The End Of The Cold War

The Return to Confrontation

The confrontation between the two superpowers through their respective local allies in the Angolan Civil War exposed President Ford to direct attacks within his own party from the future president Ronald Reagan, who became the leading Republican advocate of neoconservative positions.

Nevertheless, the pursuit of détente survived under Ford's Democratic successor, President Jimmy Carter.

Carter's initial efforts in this direction proved difficult. His proposal to resume negotiations on SALT II by beginning with an actual reduction in strategic weapons—a new approach, since previous agreements had imposed limits but never reductions—was rejected by the Soviets.

They relied on the numerical superiority of their ICBMs for deterrence, given the technological superiority of American weapons.

Between 1977 and 1979, a series of events seriously damaged cooperation.

In 1976, the Soviets began modernizing their nuclear weapons aimed at Western Europe, replacing older missiles with the newer and faster SS-20s. What was intended as a routine operation triggered an intense debate within NATO, which in 1979 decided to deploy new nuclear missiles in Europe to counter the Soviet weapons.

In 1978, the war between Somalia, supported by the Americans, and Ethiopia, heavily supported by the USSR and Cuba, ended with an Ethiopian victory.

That same year, the United States and China formally restored full diplomatic relations. Under Deng Xiaoping, China was opening itself to the West and to a market economy and, shortly afterward, launched an attack on North Vietnam, a Soviet ally, in an attempt to limit its regional influence.

Also in 1978, a revolution broke out in Iran, leading to the overthrow of the pro-American Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the establishment of an Islamic Republic.

For the Americans, this meant the loss of an important ally in their containment strategy. More historically significant, however, was the emergence of a state founded on Islamic fundamentalism that sought to escape the influence of both superpowers and their respective ideologies.

The End of Détente

At the turn of 1979–80, détente ended.

In December 1979, NATO decided to deploy new nuclear missiles to compensate for the Soviet arsenal, including Pershing II missiles, some of which were stationed in Italy. These missiles could reach their targets in roughly ten minutes.

Two weeks later, the Red Army intervened officially for the first time outside the borders established in 1945, entering Afghanistan to quickly suppress the uprising of Islamist groups against the newly established Communist government. Instead, the intervention produced a ten-year war with disastrous consequences for the USSR.

The United States feared that the Soviets intended to exploit instability in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan to extend their presence toward the Persian Gulf. Carter responded immediately: he withdrew the SALT II agreement—signed the previous June and awaiting Senate ratification—from consideration; imposed an embargo on grain and technological resources sold to the USSR; announced that American athletes would boycott the Moscow Olympics; and increased defense spending and military support for Pakistan.

With Ronald Reagan's inauguration in 1981, détente was no longer an objective. The new goals were to strengthen the United States strategically and diplomatically and weaken the USSR.

Between 1980 and 1985, military spending increased by 50 percent, reaching 6.8 percent of GDP in 1985. Washington supplied small arms to Islamist fighters in Afghanistan. It secretly financed opposition forces in Poland and imposed trade sanctions on both Poland, whose government was suppressing the unrest, and the Soviet Union.

The European countries did not join the sanctions, preferring to expand their economic relations with the East in order to support their own economies and maintain dialogue with the Soviets amid the renewed confrontation between the two superpowers.

From 1983 onward, American support for the Afghan resistance took the form of systematic training and arming of the fighters: the United States supplied military technology, Saudi Arabia provided financial resources, and Pakistan handled the operational side.

That same year, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed “Star Wars” or the “Strategic Defense Shield”. It sought to develop a system of armed satellites capable of intercepting and destroying intercontinental missiles, which would have neutralized the effects of the ABM Treaty and disrupted the balance created by mutually assured destruction.

In the autumn of 1983, the risk of war reached its highest level since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

The Kremlin, fearing that Reagan's rhetoric could lead to a nuclear attack or nuclear blackmail, placed its intelligence services and military commands on maximum alert.

The tension turned into tragedy on September 1, when a South Korean passenger aircraft entered Soviet airspace and was shot down, killing 269 people.

The situation reached its most dangerous point several weeks later. Some Soviet security analysts suspected that a NATO exercise scheduled for November 2 was a cover for a nuclear attack.

News of the Soviet alert reached British intelligence, allowing Western officials to reassure the Soviets. The episode ended without becoming public, but it prompted serious questions about the dangers of such a high level of tension.

At this point, Reagan's attitude began to change, encouraged in part by the approaching election and the need to ease public fears about nuclear weapons, as well as by the renewed strength that rearmament had given the United States.

The End of the Cold War

At the beginning of 1984, Reagan began publicly advocating constructive cooperation between the superpowers and reductions in armaments.

This was not, however, a return to détente. Reagan rejected peace based on strategic parity and mutual vulnerability and regarded compromise with the enemy as immoral.

The White House intended to force the USSR into a subordinate position, which the Soviets would have to accept in negotiations in order to avoid a technological and economic race they could hardly sustain.

The Soviet economy was already in serious difficulty. Defense spending absorbed more than 20 percent of GDP, industrial production was barely growing, and consumption remained low.

In March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party. Fully aware of his country's economic difficulties, he embarked on a program of profound reforms.

Despite initial Western distrust, he made peace and disarmament central pillars of his foreign policy. The urgent need to reduce military expenditure, and the fact that the Soviet Union could not sustain an arms race, also made disarmament an economic necessity.

At the beginning of 1986, Gorbachev publicly proposed a gradual reduction of nuclear weapons leading to their complete elimination by 2000.

A few months later, in April, the catastrophic explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine provided the public with another tangible demonstration of the dangers associated with nuclear technology.

In October, at Reykjavik, Gorbachev proposed to Reagan a 50 percent reduction in strategic arsenals, the removal of all Soviet and American missiles from Europe, and the abandonment of SDI.

The American president accepted the proposed cuts but was unwilling to give up the space-based defense system, and no agreement was reached.

Dialogue nevertheless continued. In the autumn of 1987, the superpowers signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, agreeing to dismantle short- and medium-range missiles in Europe—the so-called Euromissiles.

The USSR also accepted, in a highly unusual move, a system of external inspections of its military bases.

In the United States, however, many continued to distrust the Soviets and preferred to pursue greater American superiority. Gates, then Deputy Director and later Director of the CIA, and subsequently Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, for example, warned of the danger of “a stronger and more competitive adversary in the future”.

In February 1988, Gorbachev announced the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. At the end of the same year, speaking before the United Nations General Assembly in New York, he announced a reduction of the Soviet armed forces by 500,000 personnel.

In 1989, while Gorbachev declared that the only limit to reform was the preservation of socialism, the Eastern bloc began to rapidly disintegrate without Soviet intervention.

In August, Hungary opened its border with Austria, while Poland established a non-Communist government. In December, the Communist regimes in Czechoslovakia and Romania collapsed.

On November 9, the Berlin Wall fell.

In September 1990, agreements for German reunification were signed. At the end of 1991, the Soviet Union itself dissolved.

The Cold War was over.

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