ABSTRACT
There was growing alarm in Western capitals over the possibility of Soviet military intervention in Poland as the Polish crisis deepened in the latter part of 1980, and Soviet troops engaged in threatening manoeuvres along that country's borders. The US decision to impose sanctions upon Poland and the Soviet Union and to pressure its NATO allies to follow suit was based upon a wide range of considerations, many of which went far beyond the Polish issue. The United States initiated four separate sets of sanctions. These were imposed over a ten-month period from December 1981 to October 1982, and some were aimed at Poland while others were targeted at the Soviet Union. It is clear that the economic and political consequences of Western sanctions were relatively minimal. Sanctions did not impose a significant economic cost on either Poland or the Soviet Union, and they did not have a noticeable effect on the political behaviour of either country.
