One data point here (I’m unsure how much weight to give it, probably not very much) is the 1983 movie The Day After, which is about the aftermath of nuclear war.
He [President Reagan] wrote in his diary that the film [The Day After] was “very effective and left me greatly depressed”, and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a “nuclear war”. The film was also screened for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A government advisor who attended the screening, a friend of Meyer’s, told him: “If you wanted to draw blood, you did it. Those guys sat there like they were turned to stone.” In 1987, Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which resulted in the banning and reducing of their nuclear arsenal. In Reagan’s memoirs, he drew a direct line from the film to the signing.
I think this Wikipedia claim is from Reagan’s autobiography. But according to The Dead Hand, written by a third-party historian, Reagan was already very concerned about nuclear war by this time, and had been at least since his campaign in 1980. It’s pretty interesting — apparently this concern led to both his interest in nuclear weapon abolition (which he mostly didn’t talk about) and in his unrealistic and harmful missile defense plans.
So according to this book, The Day After wasn’t actually any kind of turning point.
and in his unrealistic and harmful missile defense plans.
Some people argue that Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense plan did succeed at it’s real goal, convincing the Soviets that they would never be able to keep up with America’s R&D, so it was better to make peace. From this point of view, whether SDI was realistic or not misses the point, that Reagan succeeded in creating the impression that it was realistic. That is, from this point of view, he succeeded in bluffing the Soviets.
Other factors contributed, like the collapsing Soviet economy, Russian defeat in Afghanistan, etc. SDI was a kind of economic war, we can out spend you etc.
One data point here (I’m unsure how much weight to give it, probably not very much) is the 1983 movie The Day After, which is about the aftermath of nuclear war.
I think this Wikipedia claim is from Reagan’s autobiography. But according to The Dead Hand, written by a third-party historian, Reagan was already very concerned about nuclear war by this time, and had been at least since his campaign in 1980. It’s pretty interesting — apparently this concern led to both his interest in nuclear weapon abolition (which he mostly didn’t talk about) and in his unrealistic and harmful missile defense plans.
So according to this book, The Day After wasn’t actually any kind of turning point.
Some people argue that Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense plan did succeed at it’s real goal, convincing the Soviets that they would never be able to keep up with America’s R&D, so it was better to make peace. From this point of view, whether SDI was realistic or not misses the point, that Reagan succeeded in creating the impression that it was realistic. That is, from this point of view, he succeeded in bluffing the Soviets.
Other factors contributed, like the collapsing Soviet economy, Russian defeat in Afghanistan, etc. SDI was a kind of economic war, we can out spend you etc.