The ‘peace’ which filled many of the Cold War years was not a pleasant peace. On the ‘western’ side, the United States and its NATO allies developed high-tech weapons. On the ‘eastern’ side, the Soviet Socialists and their Warsaw Pact allies did the same.
The stress and apprehension of these ‘peaceful’ years were caused by the knowledge that terribly powerful weapons were being stockpiled. Had these weapons been used on a large scale, the results would have been disastrous.
Peace was preserved by the fact that neither the United States nor the Soviet Socialists truly wanted to use these weapons. Leaders on both sides wanted to intimidate their opponents by owning these weapons, but they knew that using these weapons was an action to be avoided.
The Cold War was ‘cold’ because, rather than fighting and directly engaging their armies with each other, both sides wanted to pressure the other side by simply manufacturing these weapons.
The Cold War and its end were not about physical combat, but rather were ultimately about economics. Which side would be able to afford to develop and build the most terrifying weapons?
So it was that, upon taking office in January 1981, President Ronald Reagan began one of the most ambitious, and one of the most expensive, defensive systems ever conceived. In March 1983, President Reagan publicly announced the “Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI), as historian Robert Maginnis writes:
By the mid-1980s, the economic strain of Russia’s very expensive military overreach was especially tough, a major reason to end the Cold War. The strain increased significantly once the newly minted President Ronald Reagan committed the US to increased resources for defense and introduced his bank-breaking “Star Wars” initiative, an expense the Kremlin was unprepared to match.
The SDI would make most of the USSR’s missiles useless. If the Soviet Socialists launched missiles at the United States, most of them would never reach their targets, because the SDI would stop the missiles in flight.
In order to overcome the SDI, the Soviet Socialists would have to develop an entire generation of sophisticated missiles. Such an effort would require billions of rubles or dollars.
The Soviet Socialists simply could not afford to develop offensive missiles which could successfully attack the United States. Missiles which could break through the SDI’s defensive shield were plainly too expensive.
The Cold War ended, then, because the Soviet Socialists ran out of money. The United States, rather than outfighting the USSR, merely outspent the Soviets.
