ABSTRACT
From the vantage point of the 1980s, the Cold War seemed to be perpetual. As events unfolded in those years, it was difficult to imagine that by the early 1990s the Berlin Wall would fall, the Soviet economy would unravel, and bilateral diplomacy would end. Cold War tensions escalated with the ascent of Ronald Reagan as US president, and with growing anxieties over the USSR having a numerical nuclear missile advantage. If anything the 1980s began with such a sense of heightened tension in the world that any hope of a receding arms race appeared naïve. President Reagan, who was such a provocateur in his first term of office, played an important role in changing United States-Soviet relations along with his counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev. The Cold War indeed began to end under them.1 Yet events, bigger than any single person, converged to bring to a close decades of confrontation between two imposing superpowers. Hope of ending the relentless nuclear arms race was premature, however, as it remained a central point of antagonism between the United States and the USSR in the 1980s and into the 1990s. Even in the post-Cold War years the role of nuclear weapons in the world did not diminish, but instead evolved. Rising alarm over proliferation and terrorism, plus an emerging debate over climate change, ushered in a new atomic era.
