The Second Cold War 1979–1985

Between late 1979 and 1985 superpower relations collapsed into what contemporaries and historians have called the "Second Cold War" or the "New Cold War". The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on 25 December 1979 ended détente. Jimmy Carter's response — the Carter Doctrine, a grain embargo, the Olympic boycott — gave way to Ronald Reagan's far more aggressive rhetoric and spending. By 1983, Reagan was calling the USSR an "Evil Empire", announcing a space-based missile defence system, and NATO was conducting an exercise so realistic that Soviet intelligence briefly feared a nuclear first strike. At the same time, Soviet economic strains were becoming critical and Soviet leadership was visibly failing — Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko were all in poor health. By the time Mikhail Gorbachev took office in March 1985, both the rhetoric and the reality of the Cold War had shifted sharply.

This lesson covers the Second Cold War from the invasion of Afghanistan to the eve of Gorbachev's accession. It is central to Edexcel 1HI0 Paper 2 because it provides the transition from détente to the end of the Cold War and offers material for Question 1 (consequences of the invasion of Afghanistan), Question 2 (analytical narrative of worsening relations 1979–85) and Question 3 (importance of Reagan or Afghanistan).

Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, December 1979

On 25 December 1979, Soviet airborne units landed at Kabul International Airport. Over the following days, around 80,000 Soviet troops entered Afghanistan from the north. Soviet special forces stormed the Tajbeg Palace, killing the Afghan communist president Hafizullah Amin. A new Soviet-backed leader, Babrak Karmal, was installed.

The Soviet intervention had been months in the making. Since the April 1978 "Saur Revolution" brought the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) to power, the country had slid into civil war. The PDPA was split between two rival factions (Khalq and Parcham) and pursued a harsh programme of land reform and secularisation in a deeply rural, religious country. By late 1979 armed resistance by mujahideen — Islamic guerrilla fighters — had spread across the provinces. Moscow was worried that Afghanistan would fall to insurgents with links to Iran (where the Islamic Revolution had overthrown the Shah in February 1979) or Pakistan, destabilising the Soviet Central Asian republics.

Soviet motives for the intervention were primarily defensive:

• Preserving the PDPA regime as a friendly state on the USSR's southern border.
• Preventing a hostile (and possibly US-aligned) Islamic state replacing it.
• Removing Amin, whose policies Moscow blamed for provoking the insurgency.

The intervention was expected to be short — perhaps six months. It would last nine years and cost the Soviet Union approximately 15,000 soldiers killed, hundreds of thousands of Afghan lives, and vast financial and moral damage.

Carter's response and the Carter Doctrine

The invasion shocked President Jimmy Carter, who had told an interviewer that his "opinion of the Russians has changed most drastically in the last week than ... in the previous two and a half years." The White House treated the invasion as the terminal crisis of détente.

Carter's response was multi-layered:

• SALT II withdrawn from Senate: Carter asked the Senate to suspend ratification, effectively killing the treaty.
• Grain embargo: the US halted the sale of around 17 million tonnes of wheat and corn to the USSR, pressuring Soviet agriculture, which depended on US grain imports.
• Olympic boycott: the US led a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics, joined by around 65 countries including West Germany, Japan and Canada. Britain's government supported the boycott, though individual British athletes competed.
• Aid to the mujahideen: covert CIA aid to the Afghan resistance began under Carter in 1980 through Operation Cyclone, funnelled via Pakistan's ISI. This expanded greatly under Reagan.
• The Carter Doctrine: in his State of the Union address of 23 January 1980, Carter declared:

"An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."

The Carter Doctrine extended the logic of containment to the Persian Gulf and committed the US to defending its Middle Eastern oil supplies. A new Rapid Deployment Force was created to give the doctrine teeth. The US defence budget, which had been falling, began to rise.

Reagan: ideology and rhetoric

In November 1980 Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan of the Republican Party in an election shaped partly by the Iran hostage crisis and the perception of American weakness. Reagan's foreign policy instincts were very different from the managerial caution of détente.

Reagan believed the USSR was not merely a rival power but a morally illegitimate system. He declined to accept the permanence of the Soviet bloc. On 8 March 1983 he delivered a speech to evangelical Christians in Orlando that became notorious. He described the Soviet Union as:

"the focus of evil in the modern world ... an evil empire."

Reagan paired this rhetoric with concrete action:

• Military build-up. US defence spending rose from 4.9% of GDP in 1980 to 6.2% by 1986. New weapons systems included the MX ICBM, the B-1 bomber (revived after Carter cancelled it), the Trident submarine and the neutron bomb.
• Deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles in Europe. In 1983, in response to Soviet deployment of SS-20 intermediate-range missiles targeted on Western Europe, NATO began deploying US Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles in West Germany, Britain (Greenham Common), Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands. This prompted large European peace protests.
• Support for anti-communist insurgents — the Reagan Doctrine — in Afghanistan, Nicaragua (the Contras), Angola and elsewhere.

Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), March 1983

On 23 March 1983 Reagan announced one of the most controversial initiatives of the Cold War: the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), quickly nicknamed "Star Wars" after the 1977 film. SDI aimed to develop a space-based missile-defence system using lasers, particle beams and space-based interceptors that could shoot down Soviet ICBMs before they reached US soil.

SDI was technologically speculative — most scientists doubted it could work in any realistic timeframe. But politically it was potent:

• It threatened to overturn Mutually Assured Destruction by making the USA potentially invulnerable to Soviet attack.
• It implicitly violated the 1972 ABM Treaty that was the legal foundation of SALT.
• It imposed an enormous strategic challenge on a Soviet economy that was already struggling. Matching SDI would require the USSR to develop its own system and to build more and better offensive weapons to overwhelm any defence. Both were financially and technologically daunting.