Lecture 11

Question 1

1. Strategic Defense Initiative

Answer 1

What caused the war to end?
The US won!
The US’ economic strength ultimately won the CW. Soviets couldn’t compete with Star Wars (strategic defence initiative/Star Wars) and couldn’t sustain satellite states and funding communists around the world.
(This is a variant of a realist explanation: Soviets couldn’t compete, therefore had to do arms talks, therefore had to change the economy, therefore the CW ended)

Question 2

2. Perestroika

Answer 2

• Gorbachev introduces policies to improve economy: restructuring (perestroika) and openness (glasnost) – open to discuss what’s wrong with the economy so it can be fixed. Problem: can’t keep ‘openness’ quarantined on economic issues. More dissent.
  Caused the war to end
  Individuals: Gorbachev : choice of glasnost and perestroika; chose not to respond to crumbling empire; relationship between R and G. This explanation given weight by the fact that it’s entirely possible that no economic restructure would have taken place in the USSR without him – totalitarian regimes can be suicidal and refuse to respond to the pressure of the system, in this case economic pressure.
  -reform the Soviet economy to allow socialism to work better; required openness

Question 3

3. Yuri Andropov

Answer 3

What’s going on with the Soviets??
Andropov and Operation RYaN
1981 meeting: Brezhnev and Andropov announce The United States is preparing a secret nuclear attack on the USSR
Able Archer 83 – November 1983
* Practice for all-out war in Europe, including a simulated DEFCON 1 coordinated nuclear attack.
* Included lots of realistic detail (including coded communication and the participation of prime ministers)
* Andropov is in hospital
* Soviets had used exercises as a cover for the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968
* Soviets raise alert level: load warheads onto combat planes
* (much of this detail only known since 2013, still don’t have all of it)
The Able Archer controversy has featured numerous descriptions of the exercise as so “routine” that it could not have alarmed the Soviet military and political leadership. Today’s posting reveals multiple non-routine elements, including: a 170-flight, radio-silent air lift of 19,000 US soldiers to Europe, the shifting of commands from “Permanent War Headquarters to the Alternate War Headquarters,” the practice of “new nuclear weapons release procedures,” including consultations with cells in Washington and London, and the “sensitive, political issue” of numerous “slips of the tongue” in which B-52 sorties were referred to as nuclear “strikes.” These variations, seen through “the fog of nuclear exercises,” did in fact match official Soviet intelligence-defined indicators for “possible operations by the USA and its allies on British territory in preparation for RYaN” — the KGB code name for a feared Western nuclear missile attack (Raketno-Yadernoye Napadenie)
National Security Archive, 21 May 2013

Question 4

4. Solidarity (movement)

Answer 4

• The Solidarity movement in Poland in the early 1980s is a very popular oppotision labour movement eventually including 1/3 of workers; supported by foreign aid. Its extensive peaceful protests are NOT met by force for the first time (remember all those protests crushed by military means in Berlin, Hungary, Czech). This encourages further dissent..
  By 1989, fast moving events with no Soviet response encourages spread of dissent.
• Soviets pull out of Afghanistan in March 1989
• Hungary turns off electric fence on border with Austria, border fence eventually cut: no reaction (April)
• Polish Solidarity wins election and forms government (Aug/Sept)
• Mass East German protests culminating in wall coming down
  By 1990, all the former satellite states are independent.

Question 5

5. Reykjavik Summit

Answer 5

Reykjavík summit of 1986, meeting held in Reykjavík, Iceland, on October 11 and 12, 1986, between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. The meeting, the second between the two leaders, was intended not as a summit but as a session in which the leaders explored the possibility of limiting each country’s strategic nuclear weapons to create momentum in ongoing arms-control negotiations. The Reykjavík summit almost resulted in a sweeping nuclear arms-control agreement in which the nuclear weapons of both sides would be dismantled. Although no agreement was reached, many historians and government officials, including Gorbachev himself, later considered the Reykjavík summit a turning point in the Cold War.