Sparks Commentary: Reagan and “Star Wars”: Bringing the fall of the Wall and the end of the Cold War

"Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate ... Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

- President Ronald Reagan, standing at the Brandenburg Gate on 12 June 1987

Two rival superpowers with nuclear weapons

People in my generation may not always be aware of it today, but the world was afraid of a nuclear war for over forty years of the last century. It was called the "Cold War," for those who don't know, and the scariest thing about it was that this nuclear holocaust could actually happen. Two superpowers had nuclear weapons - which were, of course, the United States and the Soviet Union - and these two superpowers disliked and distrusted each other greatly.

Berlin Wall, 1986

An eerie description of the Cold War from a previous century

The words of a philosopher from 300 years ago could be seen as an accurate description of this twentieth-century conflict, and an eerie one at that. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that "persons of sovereign authority [or in this case, nations] ... [are] in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their [nations]; and continual spies on their neighbors; which is a posture of war." (Source: "Leviathan" [published 1651], Chapter XIII, the subsection entitled "The incommodities of such a war") Thus, in many important ways, Thomas Hobbes' timeless quotation is an apt description of the Cold War.

Blockade (or "quarantine") of Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962

Mutual Assured Destruction

We call it the "Cold War," because with rare exceptions, the two superpowers never engaged each other in direct open conflict on a battlefield. (Although they did fight proxy wars in places like Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan; where they shot at each other's allies and financed each other's enemies.) Why did they not fight each other directly? The answer is summed up in a famous phrase from that time, which is "Mutual Assured Destruction." Often abbreviated "MAD" (which reads like an English word for "crazy," for my international readers), this basically meant that if either side attacked the other directly, they risked a nuclear holocaust that would completely annihilate both sides (and a lot of others in between). Attacking the other side was suicidal, in other words, and neither side could afford to fight this nuclear war. Because of this, it was assumed that no one would ever win the "Cold War," and the idea that you could succeed in doing so was deemed reckless (even dangerous). This policy, it was thought, would lead to Armageddon.

"Castle Romeo" nuclear weapon test - Bikini Atoll, 1954

Ronald Reagan and the "Strategic Defense Initiative" (a. k. a. "Star Wars")

Imagine the reaction, then, when American president Ronald Reagan made the argument that we could actually win the Cold War, and succeed in overthrowing communism by so doing. You could undermine the enemy through a massive arms buildup with more nuclear weapons, he said; although this was not the risk of nuclear war that liberals have sometimes made it out to be. The communist economy of the Soviet Union could ill afford such an arms race with the United States, and this was part of the reason for its eventual collapse. (But I'm getting ahead of myself here.) The race involved some new stockpiles of nuclear weapons, I should acknowledge here, but also involved a (somewhat controversial) new research program called the "Strategic Defense Initiative" (or "SDI" for short). This new research program was revolutionary for a number of reasons, and its essence was to defend the free world against nuclear missile attacks after they had already been launched (if such a thing were ever to happen). This was a step away from the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, which aimed to prevent the attacks by threatening a retaliation (although this threat of retaliation was still pursued concurrently with SDI via the arms buildup). The idea was to destroy the missile before it hit its target, and the technology that this would have required to work was so advanced that its critics called it "Star Wars" - a reference to the 1977 science fiction film by George Lucas.

Artist's conception of a proposed missile defense system, 1984

The missile defense system scared the Soviets, even though the technology didn't work ...

I should acknowledge here that this "missile defense" program never actually worked, and there has never yet been a way to stop a nuclear missile once it's launched. (Although I pray to God that we'll one day find a way to stop one.) But there are two things that are often forgotten here by the "Star Wars" critics, I think. One is that a missile defense system had not yet been tried then, and we had good reason to investigate its feasibility before deciding whether to scrap or abandon the idea. The other is that, feasible or not, it had the intended effect of scaring the Soviets, which is a forgotten aspect of SDI that had a positive effect. They spent a lot of money trying to "keep up" with the Americans, in other words, and their communist economy could ill afford the heavy bills from this endeavor. Thus, the Soviet economy accelerated its collapse, and the end of the Cold War drew nearer.

Soviet Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile, or "ICBM" (specifically, an R-36 model)

There were actually fewer nuclear weapons in the long run after SDI

President Reagan was criticized by some for building so many nuclear weapons, and people feared that this would bring the world closer to an actual nuclear war. But the ironic thing about this is that in the long run, there were actually fewer weapons, since the two superpowers both reached mutual agreements to reduce their nuclear stockpiles. You might think that it was thus a waste to build more nuclear arsenals just to destroy them afterwards. But the fact that the Soviets actually reduced their weapons via these agreements seems to have been owing to the strong bargaining position that the Americans had in these negotiations. The Soviets would never have agreed to reduce their nuclear weapons without the strong American military power granted by the new weapons from President Reagan. The creation of more weapons in the short run thus led to fewer weapons in the long run, and the Strategic Defense Initiative thus reduced the potential for nuclear war.

Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, 1987

The Revolutions of 1989: The Berlin Wall comes down at last

President Reagan left office in 1989, I should note here, and the command of the American military thus went to the new president George H. W. Bush, who had been Ronald Reagan's vice president just before he took office. It was during this first Bush administration that Eastern Europe's reaction to communism began to turn into full blown revolution. The revolution began in Poland as early as 1980, and soon spread to Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. A few years earlier, these revolutions would have been crushed, and the similar revolutions in earlier times - some of which I will list below - had been crushed by the Soviet Union. (Specifically, the uprising in East Germany in 1953, the protests in Poland in 1956, the massive revolution in Hungary in 1956, and the "Prague Spring" reforms in Czechoslovakia in 1968.) But the bills from this arms race were now taking a toll on the Soviet economy, and so sending troops to quell these revolts was now proving too expensive for the Soviets. The result was that, for the first time in forty years, the Soviets began to lose these confrontations with the rebels; and the Soviet grip on these countries suddenly (very suddenly) slipped away. The communists lost an election in Poland in an anti-communist landslide, the physical "Iron Curtain" was torn down in Hungary, and the Berlin Wall fell in East Germany. The prospects for freedom in Eastern Europe had seldom looked so bright.

Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989

Revolutionaries on the streets in the Romanian Revolution of 1989

The collapse of the Soviet Union: The Cold War finally ends

East Germany was eventually reunified with West Germany in 1990, and thus became part of the capitalist nation that we know today simply as "Germany." In the coming years, other communist satellites would revolt against the Soviet Union; and no less than 14 countries declared independence from the Soviet Union between 1990 and 1991. (I might also mention that there were revolutions in communist Yugoslavia and nearby communist Albania; and although they were no longer part of the Eastern Bloc, they were undoubtedly part of this massive wave of anti-communist revolutions.) The Soviets were powerless to stop these revolts, of course, and they would certainly have crushed them if they'd had the chance. Despite all the revisionist nonsense to the contrary, they hated to lose their conquests, and did try to crack down on Lithuania's independence movement (and even succeeded in doing so for a time). The Soviets actually enacted some new reform policies at home, though, which they called "glasnost" and "perestroika" (Russian words meaning "openness" and "restructuring" respectively). These are often attributed - or rather, misattributed - to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The problem with this is that Gorbachev was actually against both of these policies (as the record shows), and he only agreed to do them when the collapsing economy of that time forced him to do so. He was trying to keep communism alive by just rolling it back a little bit, and not completely doing away with it. When a revolution within Soviet Russia thus forced Gorbachev out of power, it was only then that the communist system finally ended in Soviet Russia, and the Cold War ended with it.

Tanks in Red Square, Moscow 1991 - Soviet coup d'état attempt

Who deserves the credit for ending the Cold War? (Hint: It isn't Mikhail Gorbachev ... )

Liberals attribute the end of the Cold War to Mikhail Gorbachev, and it's easy to see why they'd want to do this. Being sympathetic with communism (and left-wing politics generally), they want to credit this communist left-winger for bringing about the peace after the Cold War. Being antithetical to conservatism, they are reluctant to give the glory or credit to Ronald Reagan - who is a conservative Republican, and their opponent in every way. But Ronald Reagan is clearly the one who is the obvious candidate for this honor, and his Strategic Defense Initiative deserves the credit for these results in many ways. While other presidents did set the stage for this through various foreign policies in earlier phases of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan is the most immediate cause of the peace and the eventual victory, and the hero of the hour at this ending (and defining) moment.

Ronald Reagan

The lion's share of the credit belongs to Ronald Reagan

Many in my generation have never even heard of the "Cold War," and its invisibility would seem to be the powerful evidence that the greatest threats are in the past now. There is talk of a Second Cold War, unfortunately; but the first one, at least, would seem to be over at this time. The superpowers have dismantled many of their weapons from the Cold War era, and the threat of a nuclear war is much reduced from what it was before. A wall has crumbled, a curtain has fallen, and a continent is free of communism. And the lion's share of the credit for this belongs to Ronald Reagan.

"What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term - the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people."

- President Ronald Reagan's address to the British House of Commons (July 8, 1982)

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East Germany before the Wall fell

Construction of the Wall in 1961

"Able Archer 83": A close brush with nuclear war during the Cold War

In defense of Ronald Reagan: Helping the mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan War

A review of CNN's "Cold War" miniseries

Part of a series about

Communism