Men of the Year: Ronald Reagan & Yuri Andropov

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conclave in Washington that the detonation of less than half the megatons in U.S. and Soviet arsenals could send up a cloud of smoke and dust that would block out the sun's light, producing a "nuclear winter" of death from freezing and starvation. Some 100 million Americans watched The Day After, a frightful TV visualization of nuclear blast, fire and radiation.* In Western Europe, demonstrations against the missiles made up in hysteria for anything they might have lacked in numbers. Hundreds of thousands of peace marchers paraded in West Germany, some wearing mourning clothes or displaying faces painted white to resemble death masks. Hundreds of women chained themselves to the fence at Greenham Common airbase in Britain to protest the unloading of U.S. cruise missiles in tarpaulin-draped cartons from giant droop-winged transport planes.

What could happen, of course, is by no means what necessarily, or even probably, will happen. The U.S. and the Soviet Union have not reached The Day Before the missiles fly. Indeed, Washington and Moscow share a keen apprehension not only of the terrible power of their nuclear weapons but also of the danger that any shooting at all between their forces could conceivably bring those weapons into use. For all their angry rhetoric, the two superpowers have been extraordinarily careful to avoid any direct military confrontation.

Still, there is grave danger: if not of war tomorrow, then of a long period of angry immobility in superpower relations; of an escalating arms race bringing into U.S. and Soviet arsenals weapons ever more expensive and difficult to control; of rising tension that might make every world trouble spot a potential flash point for the clash both sides fear. The deterioration of U.S.-Soviet relations to that frozen impasse overshadowed all other events of 1983. In shaping plans for the future, every statesman in the world and very nearly every private citizen has to calculate what may come of the face-off between the countries whose leaders—one operating in full public view, the other as a mysterious presence hidden by illness—share the power to decide whether there will be any future at all. Those leaders, Presidents Ronald Wilson Reagan of the United States and Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, are TIME'S Men of the Year.

Certainly there were other momentous developments, and other protagonists and antagonists, on the world stage in 1983. In the U.S., it was a year of movement—dynamic, puzzling or both—in the economy and politics. Production and income rose and unemployment fell, all more rapidly than almost any economists or business leaders had dared to hope at the end of the frightening 1981-82 recession. The inflation rate dropped lower than it had been since 1972. Federal Judge Harold Greene supervised the final breakup of the world's largest corporation, AT&T.

Eight Democrats hit the hustings for their party's 1984 presidential nomination. Vice President Walter Mondale had built an imposing lead over Space Hero John Glenn in the race to take on Reagan, who set Jan. 29 as the date for an announcement that will stun the world only if it is not an official declaration of his candidacy for reelection.

Overseas, a familiar and often scowling face was removed from the ranks of world leaders. Menachem Begin, worn by