Men of the Year: Ronald Reagan & Yuri Andropov

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"détente is irreversible." Yet for a long time, it seemed that the Soviets really could make major gains at the West's expense, as U.S. and West European leaders struggled to preserve what remained of détente. As late as 1979 Jimmy Carter was publicly embracing Brezhnev in Vienna to celebrate the signing of the SALT II treaty, which set limits on the number of nuclear launchers that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. could build. Then came the invasion of Afghanistan. In the Soviets' eyes, they only prevented the overthrow of a Communist regime on their borders. To the West and especially the U.S., the invasion was a supremely menacing use of Soviet troops, for the first time since World War II, to expand the Soviet empire by force.

Suddenly, it was all too much. Though the Soviets had nothing to do with it, the nearly simultaneous seizure of hostages by Iranian revolutionaries added to an impression among tens of millions of American voters that the U.S. was letting itself be humiliated around the world, and that it was time to fight back. By the end of his presidency, Carter had reluctantly given up trying to persuade the Senate to ratify the SALT II treaty, reversed his earlier policy of holding down military spending, embargoed grain sales to the U.S.S.R. and called for a boycott of the Moscow Olympics. The voters saw it all as too little and too late. Other factors, of course, influenced the election of 1980, notably rampant inflation and unemployment. Still, the popular appeal that carried Reagan to decisive victory was enhanced not a little by the fact that he had proclaimed an uncompromisingly hard-nosed anti-Soviet line long and loud.

For all his tough talk, Reagan initially gave low priority to foreign affairs. He preferred to concentrate on his economic program. Equally important, he felt he needed to get a military buildup in high gear so that he could later negotiate with the Soviets from a position of strength. Nonetheless, the President was soon faced with an urgent issue. In 1979, the NATO countries had approved what came to be known as the two-track decision. The U.S. would install Pershing II missiles in West Germany and cruise missiles in five European countries, beginning at the end of 1983, to counter the menace of the Soviet SS-20s. Simultaneously, Washington would try through negotiation to limit or even eliminate the deployment of all such intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. At the same time, fears of nuclear war, fanned in part by incautious remarks from members of his Administration and Reagan himself, dictated a new attempt to negotiate reductions also in "strategic" weapons, the intercontinental missiles that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. aim at each other.

Reagan, according to his closest aides, believes fervently in reducing nuclear arms. Nonetheless he has held to his belief that the U.S. must first remove what he felt had become a frightening Soviet superiority in some categories of atomic weaponry. As a goal for the INF talks that began in Geneva in late 1981, he embraced the "zero option": the dismantling of all Soviet SS-20s in Europe and Asia in return for no deployment of the new U.S. medium-range missiles. In the separate Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) that got going in June 1982, Reagan proposed a one-third cut in nuclear warheads. The trims, however, were structured in such