Download or read book The Strategic Defense Initiative and the End of the Cold War Report on SDI Star Wars President Reagan Fall of the Soviet Union Gorbachev Teller ABM Treaty and Reykjavik Summit written by Department of Defense and published by . This book was released on 2017-09-16 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a fascinating historic analysis of the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The Cold War's end was sudden, unpredicted and the seminal event of the latter half of the twentieth century. Since the disintegration of the USSR, debate has centered on whom or what was responsible for the end of the conflict. Perhaps no issue is as controversial as the role the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) played in ending the Cold War. Today, there are three main schools of thought concerning SDI's impact on the end of the Cold War. The first sees the Strategic Defense Initiative as a primary factor in ending the conflict. Another argues the initiative extended the Cold War by creating one more hurdle to the negotiations between the two superpowers. A third school holds that while SDI had a positive impact on ending the Cold War, it was a secondary factor. The third school's position is best supported by the available evidence. All of the arguments stem from several key questions. The central issue concerns the question, What drove Gorbachev's decision to exit the Cold War? This thesis rephrases that question more narrowly: What were the primary influences that motivated Gorbachev to sign the Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Elimination of Their Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles, (INF Treaty) - which arguably ended the conflict - and to what degree were they instrumental in its signing? Additional questions that will be addressed include the following: Did either the Soviet Union's investment in developing countermeasures to the U.S. defense initiative or its own ballistic missile defense (BMD) system severely strain the Soviet economy? Did Soviet fear of losing a new arms race in light of their economic and technological backwardness, as compared to the West, push them to negotiate? Were there other factors that would have driven Gorbachev to exit the Cold War regardless of the Strategic Defense Initiative? CHAPTER I - THE ROLE OF THE STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE IN ENDING THE COLD WAR * CHAPTER II - THE END OF THE COLD WAR AND SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT ON SDI * A. INTRODUCTION * B. THE END OF THE COLD WAR * C. THREE SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT ON SDI'S ROLE IN ENDING THE COLD WAR * D. CONCLUSION * CHAPTER III - PRESIDENT REAGAN AND THE STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE * A. INTRODUCTION * B. THE STATUS QUO * C. REAGAN'S FOREIGN POLICY PLAN * D. THE STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE AND REJECTION OF MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION * E. A PUSH FOR DIALOGUE * F. CONCLUSION * CHAPTER IV - INITIAL REACTIONS: MARCH 1983-MARCH 1985 * A. INTRODUCTION * B. GENERAL SECRETARY * C. THE NATIONAL SECURITY COMMUNITY * D. CONCLUSION * CHAPTER V - ENTER GORBACHEV: MARCH 1985-OCTOBER 1986 * A. INTRODUCTION * B. GENERAL SECRETARY * C. NATIONAL SECURITY COMMUNITY * D. CONCLUSION * CHAPTER VI * EXITING THE COLD WAR: NOVEMBER 1986-DECEMBER 1987 * A. INTRODUCTION * B. GENERAL SECRETARY * C. THE NATIONAL SECURITY COMMUNITY * D. CONCLUSION * CHAPTER VII - ASSESSMENT OF THE ROLE OF SDI IN THE END OF THE COLD WAR * A. INTRODUCTION * B. THE PRO-SDI SCHOOL * C. THE ANTI-SDI SCHOOL * D. SDI WAS A SECONDARY FACTOR
Download or read book The Strategic Defence Initiative written by Mira Duric and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Half Title -- Dedication -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1 The Strategic Defence Initiative -- 2 The Soviet Reaction to the SDI -- 3 The Reykjavik Summit: October 11-12 1986 -- 4 US-Soviet Relations after the Reykjavik Summit -- 5 Strategic Defence: The Post-Cold War and Post-September 11 World -- Conclusion -- Selective Bibliography -- Index
Download or read book Reagan at Reykjavik written by Ken Adelman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dramatic, first-hand account of the historic 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Iceland—the definitive weekend that was the key turning point in the Cold War—by President Reagan’s arms control director, Ken Adelman. In October 1986, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met for a forty-eight-hour summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. Planned as a short, inconsequential gathering to outline future talks, the meeting quickly turned to major international issues, including the strategic defense initiative and the possibility of eliminating all nuclear weapons—negotiations that laid the groundwork for the most sweeping arms accord in history the following year. Scrupulously researched and based on now-declassified information, Reagan at Reykjavik tells the gripping tale of this weekend that changed the world. Filled with illustrative accounts of the private discussions between Reagan and his team, Ken Adelman provides an honest and up-close portrait of President Reagan at one of his finest and most challenging moments. Reagan at Reykjavik includes 16 pages of black-and-white photos and 11 illustrations.
Download or read book Way Out There In the Blue written by Frances FitzGerald and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2001-02-21 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Way Out There in the Blue is a major work of history by the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Fire in the Lake. Using the Star Wars missile defense program as a magnifying glass on his presidency, Frances FitzGerald gives us a wholly original portrait of Ronald Reagan, the most puzzling president of the last half of the twentieth century. Reagan's presidency and the man himself have always been difficult to fathom. His influence was enormous, and the few powerful ideas he espoused remain with us still -- yet he seemed nothing more than a charming, simple-minded, inattentive actor. FitzGerald shows us a Reagan far more complex than the man we thought we knew. A master of the American language and of self-presentation, the greatest storyteller ever to occupy the Oval Office, Reagan created a compelling public persona that bore little relationship to himself. The real Ronald Reagan -- the Reagan who emerges from FitzGerald's book -- was a gifted politician with a deep understanding of the American national psyche and at the same time an executive almost totally disengaged from the policies of his administration and from the people who surrounded him. The idea that America should have an impregnable shield against nuclear weapons was Reagan's invention. His famous Star Wars speech, in which he promised us such a shield and called upon scientists to produce it, gave rise to the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan used his sure understanding of American mythology, history and politics to persuade the country that a perfect defense against Soviet nuclear weapons would be possible, even though the technology did not exist and was not remotely feasible. His idea turned into a multibillion-dollar research program. SDI played a central role in U.S.-Soviet relations at a crucial juncture in the Cold War, and in a different form it survives to this day. Drawing on prodigious research, including interviews with the participants, FitzGerald offers new insights into American foreign policy in the Reagan era. She gives us revealing portraits of major players in Reagan's administration, including George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, Donald Regan and Paul Nitze, and she provides a radically new view of what happened at the Reagan-Gorbachev summits in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington and Moscow. FitzGerald describes the fierce battles among Reagan's advisers and the frightening increase of Cold War tensions during Reagan's first term. She shows how the president who presided over the greatest peacetime military buildup came to espouse the elimination of nuclear weapons, and how the man who insisted that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire" came to embrace the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and to proclaim an end to the Cold War long before most in Washington understood that it had ended. Way Out There in the Blue is a ground-breaking history of the American side of the end of the Cold War. Both appalling and funny, it is a black comedy in which Reagan, playing the role he wrote for himself, is the hero.
Download or read book The Star Wars Enigma written by Nigel Hey and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-07 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year 1982 was a desperate time for the U.S. defense community. The United States had no effective system to protect itself completely from a Soviet attack with nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles, which the Soviet Union possessed in large quantity, and the doomsday philosophy of mutually assured destruction seemed inescapable. But people in the Reagan administration, including Reagan himself, were not content with what they viewed as a morally unacceptable status quo. Then Adm. James Watkins, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked, "Wouldn't it be better if we could develop a system that would protect, rather than avenge, our people?" With that, the president's commitment to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) became certain. Ultimately, SDI reflected Western political idealism, a powerful ingredient in the struggle to finally conquer the terrors of the Cold War and to allay the threat of nuclear holocaust. The Star Wars Enigma tells this dramatic story.
Download or read book Reagan and Gorbachev written by Jack Matlock and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2005-11-08 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Matlock’s] account of Reagan’s achievement as the nation’s diplomat in chief is a public service.”—The New York Times Book Review “Engrossing . . . authoritative . . . a detailed and reliable narrative that future historians will be able to draw on to illuminate one of the most dramatic periods in modern history.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review In Reagan and Gorbachev, Jack F. Matlock, Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R. and principal adviser to Ronald Reagan on Soviet and European affairs, gives an eyewitness account of how the Cold War ended. Working from his own papers, recent interviews with major figures, and unparalleled access to the best and latest sources, Matlock offers an insider’s perspective on a diplomatic campaign far more sophisticated than previously thought, waged by two leaders of surpassing vision. Matlock details how Reagan privately pursued improved U.S.-U.S.S.R. relations even while engaging in public saber rattling. When Gorbachev assumed leadership, however, Reagan and his advisers found a willing partner in peace. Matlock shows how both leaders took risks that yielded great rewards and offers unprecedented insight into the often cordial working relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev. Both epic and intimate, Reagan and Gorbachev will be the standard reference on the end of the Cold War, a work that is critical to our understanding of the present and the past.
Download or read book Gorbachev and Reagan written by and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-25 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the culmination of twenty years of research in which the editors gathered thousands of pages documenting the most important conversations of the late Cold War. Every word Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev said to each other in their five superpower summits from 1985 to 1988 is included in this volume. The editors argue in their contextual essays and detailed notes that these summits fueled a learning process on both sides of the Cold War. Their anthology provides insight into the nuanced shifts of monumentally important discussions, showing how Moscow’s sense of threat was eased and how a hawkish Reagan softened his tone in negotiations during his second presidential term. Documents from foreign ministers Eduard Shevardnadze and George Shultz offer a particularly intriguing look into the handful of conversations that ended almost half a century of conflict. These verbatim transcripts, until now top secret, are combined with fascinating photos and crucial information from declassified preparatory and after-action documents from both the Americans and Soviets, obtained in the US through the Freedom of Information Act and in Russia from the Gorbachev Foundation, the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, and from the personal files of Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s foreign policy adviser.
Download or read book The Strategic Defense Initiative written by Ralph L. Dietl and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nuclear and Space Talks revolutionized arms control. The Cold War endgame commenced with the umbrella negotiations’ that linked START and INF negotiations to a regulation on the weaponization of space. This volume reveals a US grand strategy to replace deterrence with a collective security order. An entente of the superpowers was needed to transform bipolarity. The US planned the replacement of mutually assured destruction by mutually assured security. A global astrodome was to protect a nuclear disarmed world. The Franco-German special relationship in European affairs had to be amended by a US-SU special relationship to replace classic bloc politics. The Reagan Administration planned a global zero agenda, a joint development of a global protective system and a creation of a Common House of Europe. In brief, the superpowers prepared ‘the velvet revolution’ that eliminated the Cold War structures. Neither containment nor convergence offers a valid explanation of the Cold War endgame. Co-creation is the key to decipher the end of the Cold War. NATO Europe challenged the transformation of bipolarity. The European NWS resisted to a multilateralization of strategic arms control. In Europe the classic Cold War thinking survived the fall of the Iron Curtain. European conservatism contributed to the geopolitical catastrophe of the first order: the downfall of the Soviet Union. The Reagan Administration developed a Grand Strategy to end the Cold War. The US-SU co-creation of an astrodome was meant to ease a global zero agenda. A global collective security structure under the United Nations was to replace deterrence. The superpower project collapsed due to the penetration of US decision-making by NATO Allies. The European NWS totally objected to a multilateralization of strategic arms control to preserve their relative position in the international system.
Download or read book Implications of the Reykjavik Summit on Its Twentieth Anniversary written by Sidney David Drell and published by Hoover Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawn from presentations at the Hoover Institution's conference on the twentieth anniversary of the Reykjavik summit, this collection of essays examines the legacy of that historic meeting between President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The contributors discuss the new nuclear era and what the lessons of Reykjavik can mean for today's nuclear arms control efforts.
Download or read book Reagan at Reykjavik written by Kenneth L. Adelman and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dramatic, firsthand account of the historic 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Iceland--the definitive weekend that was the key turning point in the Cold War--by President Reagan's arms control director, Ken Adelman. In October 1986, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met for a forty-eight-hour summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. Planned as a short, inconsequential gathering to outline future talks, the meeting quickly turned to major international issues, including the strategic defense initiative and the possibility of eliminating all nuclear weapons--negotiations that laid the groundwork for the most sweeping arms accord in history the following year. Scrupulously researched and based on now-declassified information, Reagan at Reykjavik tells the gripping tale of this weekend that changed the world. Filled with illustrative accounts of the private discussions between Reagan and his team, Ken Adelman provides an honest and up-close portrait of President Reagan at one of his finest and most challenging moments.
Download or read book An Impossible Dream written by Guillaume Serina and published by Biteback Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: p>Picture the scene: the Republican President of the United States credited with christening the Soviet Union an 'Evil Empire', and that country's own President, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, sitting down together. It was Reykjavík, 1986, and the meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev really did happen—even after the agonising escalating tensions of the arms race—as the world waited with bated breath to see if a compromise would be achieved by the two leaders to secure the future of the planet. Now, thanks to access to previously unavailable archives, historian Guillaume Serina chronicles the build-up and aftermath of that momentous summit, and employs contemporary diaries and memoranda to tell the remarkable story of how the agreement to abolish all nuclear weapons was reached. With an introduction by Gorbachev himself, An Impossible Dream turns to the Trump administration's own foreign and defence policy, in a daring examination of the past, present and future dangers of our coexistence with nuclear weapons.
Download or read book The Soviet Propaganda Campaign Against the US Strategic Defense Initiative written by United States. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Office of Public Affairs and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Last Superpower Summits written by Svetlana Savranskaya and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 1080 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book publishes for the first time in print every word the American and Soviet leaders – Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, and George H.W. Bush – said to each other in their superpower summits from 1985 to 1991. Obtained by the authors through the Freedom of Information Act in the U.S., from the Gorbachev Foundation and the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, and from the personal donation of Anatoly Chernyaev, these previously Top Secret verbatim transcripts combine with key declassified preparatory and after-action documents from both sides to create a unique interactive documentary record of these historic highest-level talks – the conversations that ended the Cold War. The summits fueled a process of learning on both sides, as the authors argue in contextual essays on each summit and detailed headnotes on each document. Geneva 1985 and Reykjavik 1986 reduced Moscow's sense of threat and unleashed Reagan's inner abolitionist. Malta 1989 and Washington 1990 helped dampen any superpower sparks that might have flown in a time of revolutionary change in Eastern Europe, set off by Gorbachev and by Eastern Europeans (Solidarity, dissidents, reform Communists). The high level and scope of the dialogue between these world leaders was unprecedented, and is likely never to be repeated.
Download or read book The Grand Strategy that Won the Cold War written by Douglas E. Streusand and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates that under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan and through the mechanism of his National Security Council staff, the United States developed and executed a comprehensive grand strategy, involving the coordinated use of the diplomatic, informational, military, and economic instruments of national power, and that grand strategy led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In doing so, it refutes three orthodoxies: that Reagan and his administration deserve little credit for the end of the Cold War, with most of credit going to Mikhail Gorbachev; that Reagan’s management of the National Security Council staff was singularly inept; and that the United States is incapable of generating and implementing a grand strategy that employs all the instruments of national power and coordinates the work of all executive agencies. The Reagan years were hardly a time of interagency concord, but the National Security Council staff managed the successful implementation of its program nonetheless.
Download or read book The Reagan Reversal written by Beth A. Fischer and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2000-03 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is often assumed that Ronald Reagan's administration was reactive in bringing about the end of the cold war, that it was Mikhail Gorbachev's "new thinking" and congenial personality that led the administration to abandon its hard-line approach toward Moscow. In The Reagan Reversal, Beth A. Fischer convincingly demonstrates that President Reagan actually began seeking a rapprochement with the Kremlin fifteen months before Gorbachev took office. She shows that Reagan, known for his longstanding antipathy toward communism, suddenly began calling for "dialogue, cooperation, and understanding" between the superpowers. What caused such a reversal in policy? Fischer considers three explanations for the reversal. First, she considers the possibility that the administration reversed course simply to cater to public opinion during an election year. Second, she investigates whether new personnel, namely Secretary of State George Shultz and National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, took control of U.S. policy and made changes more in line with their personal views. Third, Fischer considers the possibility that Reagan himself redirected U.S. policy out of his fear of nuclear war. This is the explanation Fischer defends as most significant.
Download or read book Reagan Bush Gorbachev written by Norman A. Graebner and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicles the evolution of the political relationship between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, and that relationship's role in ending the Cold War.
Download or read book At the Summit written by Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev and published by Eagle Publishing Corporation. This book was released on 1988 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mikhail Gorbachev summarizes in his own words his impressions of the Washington Summit meeting in January with President Reagan and their May Summit meeting in Moscow.
