Cold War (1979–1985)

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History of the
Cold War
Origins
1947–1953
1953–1962
1962–1979
1979–1985
1985–1991
  Timeline

The Cold War (1979-1985) discusses the period within the Cold War between the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet leader in 1985.

The period is sometimes referred to as the "Second Cold War"[1] due to the rising US-Soviet tensions and a change in Western policy from détente to more confrontation against the Soviets. Margaret Thatcher became the British Prime Minister in 1979, and Ronald Reagan was elected US President in 1981.

Tensions increased between the major powers with both sides becoming more militaristic. The Able Archer 83 exercise in November 1983, a realistic simulation of a coordinated Western European nuclear release, convinced Soviet leadership to believe they were actually under attack. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan became a tedious guerrilla war. America supplied the mujahadeen of Afghanistan with weapons, including Stinger missiles used to shoot down many Soviet aircraft. America also supplied arms to the Nicaraguan Contras, funded by the sale of arms to Iran, which caused the Iran-Contra Affair political scandal. Many military conflicts occurred, including the 1981 Gulf of Sidra incident, the shooting of Korean Air Flight 007 by the Soviets in 1983, the US invasion of Grenada, and the implementation of martial law in Poland from 1981 to 1983.

Contents

[edit] Transition period

Carter and Brezhnev sign SALT II, 1979
Carter and Brezhnev sign SALT II, 1979

U.S. President Jimmy Carter, however, tried to move beyond these setbacks for peace and place another cap on the arms race with a SALT II agreement in 1979, but his efforts were undercut by three surprising developments: the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Nicaraguan Revolution, and Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

Popular anger among sectors of the Iranian population opposed to the Shah's rule, seething and repressed for a generation, combined with the Shah's secular reforms, eventually culminated in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which in turn led to a hostage crisis. Much of the anger in Iran was directed at the U.S., which helped bring the Shah to power in a 1953 CIA-backed coup. In recent years, U.S. officials have expressed regret for past U.S. actions that contributed to the Iran Revolution. Madeleine Albright in 2000 expressed regret for the '53 CIA role, stating "...it is easy to see now why so many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs."1

The fall of the Shah, a key Middle Eastern ally, was an embarrassment for the United States; and Carter's inability to get U.S. hostages freed cost him the 1980 election. While the United States was mired in recession and the Vietnam quagmire, pro-Soviet governments were making great strides abroad, especially in the Third World. Communist Vietnam had defeated the United States, becoming a united state under a communist government. New pro-Soviet governments had also been established in Laos, Angola, Ethiopia and elsewhere. Other communist insurgencies were spreading rapidly across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

The Soviet Union seemed committed to the Brezhnev Doctrine, sending troops to Afghanistan at the request of its communist government. The Afghan invasion in 1979 marked the first time that the Soviet Union sent troops outside the Warsaw Pact since the inception of the Eastern counterpart of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). This prompted a swift reaction from the west: the boycotting of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow and the heavy funding for the Afghani resistance fighters.

Alliances in 1980.
Alliances in 1980.
Olympic boycotts: American led 1980 boycott blue, Soviet led 1984 boycott red
Olympic boycotts: American led 1980 boycott blue, Soviet led 1984 boycott red

Worried by Soviet deployment of nuclear SS-20 missiles (commenced in 1977), the NATO allies had in 1979 agreed to continued Strategic Arms Limitation Talks to constrain the number of nuclear missiles for battle field targets, threatening to deploy some 500 cruise missiles and Pershing II missiles in West Germany and the Netherlands in case the negotiations were unsuccessful. The negotiations, taken up in Geneva, November 30, 1981, were bound to fail. In the countries in question, the planned deployment of Pershing II met intense and widespread opposition from public opinion across Europe, which was the site of massive demonstrations.2 Pershing II missiles were deployed in Europe from January 1984. They were, however, soon withdrawn, beginning in October 1988. The shooting down by Soviet fighters of civilian airliner Korean Air Flight 7 also increased tensions.

In spite of its successes, the "new conservatives" or "neoconservatives" rebelled against both the Nixon-era detente and the Democratic Party's position on defense issues in the 1970s, especially after the nomination of George McGovern in 1972, saying liberal Democrats were the cause for U.S. international setbacks. Many clustered around hawkish Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat, and pressured President Carter into a more confrontational stance. Eventually they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the conservative wing of the Republicans, who promised to confront Soviet expansionism.

While the Soviets had enjoyed great achievements on the international stage before the 1980s, such as the unification of their communist ally, Vietnam (1975), and a string of communist revolutions in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, the country's strengthening ties with Third World nations in the 1960s and 1970s only masked its weakness in economic terms next to the United States. In 1981, the Warsaw Pact ran the military exercise Zapad, a massive show of numerical strength, but masking political instability in Poland.

The Soviet economy suffered severe structural problems. Reform stalled between 1964-1982 and supply shortages of consumer goods became increasingly widespread. The 1980s saw weak leadership in the Soviet Union. In 1982, Leonid Brezhnev died, to be replaced by the short-lived Yuri Andropov and then Konstantin Chernenko who also quickly died.

[edit] Culture and Media

Led by heightened public awareness and fears, the period 1979-1985 witnessed the production in Western countries of several films and television dramas depicting the probable effects of a nuclear war and its aftermath. These included the ground-breaking American film The Day After (1983) and the British television docudrama Threads of the same year. Combining a contemporary Western youth culture of computer games and young love with fears of an accidental nuclear holocaust was the 1983 film WarGames. The Hollywood film Red Dawn (1984) played on American fears by portraying an invasion by Soviet and Cuban forces.

Several films of the James Bond series were set against a Cold War backdrop, while films such as White Nights and Rocky IV exploited contemporaneous tense Soviet-American relations.

[edit] Significant documents

  • Partial or Limited Test Ban Treaty (PTBT/LTBT): 1963. Also put forth by Kennedy; banned nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underwater and in space. However, neither France nor China (both Nuclear Weapon States) signed.
  • Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT): 1968. Established the U.S., USSR, UK, France, and China as five "Nuclear-Weapon States". Non-Nuclear Weapon states were prohibited from (among other things) possessing, manufacturing, or acquiring nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices. All 187 signatories were committed to the goal of (eventual) nuclear disarmament.
  • Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM): 1972. Entered into between the U.S. and USSR to limit the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems used in defending areas against missile-delivered nuclear weapons; ended by the US in 2002.
  • Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties I & II (SALT I & II): 1972 / 1979. Limited the growth of US and Soviet missile arsenals.
  • Prevention of Nuclear War Agreement: 1973. Committed the U.S. and USSR to consult with one another during conditions of nuclear confrontation.
  • Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF): 1987. Eliminated tactical ("battlefield") nuclear devices and GLCMs from Europe.
  • Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty I (START I): 1991. This was signed by George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev; reduced the numbers of U.S. and Soviet long-range missiles and nuclear warheads from 10,000 per side to 6,000 per side.
  • Mutual Detargeting Treaty (MDT): 1994. U.S. and Russian missiles no longer automatically target the other country; nuclear forces are no longer operated in a manner that presumes that the two nations are adversaries.
  • Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) 1996. Prohibits all nuclear test explosions in all environments; was signed by 71 States (US is not signatory).
  • Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty II (START II): 2000. Will reduce the numbers of U.S. and Russian long-range missiles and nuclear warheads from 6,000 per side to 3,500-3,000 per side. (START III proposed for 2007).
  • Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (Moscow Treaty (2002)). Established bilateral strategic nuclear arms reductions and a new "strategic nuclear framework"; also invited all countries to adopt non-proliferation principles aimed at preventing terrorists, or those that harbored them, from acquiring or developing all types of WMD's and related materials, equipment, and tech.

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Halliday, Fred. "Cold War". The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World. Oxford University Press Inc., 2001, page 2e.

[edit] References

  • Ball, S. J. The Cold War: An International History, 1947-1991 (1998). British perspective
  • Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History (2005)
  • Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (1987)]
  • Gaddis, John Lewis. * LaFeber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1992 7th ed. (1993)
  • Powaski, Ronald E. The Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1917-1991 (1998)
  • Sivachev, Nikolai and Nikolai Yakolev, Russia and the United States (1979), by Soviet historians
  • Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977-1981 (1983);
  • Edmonds, Robin. Soviet Foreign Policy: The Brezhnev Years (1983)
  • Mower, A. Glenn Jr. Human Rights and American Foreign Policy: The Carter and Reagan Experiences ( 1987),
  • Smith, Gaddis. Morality, Reason and Power:American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (1986).
  • Beschloss, Michael, and Strobe Talbott. At the Highest Levels:The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (1993)
  • Bialer, Seweryn and Michael Mandelbaum, eds. Gorbachev's Russia and American Foreign Policy (1988).
  • Gaddis, John Lewis. The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (1992)
  • Garthoff, Raymond. The Great Transition:American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (1994)
  • Hogan, Michael ed. The End of the Cold War. Its Meaning and Implications (1992) articles from Diplomatic History online at JSTOR
  • Kyvig, David ed. Reagan and the World (1990)
  • Matlock, Jack F. Autopsy of an Empire (1995) by US ambassador to Moscow
  • Shultz, George P. Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (1993)
  • Westad, Odd Arne The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2006) ISBN 0-521-85364-8
  • Sasa Kubat, American hero that took down 3 soviet aircraft