I’m no fan of Reagan, but I would generally agree with this statement; when the Reagan Administration took over, the United States was widely consider the punchline to a tired joke about a bumbling giant that thwacks himself in the nose trying to squash a mesquito. After Reagan instituted a number of economic and military changes…the United States was still a punchline to a joke, but one somewhat more respected and certainly feared. The military buildup during the Reagan years was in many respects corporate welfare, but it also reinvigorated our national technology infrastructure and helped float a wallowing economy. The incidential end of the energy crisis of the 'Seventies also helped pump up the economy, and deregulation of energy, transportation, and financial markets resulted in speculation which, at least in the short term, created an economic bubble, albeit one that later popped in dramatically undesireable ways. Carter was a consensus builder, but Reagan–for good and bad–was a charismatic leader; unfortunately, one with a rather simplistic and whitewashed view of the world and America’s place in it.
I don’t believe that Reagan would have intentionally initiated a nuclear strike; while he was naive about the possibility and resulting damage, and at least influenced by the far right Moral Majority, I don’t think he was the kind of nutter who sincerely welcomed the End of Days. I don’t know about the Soviets; I find it very, very unlikely that Brezhnev would (despite his support for brutal oppression in the East Bloc ‘client’ states), and I doubt that the rubber-stamp enthusiast Chernenko would. However, I’m not so sure that Andropov, an ideologue who was scarred by his experiences in the Hungarian Revolution and used propaganda and outright lies to support the most brutal and violent oppression since Stalin’s era, would have deferred if he felt pressured; certainly, he rejected overtures of arms reduction out of hand, made bald threats, covered up blatantly provokational acts like the shootdown of KAL 007, and otherwise gave every indication that he’d rather pull the temple down on his head than permit the United States and NATO to gain any advantage over the Warsaw Pact or allow the East Bloc nations any real autonomy. And of course, all of these men were, in their respective periods of leadership in the late 'Seventies/early 'Eighties, in very poor health, chronically ill, often bedridden, and often unavailable to outside observers, so the possibility of military or political hardliners initiating a silent palace coup and taking charge was every bit as real as the improbable potboiler Seven Days in May.
So sane and rational party is going to initiate nuclear war, or indeed, even use nuclear weapons in a tactical sense. But under stress, people revert to atavistic behavior, and they often become focused on details and miss the big picture. Like Gen. Buck Turgidson–worried that the Soviet Ambassador might see “the Big Board”–it is easy to focus on the here and now without a true consideration for the consequences, and in that scenario the empathy and foresight to avert war, even at an immediate cost, can be lost. Today, films like Duck and Cover and Make Mine Freedom are kitsch and the epitome of camp, but back in the day, they were taken seriously.
Stranger