There has been this strange tendency to overestimate the Soviet (or, specifically, Russian) capabilities amongst the NATO staff, possibly motivated by the opportunities to spend more money on the military as long as the threat was there, regardless of its severity. Under the circumstances, any Soviet foray into the west was tantamount to suicide. Additionally, there was much political unrest brewing in the Warsaw Pact satellite states вЂ“ unrest that the Soviets were not ready or able to handle anymore. Since the ill-fated Brezhnev reforms of the 1960s, the Soviets were dependent on food imports and loans from the west and the technology gap between them and the NATO was, thanks to the rapidly developing computer industry in the USA, only getting wider. By this time, the Soviet Union was basically on its last legs both economically and politically. ItвЂ™s very hard to say as to what prompted this development. Drawings of new unmanned turrets also started to appear, each with different armament ranging from 120mm to 145mm caliber.Д«ut, around 1985-1986, the panic about the future Soviet tanks was cranked up a notch. Additionally, this diesel engine was far less fuel-hungry. One of the earliest iterations of such a design was the TTB demonstrator vehicle and the SRV testbed that followed, both intended to test innovative and largely experimental features for the future Abrams, such as an adjustable hydropneumatic suspension or the Cummins XAP-1000 diesel engine that occupied 50 percent less space than the turbine of a standard Abrams while producing equal horsepower. By 1995, the Soviets were expected to operate around two thousand such super-tanks, which would dangerously jeopardize the defense capabilities of Europe.ДЄt first, the developers tried something new вЂ“ specifically to use a modified Abrams hull to carry an unmanned turret. By the mid-1980s, an opinion appeared that the Soviets were building some radically different MBTs that were superior to everything else in the aging Soviet arsenal and (more importantly) to anything the NATO could field. The CATTB is one of the last evolutions of the Abrams design from back when a radically different successor to the original M1 tank was sought in the 1980s in order to combat the next generation of Soviet Tanks, internally designated вЂњFSTвЂќ (Future Soviet Tank) by the Americans.

M1 thumper