ABSTRACT
The decade of the 1980s witnessed some of the most dangerous and antagonistic events of the East-West conflict known as the Cold War, but also a series of dramatic changes that ultimately brought the conflict to an end. The causes of the Cold War are manifold, as it represented the competition of ideological, economic and geopolitical rivals. The most tangible manifestation of the Cold War, as the preceding chapters make clear, came in the realm of security policy. In particular, each side came to perceive the other as a grave threat to its national security. This was especially so of the Western side, where the perception of a Soviet threat led to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the peacetime mobilization of enormous economic and industrial resources to produce large standing armies, equipped with the latest conventional and nuclear armaments. They were matched or exceeded on the Soviet side, in quantitative if not always qualitative terms.1 The end of the Cold War thus required dealing with this legacy of mutual security threats, even if other factors, such as the widespread disillusionment with communist rule and aspirations for independence of members of the Soviet bloc and national groups within the USSR itself, must be considered in any comprehensive account. The history of the 1980s is in part the history of the reversal of the legacy of Cold War as manifested in the US-Soviet arms race.
