The Cold War Era Essay Research Paper — страница 3

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SALT Interim Agreement which froze the number of ballistic missile launchers at 1972 levels but did not limit munitions. In December of 1979, the Soviet Union sent troops to Afghanistan. President Jimmy Carter condemned the invasion, canceled U.S. participation in the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, and asked the Senate to postpone action on SALT II, which he had just sent to the senate for ratification. In addition, Carter devised a wider range of nuclear options, including the implementation of command-and-control measures that would, in theory, insure that the United States could fight a delayed nuclear conflict. In November 1980, Ronald Reagan campaigned on the premise that the United States had become dangerously weak, and after elected, said SALT II was fatally flawed, and

that the way to end the Cold War was to win it. Nuclear weapons were deployed in Europe by both the United States and the East. Both sides willfully delude themselves that a nuclear war can remain limited or even be won. In 1980, both sides officially declared nuclear war thinkable. (Moore) Reagan accelerated the weapons buildup started by Jimmy Carter, and insulted Soviets by calling them the evil empire. Pro-nuclear build-up champion, Eugene Rostow, previously with Carter, became director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, an organization dedicated to persuading the nation that the Soviet Union was dangerously ahead of the United States in nuclear weaponry. In 1983, Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), dubbed Star Wars) resurrecting the long-dead

fantasy of unfurling an anti-ballistic missile umbrella over the United States. This action simultaneously coincides with a decreasing G.N.P and increasing unemployment rates causing criticism from the American public. SDI would violate the ABM Treaty, leading the nation back into the nuclear arms race. The United States and Soviet Union cut off all communication. After protests from around the world, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in December of 1987, eliminating all weapons. Public opinion had made it clear to the Reagan administration that we were fed up and it became politically savvy to sign the INF. Soviet power internationally had been declining for years and with the intelligence of their new leader,

Mikhail Gorbachev, the Cold War was ended. The build-up of nuclear arms- the potential for annihilation- may have prevented World War III, however it was only the public s opinion and outrage that led us to this feat. Governments were prepared to use their weapons in order to win. From the beginning, both sides seemed to have dismissed possibilities for a peaceful resolution of the Cold War conflict. The Cold War helped the Soviet Union ingrain its military-bureaucratic ruling class into power and it gave the US a way to coerce its population to fund high-tech industry. Both were not easy accomplishments but were satisfied by the constant insistence of the threat of the great enemy. This phase has ended, but conflicts continue. The Soviet Union may have called off the war, but

the U.S. is continuing as before, even more freely with Soviet obstruction a thing of the past. George Bush celebrated the symbolic end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, by immediately invading Panama and announcing that the U.S. would overturn Nicaragua s election by maintaining its economic stranglehold and military attack unless our side won. With the threat of the Soviet Union no longer existing the U.S. is now free to use unlimited force against almost anyone it may choose. The end of the Cold War has caused its problems too as new enemies have needed to be invented. This problem has been solved quite easily if you were to look at the United States current international footing. A new and possibly better convincing enemy has been found in the likes of Saddam

Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The U.S. government has continued a policy of convincing the American public of the great evil existing elsewhere to achieve their economic, technological and defensive objectives.