Ronald Reagan
March 8, 1983
"They violate elementary norms of decency."
Yuri Andropov
September 28, 1983
In the beginning were the words. At the top, verbal missiles fired in magisterial wrath: Ronald Reagan denouncing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" that had committed "a crime against humanity" when its fighters shot down a Korean jetliner; Yuri Andropov responding that the Reagan Administration had "finally dispelled" all "illusions" that it could be dealt with. At a baser level, crude vilification: American caricatures of Andropov as a "mutant from outer space"; Soviet comparisons of Reagan to Adolf Hitler.
After the words, the walkouts. "Everything is finished!" Soviet Negotiator Yuli Kvitsinsky proclaimed, as he stomped out of a meeting with his U.S. counterpart, Paul Nitze. Four days later, the U.S.S.R. broke off the Geneva INF (Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces) talks on limiting missiles in Europe. The U.S. "would still like to launch a decapitating nuclear first strike," Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, the Soviet armed forces Chief of Staff, charged at a remarkable news conference, as he rapped a long metal pointer against a wall chart showing U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals.
By year's end the Kremlin let two other negotiations drift into limbo. It refused to set a date for resuming either the Geneva START talks on reducing the numbers of long-range nuclear weapons or the decade-long Vienna bargaining on cutting conventional forces in Europe. The suspensions left the superpowers for the first time in 14 years with no arms-control talks of any kind in progress and with even regular diplomatic contacts frosty.
Now, in the silence, come the missiles, no longer metaphorical but physical and nuclear. U.S. Pershing IIs, looking incongruously toylike with their bright red and yellow stripes, being deployed in West Germany. In Britain and Italy, Tomahawk cruise missiles, sleek, innocent-looking and small enough to fit into a pickup truck, all targeted on the Soviet Union. On the other side, Soviet mobile rockets going into Czechoslovakia and East Germany, aimed at U.S. allies in Europe. Tomorrow, perhaps, Soviet depressed-trajectory ballistic missiles on submarines off America's Atlantic shores, capable of hitting Washington as rapidly as the Pershing IIs could strike, say, Minsk: twelve to 15 minutes after firing.
Following the missiles, fear and alarm. "The second cold war has begun," shrilled the Italian weekly Panorama. French President François Mitterrand warned that the situation was comparable in gravity with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 or the Berlin blockade of 1948-49. American Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer, who has just returned from Moscow, where he had extensive interviews with Soviet officials, observes that "a test is coming between the superpowers. The Soviets are frustrated, angry. They have to reassert their manhood, to regain the influence in the international arena that today only America enjoys."
And always, growing in intensity throughout the year, came the horrifying pictures of the apocalypse that war in the nuclear age would mean. Astronomer Carl Sagan and Biologist Paul Ehrlich warned a sober scientific