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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 Sovietleader 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. Many military conflicts occurred, including Soviet war in Afghanistan, the 1981 Gulf of Sidra incident and the US invasion of Grenada.

Main events

 

Carter and Brezhnev sign SALT II, 1979

U.S. President Jimmy Carter tried to 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 perhaps 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.

Margaret Thatcher became the British Prime Minister in 1979, and Ronald Reagan was inaugurated US President in 1981. Both Reagan and Thatcher denounced the Soviet Union in ideological terms that rivaled those of the worst days of the Cold War in the late 1940s,^[2] with the former famously vowing to leave the “evil empire” on the “ash heap of history“. Pope John Paul II helped provide a moral focus for anti-communism; a visit to his native Poland in 1979 stimulated a religious and nationalist upsurge that galvanized opposition and may have led to his attempted assassination two years later.^[3]

The “new conservatives” or “neoconservatives” rebelled against both the Nixon-era détente 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.

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. A tedious guerrilla war continued. 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.

 

Alliances in 1980.

 

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.

The shooting down by Soviet fighters of civilian airliner Korean Air Lines Flight 007 also increased tensions. However, the Able Archer 83 exercise in November 1983, a realistic simulation of a coordinated Western European nuclear release, was met with no official reaction from the Soviet leadership although operation RYAN suggested otherwise.

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 inPoland. Martial law in Poland was implemented from 1981 to 1983.

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.

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 (The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, Octopussy, and most particularly The Living Daylights set in war-torn Afghanistan with Bond vs. the KGB directly), while films such as White Nights and Rocky IV exploited contemporaneous tense Soviet-American relations.

See also

• History of the Soviet Union (1953-1985)
• History of the United States (1980-1988)
• Timeline of Events in the Cold War

Footnotes

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