Cold War (1979–1985)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Cold War entered one of its most dangerous phases between 1979 and 1985, a period when the threat of nuclear war reached heights not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. What began as a decade of cautious cooperation between the superpowers collapsed with remarkable speed. A single invasion, a cascade of elections, and a string of miscalculations pulled the world toward the edge. How did détente, the policy that had kept the peace through the 1970s, fall apart so completely? And how close did the world actually come to a nuclear catastrophe? The answers lie in the decisions made in Kabul, Washington, Moscow, and the skies above the Kurile Islands.

• 2. The Détente That Broke

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  By the mid-1970s, roughly 70 percent of the Soviet Union's grain came from the United States. That single statistic captures how deeply the two superpowers had woven their economies together during the era of détente. The Helsinki Accords of 1975 formalized political ties between NATO and Soviet-bloc nations, and treaties like SALT I and II put boundaries on the nuclear arsenals both sides kept building.

  Not everyone was satisfied. Conservative senator Barry Goldwater condemned the entire framework, warning that trade with the Soviet Union helped maintain Soviet control over Eastern Europe. On the American left, Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson argued the USSR needed to be confronted more forcefully, not accommodated. In Eastern Europe, Czech playwright Vachlav Havel, who would later become president, dismissed détente as "naive, thickheaded." Soviet dissident and former nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov warned that Western security was at risk unless détente came with genuine liberalization inside the Soviet bloc.

  Despite all of this, both parties nominated pro-détente candidates in the 1976 U.S. presidential election. The policy held, until Afghanistan changed everything.

  The 1978 Saur Revolution brought members of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, a Soviet-backed Marxist-Leninist party, to power through a bloody coup. The new government's radical transformation of Afghan society and its purge of "class enemies" triggered a civil war. When the communist military position deteriorated, the Soviet Union intervened in December 1979. That invasion handed critics of détente everything they needed. The U.S. Senate refused to ratify SALT II. A grain embargo followed. The United States announced a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. And weapons began flowing to the Afghan rebels who opposed Soviet forces.

• 3. Reagan and Rollback

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  Henry Kissinger described Ronald Reagan as "the first postwar President to take the offensive both ideologically and strategically." That assessment captures something real about the shift in American posture after Reagan's election in 1980, which coincided with Margaret Thatcher already in office in Britain since 1979.

  In 1984, journalist Nicholas Lemann interviewed Reagan's Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and recorded the underlying logic of the administration's approach. Weinberger's argument, as Lemann summarized it, ran as follows: the Soviet economy lacked the wealth, education, and technology to enter the information age; the Soviets had thrown everything into military production and were showing signs of serious stress; they could not sustain that level of military spending the way the United States could; and eventually it would break them, leaving only one superpower. Lemann admitted he thought this was fantasy when he wrote it in 1984. By 2016, he called it "a fairly uncontroversial description of what Reagan actually did."

  The strategy had several practical components. The United States aggressively built up both its conventional and nuclear stockpile. It escalated support for movements fighting Soviet-aligned governments, most visibly in Afghanistan, where the CIA channeled approximately $750 million a year to the Mujahideen, largely through Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI. The ISI itself trained 80,000 fighters against Soviet forces. That support ultimately included sales of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, which proved instrumental in preventing a Soviet victory. The administration also pushed Western European governments to host American missiles aimed at the Soviet Union, and Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, a proposed space-based missile defense system that critics nicknamed "Star Wars."

  In 1983, Reagan publicly branded the Soviet Union an "evil empire." Soviet leaders were not treating this as rhetoric.

• 4. Nuclear Hardware

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  Soviet military planners had spent the 1970s quietly building a new generation of weapons. By the end of 1979, the USSR had deployed 130 SS-20 missiles in the western Soviet Union and to Warsaw Pact states. Each SS-20 could carry multiple warheads; 130 missiles translated into over 390 warheads capable of striking targets across Western Europe. NATO's collective defense had long depended on tactical nuclear superiority to compensate for the Warsaw Pact's larger conventional forces. The SS-20 deployment unsettled that calculation.

  In response, NATO member states committed to deploying several hundred missiles of their own to Western Europe, primarily the Pershing II. The Pershing II first appeared in Europe in 1983. It carried a single W-85 variable yield nuclear warhead with a yield ranging from five to 80 kilotons, smaller than the W-50 warhead it succeeded. What the Pershing II lacked in raw yield it made up in precision; its radar and inertial guidance systems allowed it to strike very close to its target from a range of around 1,000 miles.

  On the air side, the B-52 Stratofortress had served as the primary U.S. heavy strategic bomber, but advances in Airborne Early Warning and Control technology made it increasingly vulnerable. The B-1A Lancer program had been cancelled in 1977, but Reagan brought it back in 1981 under its new designation, the B-1B. Capable of speeds at or above Mach 1.2 and a payload of 75,000 pounds, the B-1B carried nuclear weapons until 1994, when that mission was cancelled and the aircraft switched to conventional weapons.

  Mikhail Gorbachev later reflected, in February 1986, that "never, perhaps, in the postwar decades has the situation in the world been as explosive and, hence, more difficult and unfavorable as in the first half of the 1980s." The hardware accumulating on both sides throughout 1981-1983 was a large part of why.

• 5. 1983: The Year of Crises

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  In 1981, KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev authorized Operation RYAN, the largest Soviet intelligence-gathering campaign ever launched. Its name was an acronym for the Russian phrase meaning "nuclear missile attack." Its purpose was to detect the earliest possible signs of an American first strike. In February 1983, with tensions accelerating, the KGB doubled its effort under the RYAN framework, scanning every signal for evidence of imminent attack.

  In April of that same year, the United States Navy assembled approximately forty ships, 23,000 crewmembers, and 300 aircraft for FleetEx '83-1, the largest fleet exercise ever conducted in the North Pacific. U.S. aircraft and ships deliberately probed Soviet responses to study radar characteristics and tactical behavior. On April 4, at least six U.S. Navy aircraft flew over Zeleny Island, part of the Habomai Islands group off the coast of the Kurile Islands. The Soviets, furious, ordered a retaliatory overflight of the Aleutian Islands and lodged a formal diplomatic protest accusing the United States of repeated violations of Soviet airspace.

  On the 1st of September 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 departed Anchorage, Alaska bound for Seoul. The plane strayed over the Soviet Kamchatka Peninsula. Soviet fighters launched air-to-air missiles and brought it down. The airliner crashed into the Pacific Ocean, killing all 269 passengers, among them U.S. Congressman Larry McDonald of Georgia.

  Two months after that, in November 1983, NATO launched Able Archer 83, a military simulation that incorporated, for the first time, a realistic end-game scenario simulating a full-scale nuclear release. Soviet intelligence detected the exercise but could not determine with certainty whether the activation of nuclear protocols was part of the war game or a genuine first strike in progress. Military units in East Germany and Poland were placed on alert. An abnormal number of surveillance flights took off. MiG-23s were stationed near the border in readiness. Many historians regard Able Archer 83 as the closest the world came to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, though others note that some Soviet responses may have been within standard operating procedures for NATO exercises.

• 6. Soviet Leadership in Decline

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  Leonid Brezhnev led the Soviet Union for 18 years, from 1964 until his death in 1982. By his final years, his declining health, attributable in part to heavy smoking and addiction to sleeping pills, had rendered him increasingly unable to govern. Political corruption spread through the Soviet leadership. Brezhnev grew reliant on his advisors, who made critical decisions in his name, and he became more of a figurehead than a head of state.

  Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev but led for only 15 months, from November 1982 to February 1984. He fell ill in February 1983 and began spending extended periods in the hospital. On the 7th of November 1983, he became the first Soviet leader in the postwar era to miss the annual October Revolution parade on Red Square. He died on the 9th of February 1984. In that short time, Andropov attempted to clean up Soviet corruption, dismissing numerous party ministers and secretaries. He had come to believe the Afghanistan invasion was a mistake, and he gave UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar four specific reasons why continuing it was not in Soviet interests. He visited Afghanistan himself in late 1981 and early 1982 and concluded there was no military solution available. His death ended any prospect of acting on that conclusion.

  Konstantin Chernenko, despite suffering from emphysema and other health problems that Andropov had explicitly flagged as disqualifying, became the next Soviet leader, serving from February 1984 to March 1985, just 13 months. Andropov had preferred Mikhail Gorbachev as his successor. Chernenko's tenure was not entirely without accomplishment. He negotiated and signed a new trade pact with China worth $1.2 billion, allowing a 50 percent increase in commerce between the two countries. He also made contact with President Reagan and met him in Geneva on the 7th of January 1985, where two days of negotiations produced an agreement to resume formal arms talks under a new framework addressing both nuclear and space weapons. That meeting stood as one of the first steps back from the brink, though Chernenko died in March 1985 before any of it could fully unfold. His chosen successor, Gorbachev, came into office with a genuine commitment to reducing tensions and reforming Soviet society.

• 7. Proxy Wars and Global Fractures

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  Afghanistan absorbed much of the superpower rivalry, but the conflict spread across continents. In Africa, South African and Cuban soldiers fought one another directly in the Angolan Civil War. The continent also saw the Ethiopian Civil War, the War in Mozambique, the Second Sudanese Civil War, and the Somali Rebellion. Combined with 20 successful coups across the continent during the 1980s, Africa remained a persistent source of instability. Soviet-bloc states supplied the ANC and other anti-apartheid movements in South Africa with both lethal and non-lethal aid, while in the United States a Disinvestment Movement grew. The U.S. Congress eventually passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act over President Reagan's veto, a measure that struck a significant blow to the South African economy.

  In Latin America, the Sandinista movement led by Daniel Ortega had overthrown the ruling Somoza family in Nicaragua in 1979. The Reagan administration committed to removing that government and funded anti-communist forces known as the Contras. When Congress limited Contra aid to $24 million in late 1983, members of the administration sought to circumvent those restrictions, which eventually produced the Iran-Contra Scandal. U.S. aid to Central American governments peaked in 1985 at $1.2 billion before declining sharply. In 1983, U.S. forces invaded Grenada, toppling the Cuban-backed People's Revolutionary Government.

  In the Middle East, the Iran-Iraq War drew in superpower interests on multiple sides: Iraq received arms from both the Soviet Union and the West, yet Iran fought that combined backing to a standstill, and the conflict did not end until 1988 with a status quo ante-bellum ceasefire after more than a million deaths. The period of the 12th of June 1982, saw one million people march in New York City against the nuclear arms race, in what remains the largest gathering of protesters in American history, part of a peace and anti-nuclear movement that had grown dramatically across Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan.

• 8. Culture Under the Shadow

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  In November 1983, President Reagan watched a private screening of The Day After, a film depicting a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. He was said to be deeply affected by it. He subsequently revised his posture on nuclear arms in favor of eventual nuclear abolition, at least in part because of that experience.

  The fear of nuclear war had found its way into popular culture at every level. In 1982, Nicole Hohloch won the Eurovision Song Contest with "Ein bißchen Frieden," a German-language song about the fear of war. In 1983, Nena's "99 Luftballons" imagined balloons drifting through the sky and triggering a war that left the Earth in ruins. In 1984, Alphaville released "Forever Young," which directly addressed living in a world armed with nuclear weapons.

  The board wargame industry published dozens of titles during this period, ranging in scale from individual soldiers to global thermonuclear conflict. Historical subjects included the Falklands War, the Iran-Iraq War, the invasion of Grenada, and the Angolan Civil War. The majority of titles, however, focused on hypothetical Warsaw Pact invasions of Western Europe. Notable releases included Harpoon in 1983, The Third World War series in 1984, and Gulf Strike in 1983.

  Videogames took up the same themes. Atari's Missile Command appeared in 1980. Raid over Moscow arrived in 1984, allowing players to destroy the Soviet capital. Theatre Europe in 1985 simulated a conventional war between Warsaw Pact and NATO forces, and notably advised strongly against using nuclear weapons, a design choice that reflected the anxieties of its audience. The geopolitical simulation Balance of Power, released in 1985, let players manage superpower competition directly. The Polish Solidarity movement, 10 million members strong after the government legalized it on the 31st of August 1980, would eventually outlast all of these conflicts, with Poland holding its first free post-World War II elections in 1989.