Reagan’s Arms Race
Discuss how Reagan’s proposed military build-up changed the parameters for arms control negotiations. What were the results?
In the years leading up to Reagan’s presidency, the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan had led to the end of Detente and a breakdown in relations and trade between the two states. These actions sparked a period of American foreign policy known as the Reagan Doctrine in which the United States would engage in both overt and covert aid to anti-communist resistance movements all around the world. In two speeches in 1983 Reagan declared that the Soviet Union was an “Evil Empire” and that the threat of mutually assured destruction could no longer be the sole deterrent for nuclear war. This was the speech where he announced the start of the development of SDI, an anti-ballistic missile system that would purportedly be able to prevent nuclear weapons from landing on US soil.
This period of time marked the largest military buildup in history. Just a decade after SALT 1, the first arms limitation treaty between the United States and the USSR, it seemed as though any hope of actual arms reduction had died alongside Détente. This military buildup did not come without significant financial cost, and in this case the USSR’s economy was not able to cope with the increased spending that came along with a ramped-up military. In my term paper I discussed why I believe that this increase in Soviet military spending was more of a result of Brezhnev’s expansionism rather than a response to Reagan, but regardless of the reason the facts remain that the Soviet Union began to feel the bite of this increased spending fairly quickly. The material prosperity of the citizens of the USSR would not normally have been a foremost concern for the Soviet leadership, but that changed when Gorbachev took power in 1985. He was a different kind of Soviet leader who opened the country up politically and economically through his policies of Glasnost and Perestroika and was willing to negotiate with the Americans for the purpose of actual arms reduction for the first time in the history of the cold war.
The game had changed for the Soviet Union by 1985. Major changes were happening domestically and when Gorbachev went to negotiate with Reagan there were two fundamental differences in what he wanted for the Soviet Union compared to previous arms control negotiations. The first was that he needed to actually reduce arms to reduce military spending. Regardless of whether he was able to convince the US of reducing their spending he knew that some changes needed to be made to lower the economic cost of supporting his massive military. Besides needing to actually reduce arms rather than just limit them, he also needed to get Reagan to agree to stop his funding of SDI. A successful SDI would have ended the balance of terror that had existed throughout the course of the cold war and would have eliminated any bargaining power the USSR still had.
During the Reykjavik conference of 1986 Gorbachev actually proposed to completely eliminate all but 100 nuclear weapons for both sides, something that Reagan actually supported. There was a period of time in which many thought that this might actually happen, however the two could not find a way to agree on SDI. For the Soviets it was a necessary and central issue that they could not allow to continue, while Reagan on the other hand refused to stop development of the program. Reagan’s refusal to stop ended up causing the soviets to walk away from the deal. Even though they were not able to reach an agreement, in the same year soviet military spending did actually dramatically decrease, and this trend would continue until 1991 when the USSR fragmented into 19 different nation-states.