We
knew this. Why do you think every other sci-fi movie in the '70s and '80s was set in a post-apocalyptic radioactive wasteland? Why were movies like "Wargames" and "Red Dawn" and "Threads" such huge hits? Even the Aussies were getting in on the act:
We literally came this >< close to all-out nuclear exchanges with the Soviet Union on multiple occasions. Look up the names Vasilli Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov, men who
literally, single-handedly prevented nuclear war on two different occasions (at great personal cost in Arkhipov's case).
I lived in San Antonio, which, with multiple Air Force bases (including a logistics wing at Kelly) and Army posts, was actually a high-value target.
There were occasional diplomatic overtures and joint ventures to keep it from turning it into a hot war (with nukes), but that didn't make it any less real. Southeast Asia was a total cluster both because the Best and the Brightest ...
weren't, and because the Soviet and Chinese proxies were especially brutal; Hitler was third-rate on the mass-murder scale compared to Stalin and Mao, but
none of them could touch Pol Pot on percentage.
Apollo only happened because there was real, genuine, pants-wetting fear of the Soviets gaining the high ground (literally). The Saturn V was as much a statement of how much nuclear flaming death we could drop on Moscow as it was anything else.
You are not anywhere near as smart or clever or well-informed as you think you are. You've basically spent an afternoon skimming through "Chess for Dummies" and are confident you could beat Kasparov or Fischer in less than 20 moves.
Son, you are about as sharp as a sack of wet mice. You might as well claim the Holocaust was fake, too.