How exactly did the Cold War end, and who exactly won it, and lost it?
I like this summary, provided by someone or something called “The Friendly Ghost”, which he (it) wrote in response to the accusation that the current President of the US has also been telling the occasional untruth.
When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he was briefed on the military capabilities of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. At the end of the briefing, Reagan asked, “Is that all the forces we can afford?” The answer was yes. The president then asked, “Then how can the Soviet Union afford such a huge military?” He was told they couldn’t. At that point, Reagan decided to see the Soviet Union’s 20-year military build-up, and raised them Star Wars.
Now, President Reagan couldn’t just say he was building a shield to shoot down ICBMs. He had to demonstrate that the technology actually worked. But it didn’t really work. So the decision was made to rig the tests, so that it looked like the system worked. In other words, HE LIED. But the Soviets believed the lie, and bankrupted themselves trying to catch up to the Americans. Gorbachev eventually came to power, and shouted “glasnost!” A few years later, the Soviet Union dissolved.
The moral of the story? By telling a lie, Ronald Reagan helped bring down the United States’ biggest, most powerful enemy, without firing a shot. Sun Tsu would be proud.
I’m not exactly sure what the provenance of the above is. It seems to be a summary of things that the Friendly Ghost guy got from this guy.
The Friendly Ghost then continues, in his own voice, so to speak.
Yes, the story is a simplification of events. But a couple of months ago, I watched a documentary on the History Channel about Star Wars. The Soviets really were that paranoid about SDI, at least for a few years. Although by the time of the Reykjavik Summit, there was some suspicion about the effectiveness of SDI, Reagan’s actions in not giving it up helped sustain the illusion in many minds in the Soviet leadership. But the most telling statistic? When the Soviet Union fell, it was discovered that the CIA had woefully underestimated Soviet military spending. The Soviets were spending 25% of their GNP on their military. Yes Virginia, there was a reason the Soviet Union fell. The military spending killed the economy. And why were the Soviets spending so much on their military? Two words: Ronald Reagan.
I was always of and remain of the opinion that the proper percentage figure for Soviet “defence” spending was one hundred.
A lot of my libertarian friends, acquaintances and competitors believe that the USSR would have collapsed anyway, a victim of its own “internal contradictions” – i.e. its useless economy, inability to make PCs or washing machines or jeans or decent cars, or make sensible use of fax machines and photocopiers.
My feeling about that is, maybe it would, but how might it have collapsed? Had the old USSR not been faced by a weapon-wielding USA breathing fire, brimstone and Tom Cruise movies all over it, and flashing cool photos of stealth bombers all over the place, might the USSR not have collapsed outwards, so to speak? Might it perhaps have attacked lazy, fat, pre-occupied Western Europe, in order to get more plunder, and to divert its domestic population from its domestic griefs with foreign glories, Henry V style – and because it preferred going out with a bang to going out with the whimper that it actually did go out with?
My favourite end-of-Cold-War moment came in the late eighties when, on a British TV show, a Dimbleby asked Caspar Weinberger what defence spending was being “prioritised”. Said Weinberger, after a thoughtful pause: “Well, pretty much everything.” I knew then that it was over.
I know, I’m a libertarian and I’m not supposed to enjoy stuff like that, but I did and I do. Given what Reagan could do with the buttons he had on his desk, and did not have, I think he did very well.
What Reagan did was to restore confidence that the US could defeat the USSR because its system worked, and communism didn’t. This was not a confidence shared by many in the years following our withdrawal from Vietnam, and the Iranian revolution.
In short, he believed in capitalism. He knew that the USSR could not keep pace forever, precisely because it was, economically and militarily speaking, a dragon eating its own tail. Carter, on the other hand, was quite convinced that the communist juggernaut was unbeatable, and did not share Reagan’s conviction that America was institutionally superior to the Soviet Union.
While most of the American political establishment had consigned itself to defeat or stalemate, Reagan was busy trying to win. And win he did. Whatever else you can say about the man–good, bad, or indifferent–it all withers in the shadow of this one achievement, the only one that, in hindsight, seems to have really mattered at the time.
I must admit for a moment there I thought you were thinking of Star Wars the movie. Images flashed across my mind of Han Solo sabotaging tractor production, Chewbacca running illegal distilleries and Princess Leia swapping the plans for the top secret missile guidance station for bogus ones with the result that it was built the wrong way round.
Ah, but you meant SDI. That Star Wars.
I wonder if, not least in part, the world’s (including the Soviet Union’s) assumption that Reagan was a dumbass actually helped the deception. “Comrade, he’s too stupid to lie.”
I recall a good deal of fuss being made by people lobbying for various things in the late 70s and early 80s about the Soviets’ extraordinary (at least: unbelievable, actually) superiority in various arms. Special forces and particle weapons spring to mind… I’ve always taken it that this was by way of compensation for the impossibility of pretending their conscript forces were as reliable or their ships and aircraft as sophisticated.
The US’s high-tech weponry was setting an impossibly hot pace even by the Eisenhower era. Perhaps the Soviet war machine wasn’t defeated by Reagan’s strategy so much as by lobbyists for the military industrial complex over a longer period.
Decades before the Reagan presidency, the US was effectively (if unknowingly) pushing the USSR to the brink with defense-related expenditures. I’m presently reading a biography, “Khrushchev: The Man and His Era,” by William Taubman (highly recommended). During the late 50’s, the Soviet Union came upon something it could do “better” than the US: Make big rockets to put satellites (eg, Sputnik) into orbit. But this was a frightfully expensive undertaking for the USSR, and it become even more so when America began to match the Soviet achievements. The costs of the Soviet program not only drained the defense budget, it created an appreciable drag on the entire Soviet economy.
Re: alleged American falsifying of “Starwars” testing. I was part of the Pentagon’s operations research/operational testing community in the 1980s. I find this allegation absurd — not only because we just didn’t do business that way but because, if we had, you can be assured a “whistleblower” would have informed some very accessible Washington Post correspondent.
W/in the past 5 years, I believe, the WSJ had an article on some of the commericial uses that Star Wars had given us. They profiled 4 of them. The only one I could remember was dentistry.
Star wars may have been threatening but the B-2 bomber may have been the real killer. With its stealth abilities, it made the Russian air defense network worthless. IIRC, They would have had to deploy a RADAR net over three times as dense as their existing net to to maintain parity with the threat. Stealth was an proven capability that they hadn’t addressed rather than a future threat they needed to meet. It put the Russians immediately behind with no idea of how much worse it would get.
The success of stealth (Russians had written papers on it but didn’t think you could make a stealth design fly) also made the SDI look achievable for the US.
The full scope of what Reagan did and what he was trying to do and what he set out to do has not yet been fully appreciated. He was one of the most focused people who ever rose to the presidency. His entire adult life was directed at bringing down communism. And he understood all the most important basic facts, i.e. the fundamental weakness of the socialist Soviet economy, the strength of American capitalism, the basic evil of their system, the basic decency of ours, the willingness of the majority of Americans to accept these facts and act on them, their willingness to create and employ massive military power, all joined to a disdain for the elite opinion which held contrary views. They have spent the last 15 years rewriting the ’80s, and the whole Cold War. Let’s do our best to pluck the truth of those times out of the memory hole. Lessons forgotten will end up being repeated. The man was a hero.
Most of the foregoing comments are on the mark — except about falsifying tests. I was not in the Pentagon — but as noted above a whistleblower would have outed any such thing essentially immediately. In American society conspiracies last about ten minutes, the time it takes someone to duck around the corner and make a phone call.
It is OK to be a libertarian and enjoy things like photos of the incredible B2 bomber. Freedom is freedom. The forceful, intelligent, militant defense of freedom is something to be proud of. I suppose a libertarian who was over toward the anarchist end of the spectrum would say we should not have had the Reagan arms build up since the State is always evil, blah blah. Whatever. Ideological abstractions belong in coffee shops. Libertarian views will succeed when and to the extent they accomodate the reality of armed and organized evil which must be resisted, and what means will actually work to resist these dangers. Soviet Communism required a massive commitment to defeat. Islamic terrorism/fascism will require a smaller but still large and long-lasting commitment. The thing is both to defeat the danger and to preserve our libertarian principles as best we can under real and severe constraints.
This is an interesting challenge, but we are up to it.
Star Wars was just part of the whole Cold War strategy of maintaining sufficient uncertainty as to what would happen should the Cold War go hot – would the US president *really* press the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) button?
Reagan played his part in this brilliantly. At the time, and even now, I was never sure whether Reagan was for real or just playing a role that he understood the significance of. I suspect it was a mixture of both. Surely the most outstanding performance of all time.
In American society conspiracies last about ten minutes, the time it takes someone to duck around the corner and make a phone call.
While I am not a fan of conspiracy theories, the CIA did manage to hide the real purpose of the Glomar Explorer
for several years. In fact its cover story of mining deep sea metallic modules got considerable press. I for example followed it with interest.
Reagan … His entire adult life was directed at bringing down communism.
Well, I thought (and think) Reagan was a marvelous president. But it can’t be denied that some of his “adult life” was “directed at” making Grade B movies (which I thoroughly enjoy, btw).
Perhaps what he meant was his adult political life.
But, Reagan very clearly saw communism for what it was. Supposedly, he had some writings in the 70s that were extremely articulate and laid out most of what Lex mentions above. Those who call him a dunce ignored these. He was quite focused on defeating communism and more importantly he had a plan.
I remember reading a while back Gorbachev’s recounting of the Iceland summit and when the 2 men had their one on one in which the only other people present were interpreters. He spoke about how he tried to get Reagan to deal on SDI and while Reagan didn’t grasp the technical aspects of it, he knew that it was non-negotiable and the key to putting the screws to the Soviets. Gorbachev said he gained some respect for Reagan as a leader and as a negotiater during the summit and knew that he was not to be taken lightly.
I also remember some history wonks on TV in January of 1989 saying that Reagan’s presidency would be looked back on as an insignificant president. Fortunately, even liberals are coming to the realization that he was an important president. So much so that they are even trying to co-op some of his beliefs. One of the major U.S. magazines recently did a cover story saying Reagan had a great “liberal” presidency (yes, liberal in the American context). Something to keep an eye on. But, I think it’s not a stretch to say that Reagan was the 2nd most important U.S. president of the 20th century (FDR being the 1st obviously)
Thank you, Russ. I can see now that “Death Valley Days” was in fact a precursor to the death of communism.
His “own words” on the Star Wars bluff was my take on it too, although some History Channel shows that I saw tended to credit Gorbachev and his Glasnost “vision.” He apparently realized, apart from Reagan, that the command economy wasn’t cutting it.
But I’ve come to regard the History Channel as politically leaning to the Left, so I’m suspicious of their undercutting of Reagan.
Your point about the Soviet Union “collapsing outward” is valid too, though. I’ve heard that the growing stream of people escaping the Eastern Bloc was instrumental in “tearing down this wall,” so it actually was collapsing outward.
But the final straw may have been the Soviet military’s quagmire and utter failure in Afghanistan in the late 80’s.
‘His “own words”… ‘ Who’s own words, Paul?
“He apparently realized, apart from Reagan…” Who apparently realized, Paul?
‘Your point about the Soviet Union “collapsing outward” is valid too…’ Who’s point, Paul?
Honest attempts to follow comments on this site are difficult when the comments are posted without due consideration for those who might wish to read and understand them.
As a former “Star Warrior” I can assure you that all the stuff I worked on worked as advertised, or possibly even better. The Dems in congress at the time were believers in the soviet system, and saw the program as an assault on their core beliefs. They couldn’t be seen voting against the stuff, because that would make them “weak on defense” so they voted R&D money only, for what seemed like the least likely parts. Initially the Space Based Laser. There was an article in Scientific American totally debunking the idea that such a thing could ever work, but 18 months after start of work, a 1/4 scale prototype was ready to be tested on a shuttle flight. This caused the R&D money to dissapear immediately and be shifted to Ground based Laser and Kinetic Kill Vehicles (hit to kill).
Within a year or so, however, both of these technologies were ready for demonstration, and the laser had been bounced from Sandia via 2 satelite mirrors, to a target on or near the Falklands.
All this was documented in Aviation Week and Space Technology, known in the industry as “Aviation Leak and Space Treachery”. Their attitude was that if it couldn’t be kept secret from them, it wasn’t likely to be a secret from the Russians.
The Dems still hold to their core belief in Socialist command economies, and are as weak on defense as ever. President Gore would have had everybody attend sensitivity classes to help us understand why those Muslims attacked us, and learn to sympathise with them.
Having a bad night or something George? “His own words” I think he means Gorbachev, but I’m not totally sure on that one, it is a little unclear. But, Gorbachev is the “who” Paul is clearly referring to in the 2nd comment you quote and the last one that you cirticize is his addressing the author of the original post (Brian) which makes perfect sense to address as “your” sense we are all essentially responding to Brian in some shape or form.
As has been supported by “star warriors” here, SDI was far more than a bluff. It was more like the Apollo Project… with work done simultaneously on more than one approach, with the expectation that some would fail.
With good sensor technology, it isn’t all that hard to make a reasonable* SDI system. The real problem is political: the easiest effective SDI system uses nuclear warheads on the interceptors – specifically enhanced radiation weapons (“neutron bombs”). I hope that our current interceptor system secretly has some nuclear warheads in the plan, although it is unlikely given the treachery in the anti-defense part of congress.
The current system was cleverly designed by the Clinton administration to not work, but to appear to work… that way he did his normal triangulation… placating the hawks while reassuring the peaceniks that we weren’t really deploying anything that would threaten their immoral vision: that MAD or total disarmament were the only acceptable geopolitical configurations.
Hit-to-kill (the technology on the system now being built) is hard. With good technology, which we have, it is possible. However, I suspect (I’m an engineer but with no access to classified information) that it is far too easy to hide the incoming weapon from such an interceptor. After all, it has to directly hit a target as small as a pitcher of water in order to score a kill. Decoys and balloons which surround warheads are simple and inexpensive methods to defeat such technology, unless we have something really exotic like a highly directional neutron source or something.
But put a nuke on it and the story changes. You just have to get close.
NOTE 1: the Russians (and today, the Chinese) have plenty of physicists and engineers to evaluate the feasibility of these systems. If they were afraid, it was because these technical types were not convinced that the system was impossible.
NOTE 2: Scientific American is an extremely biased publication when it comes to subjects of interest to the left (for example, see this). Thus its articles on nuclear war, nuclear deterrence and ABM/SDI systems are often slanted. One can get some interesting information from them, but don’t expect to find the whole story!
NOTE 3: “reasonable” has different meanings in different contexts. In the cold war context, it means capable of disabling enough incoming warheads to raise significant uncertainty about the effectiveness of a first strike in destroying counterstrike capability. This is still important with regard to China, which is why they are strongly opposed to this system.
On the other hand, if it means taking care of a last-gasp spasm of nuclear missiles from a dying tyranny (as could happen in North Korea), “reasonable” means getting every warhead, which is a much higher standard.
It was not an accident that the Soviets collapsed late in the 1980’s. Apart from the contribution of Reagan, which I agree will be greatly appreciated as time and distance allow a more disinterested analysis by historians less ideologically challenged, there were many articles during the ’70’s and ’80’s about the primitive level of Soviet technology.
I recall one case where a pilot defected with his Soviet plane to Japan (or Korea). The plane was a knockoff of our F15. When our military and tech people got to look at it, they were astounded to find its main component was fabricated steel, instead of the complex metals we used. The range was also way below what our estimates had been.
Most of all, the electronics were simply not in the same decade as ours. And herein was a key. The Soviets were great at big, but hopeless at small. The avionics and computers were 10 years out of date, and the military people especially knew they could never make up the gap. Apple, Microsoft, and the PC revolution we are currently enjoying was barely beginning, and Soviet computers still filled whole rooms.
In the 1973 Yom Kippur war, the Isreali air force shot down several hundred Soviet made aircraft using our planes and technology without a single loss. Part of Breznhev’s (sp?) detente ruse was an attempt to buy time so they could rebuild the Soviet military from a mass to a high tech force. They tried desparately to copy computer and other technology that they could not develop for themselves.
There was an anecdote from this period involving the high level delegation from the US that went to Moscow to negotiate a big trade deal which would “bring us all closer together”. After weeks of talks, the deal was finally set. At a big ceremony in front of the newscameras, the main actors sat down with their embossed copies all ready to sign.
The hosts passed out special pens, and, as the cameras rolled, pen after pen failed, gooped, or slobbered. Finally, one of the US delegates pulled his Parker T-Ball Jotter out of his pocket and got things going. It was later noticed that the Soviet delegate had pocketed the Jotter, another hi-tech candidate for re-engineering.
The tanks that blew through the Iraqi forces in both Gulf wars were better because of their MICRO technology, not their size or engine power or some other easily copied feature. It would be very interesting to go back and read some of the anti-military, and especially anti-high tech, speeches made by some of those who consistently opposed and criticized defense expenditures over the past 20 years. Credibility should be earned by being correct at least once in a while.
I believe the missiles deployed around Moscow are nuclear tipped. Nike Zeus, had it not been scrapped by Democrats, would today be better than 98% effective. I did not like a few things Reagan did – his giving in to California income tax withholding made it possible for Democrats to spend us into today’s flameout, but he did say “Tear down that wall!” Remember that, because I doubt it is being taught in schools.
And if Powell had had his way, Ronnie wouldn’t have said that!
The left despises him. Especially the latest paper out of Berserkely on the characteristics of a conservative. RR and Hitler in the same sentence.
Superhawk and sort-of libertarian Barry Goldwater is widely regarded as Reagans’s spiritual forefather. If he’d been elected in 1964 instead of LBJ, could he have won the cold war back then?
Or would he have started WWIII? He rather famously advocated winning the Vietnam war by cutting off the VCs supply lines in China by…invading China. He also proposed an extensive defoliating Nam with nuclear bombs.
Amazing, really, to think someone with such extreme views ever got on the ballot.
Kit,
Amazing ,really, that George McGovern with such extreme views ever got on the ballot, too.
But, Nixon did to McGovern in the election, what Johnson did to Goldwater.
I’ve got an early short WWII training film on tape.
Ronnie is playing the pilot of a P40, first going into combat and remembering his training on how to survive an encounter with a Zero.
I wonder if they’ve got that in the archives aboard our newest carrier.
One other crucial point about the USSR collapse.
The dramatic failure of Russian tanks and planes during the first gulf war made them basically unsellable to 3rd world forces.
When a large source of money coming in really dried up, this really knocked the supports out from under the Russian military complex.
Hi folks,
I hope that with my story, I didn’t imply that the Strategic Defense Inititive was impossible. It is, I’m just not sure how successful it would be. But there is open-source material, including newspapers, that reported that tests during the Reagan era were rigged. It is my belief that the effectiveness of the 1980s tests were greatly exaggerated. I also believe that was a GOOD thing.
Personally, one of the reasons I posted the story is because I’m tired of the line, “Bush lied, people died.” I wanted to tell a story in which people would say, “Reagan lied, the Soviet Union died.”
P.S. – I know that the demise of the Soviet Union took a 40+ year Cold War that was supported by both Republicans AND Democrats. It’s just that in the 1980s, loud voices from the left-wing of the Democratic Party didn’t want to confront the Soviets. People like Sam Nunn, who supported Reagan, deserve to be thanked also.
At least one history book has been written giving Reagan his due for contributing to the Soviet implosion: “Reagan’s War,” by Peter Schweitzer. I read it recently, & it’s quite good. One point he makes is that Reagan was the first President of the USA to make it his official policy to bring about the end of the Soviet Union & win the Cold War. In contrast, Kissinger thought the best he could do was negotiate the best possible second-place for the USA. And shortly after Reagan’s second term, the Soviet Union fell apart.
Regarding faked SDI tests…
Consider four facts.
1) The press was strongly SDI and had every intention of trashing SDI.
2) Reporters and editors rarely have any scientific background. You can get a Masters in Journalism from Columbia (the most prestigious journalism school in the US) without taking any science courses (unless you count anthropology as a science).
3) Many weapons tests are “rigged” in the sense that they don’t duplicate actual conditions. As an example, certain target data may be pre-fed into the system. This “rigging” is simply part of the testing process. Anyone who has ever developed a complex hardware or software system knows that you often limit the variables in the early tests, rather than always doing a full system tests. Don’t expect reporters to know that.
4) Defense contractors have been known to cheat. Not often, but they are human. It is possible that this happened and was reported, although I don’t remember it.
In the Reagan years Pournelle and Possony had his ear, see their book The Strategy of Technology, readable for free here..
The Soviets were playing to end the game and usher in the Socialist Paradise, while we were (and are) playing to sstay on top and continue playing.
Reagan knew all this, it’s a shame that Pournelle doesn’t have the ear of the Bushs (he’s lived in Studio City for years, so it’s not surprising that he had connections to Reagan). Quayle was the closest link the space/scifi community had to Bush I, and all that resulted in was meagre funding for some of the later (and poorly executed) X Projects.
Reagan basically elevated “The Strategy of Technology” from being something half-understood and practiced, to being official administration policy (even though it had been used in various War Colleges, it wasn’t well understood by the folks in the White House before Ronnie).
Kit, I can’t quite agree with your comments about Goldwater — yes, what you say is what the Democrats and the media (what? you thought media bias was new?) claimed he said. In actuality, he discussed those possibilities, saying that there had been suggestions (and there had been, from folks like General Curtis LeMay, etc.) that we could use nukes to defoliate the jungle and expose their supply lines, etc. — however, I recall him also saying that America would not be the party to first use nuclear weapons in a situation like that — all the newspapers the next day said Goldwater threatens to use nukes. Goldwater also warned strongly against involving American troops in a land war in Asia — but LBJ, lying through his teeth and with the aid of the media, presented it as if Goldwater wanted war and LBJ was the Peace candidate. Ha!
(For those of you who have heard the following comment, I apologize, but I just can’t resist)
I personally am responsible for all that went wrong in the second half of the 1960’s — I was told that if I voted for Goldwater we would become involved in a bloody war in Vietnam, would have run-away inflation, and would have race riots in the streets of American cities. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I did vote for Goldwater and sure enough, we had a bloody war in Vietnam, runaway inflation, and riots in our cities. I’m sorry.
Here’s a what-if. Some Republican other than Reagan defeats Carter in 1980 and holds two terms. This president prefers engaging in Kissinger-esque detente over challenging the USSR directly. He does not build up the military and does not promote SDI or stealth technology programs. Fast forward to the fall of 1989, when protests rock East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Do the Soviets send in the tanks like they did in similar times past?
I’d say it wasn’t superfluous but it didn’t win the Cold War. Sure enough, Reagan’s defense spending made Russian planners hysterical. But let’s not forget oil prices dropped in the mid-1980s, and so did the flow rates of poorly built West Siberian oil wells. No wonder the USSR’s trade balance was already going nowhere.
I wouldn’t underestimate Soviet military technology, but it was not — or could not — be put to civilian use. Agriculture was a mess. Hence the need to import food and clothes and other basics. Obviously, with low oil prices, that was getting a bit difficult; the Soviets started borrowing heavily. It just couldn’t have lasted long.
Plus, the people were totally disincentivized. Brezhnev used neither a stick or a carrot to put millions back to productive work. Drinking became a huge, national problem. Gorbachev’s first big move — and first big failure — was to curb the sale of alcohol. I guess most of the posters here don’t quite understand the magnitude of the social crisis in the aging USSR. It’s not over yet.
You’re right, it’s not over yet in Russia. What little I know second hand from Russian friends isn’t very pretty. Gangter-esque pseudo-capitalism like they’re living with now has GOT to suck.
If Reagan and the US military were such strategic geniuses, how come they didn’t penetrate deep into the Soviet’s air defense network and land a plane in the middle of Red Square right in front of the Kremlin, a feat accompished by German Cessna pilot Mathias Rust in 1987? Not one missile or shot was fired. Not one plane alerted to intercept this hi-tech “stealth” fighter. B2 Bomber my ass! All the billions blown on that boondoggle had less impact on the Cold War than a 19 year-old student with less than 40 hours flying time, in a hired plane. So much for military intelligence.
Such a display of initiative, if carried out by the western military, would have shown up the Soviet military for what it really was – a fairly incompetent, poorly motivated collection of scrap-metal handlers that would have been incapable of conquering a tribal desert backwater or one of its own provinces, let alone the combined NATO forces of Western Europe. The Cold War could have ended almost overnight.
But then why should anyone expect the state – an organisation incapable of delivering trains or letters on time – to be anything other than substandard in the field of national defence or foreign policy? It is amazing how many supposed libertarians, who are normally so sceptical of of government competence, suddenly transform into slavish state admirers the moment the military enters the picture.
Please guys, these are the same folks responsible for Vietnam, Dunkirk, and Yalta. The idea that they are the best guardians of your national security is laughable.
SDI may well have pushed the already over-stretched Soviet military over the limit of what they could support economically. But I’d wager 50-1 that the same goal could have been achieved much earlier, and by much cheaper methods. Reagan may have been slightly less bad than ignoramuses such as Carter, but that doesn’t make him some kind of Cold War hero.