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The decade of détente ended abruptly. Within a few years the managed coexistence of the 1970s gave way to a renewed and dangerous confrontation that contemporaries named the Second Cold War — a period, roughly 1979 to 1985, in which the superpowers rearmed, exchanged furious rhetoric, and brought Europe closer to nuclear catastrophe than at any time since the Cuban confrontation of 1962. Nowhere was the change more sharply felt than on the European continent itself. The Soviet Union had begun to deploy a formidable new generation of intermediate-range missiles, the SS-20s, targeted on Western Europe; NATO answered with a decision to station American Pershing II and cruise missiles on European soil; and the resulting Euromissile crisis dominated European politics for half a decade, splitting publics, mobilising the largest peace movements the continent had seen, and pushing the machinery of deterrence to a hair-trigger tension that, in the autumn of 1983, came within an ace of misfiring. Meanwhile, in Poland, the rise of the independent trade union Solidarity and its suppression under martial law exposed both the fragility of Soviet control and the exhaustion of the communist model it was built upon.
The interest of the topic lies in a double problem of causation and character. First, in explaining the renewed confrontation: was the Second Cold War caused chiefly by Soviet actions — the SS-20s, the invasion of Afghanistan, the imposition of martial law in Poland — or by a hardening of Western policy under a new and more assertive American president, Ronald Reagan? Second, in weighing the two dimensions of the period: was this above all a military confrontation of missiles and rhetoric, or was the decisive development the underlying stagnation of the Soviet system, whose economic and ideological exhaustion the events of the early 1980s laid bare? The specification places the Second Cold War at the centre of the European story because it was in Europe — over the Euromissiles and in Poland — that the renewed confrontation was most acute, and because it was the strain of this final confrontation, meeting a Soviet system already faltering, that set the stage for the transformation Gorbachev would attempt.
The organising question is therefore this: was the Second Cold War of 1979–1985 primarily a renewed military confrontation driven by the actions and rhetoric of the superpowers, or the outward symptom of a deeper Soviet stagnation whose weakness was being progressively exposed — and how far was the West, rather than the East, responsible for the return to confrontation? How one answers determines whether the early 1980s are read as a dangerous but essentially reversible flare-up of the old rivalry, or as the moment the underlying decay of the Soviet bloc became visible and its collapse began to loom.
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This lesson belongs to OCR H505 Unit Y223 (Non-British period study): The Cold War in Europe 1941–1995. Within our own teaching sequence it develops the coexistence-and-endgame thread from the collapse of détente to the eve of the Gorbachev transformation, and it marks the return from the negotiated Cold War of the 1970s to open confrontation. We have organised the material around the analytical tension between military confrontation and Soviet stagnation — whether the period is best understood through its missiles and rhetoric or through the underlying decay they exposed — rather than following the specification's own listing order, because that tension is the intellectual spine of the whole debate about the early 1980s and clarifies the causation far better than a strict chronological survey would. This arrangement is our pedagogical choice, not a transcription of the specification. (Refer to the official OCR specification for exact wording.)
Because Y223 spans more than half a century, keep the European dimension central throughout: this is the Second Cold War in Europe, so the Euromissile crisis and Poland matter far more than the wider global contest, and even the invasion of Afghanistan belongs chiefly insofar as it wrecked détente and hardened Western policy towards the continent. Ask, at every stage, how far the confrontation was driven by fresh actions and how far it was the surfacing of a weakness that had been growing for years.
Détente decayed across the later 1970s and then broke down completely, undermined by the very ambiguity at its heart. Because the two sides had never agreed on what détente permitted — the West reading it as a code of restraint, Moscow as recognition of equality within which competition continued — each came to see the other's conduct as a betrayal of a bargain that had never actually been struck.
| Cause of collapse | Detail | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Soviet activism in the Third World | Backing for Marxist forces in Angola (1975) and the Horn of Africa (1977–78) | Convinced American critics that Moscow was exploiting détente to advance, discrediting the whole policy in Washington |
| The SS-20 deployment | New, mobile, accurate Soviet intermediate-range missiles targeted on Western Europe, deployed from 1976–77 | Alarmed NATO, upset the European balance, and triggered the counter-deployment debate that became the Euromissile crisis |
| Human rights | President Carter's emphasis on human rights from 1977 | Antagonised the Soviet leadership, who read it as interference and as a repudiation of the spirit of détente |
| The failure of SALT II | Signed in June 1979 but attacked by American conservatives as too favourable to Moscow | Left the flagship arms-control process stalled and never ratified, draining détente of momentum |
| The invasion of Afghanistan | 25 December 1979: Soviet forces intervened to prop up a faltering communist regime | Read in the West as naked expansion towards the Persian Gulf; the decisive blow that destroyed what remained of détente |
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on 25 December 1979 was the event that ended détente outright. Undertaken to shore up a collapsing client regime on the Soviet southern border, it was interpreted in Washington as a lunge towards the oil of the Persian Gulf and as proof that Moscow could never be trusted. President Carter, whose administration had begun in the language of human rights and cooperation, responded with a battery of measures: he withdrew the unratified SALT II treaty from the Senate, imposed a grain embargo, boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics, proclaimed the Carter Doctrine committing the United States to defend the Gulf by force, raised defence spending, and began covert aid to the Afghan resistance. The thaw was over; the language of confrontation had returned. But it was Carter's successor who would give the Second Cold War its defining edge.
The heart of the Second Cold War in Europe was the crisis over intermediate-range nuclear missiles — the so-called Euromissile crisis — which dominated the continent's politics from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. Its origin lay in a gap that détente-era arms control had left open. The SALT agreements had capped the strategic, intercontinental weapons but had said nothing about intermediate-range missiles, and it was into this gap that the Soviet Union, from 1976–77, deployed a new weapon: the SS-20. Mobile, accurate, and armed with three independently targetable warheads, the SS-20 could strike any target in Western Europe from within Soviet territory, and its arrival appeared to hand Moscow a decisive advantage in the European theatre while leaving the American homeland untouched. To West European governments, and above all to the West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, this "decoupled" the defence of Europe from the American strategic guarantee: would Washington really risk New York to defend Hamburg? The SS-20s threatened to make Europe a hostage.
NATO's answer, taken in December 1979, was the dual-track decision — a strategy of simultaneous rearmament and negotiation. On one track, if the Soviet Union would not agree to remove its SS-20s, NATO would deploy in Western Europe, from late 1983, a matching force of American Pershing II ballistic missiles and ground-launched cruise missiles. On the other track, the West would offer serious negotiations to remove the whole class of weapons — the "zero option" proposed by Reagan in 1981, under which NATO would cancel its deployment if the USSR scrapped its SS-20s. The dual-track decision was thus both a threat and an offer, designed to restore the European balance while holding open the door to its stabilisation by treaty.
| Element | Detail | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| SS-20 deployment | Soviet mobile intermediate-range missiles with three warheads each, from 1976–77 | Threatened to "decouple" European from American defence and to make Europe a nuclear hostage |
| NATO dual-track decision | December 1979: deploy Pershing II and cruise missiles by late 1983 unless the SS-20s were withdrawn by negotiation | Combined rearmament with the offer of the "zero option"; restored the balance while keeping talks alive |
| The 1983 deployments | Pershing II and cruise missiles arrived in West Germany, Britain, Italy and elsewhere from November 1983 | The moment of maximum tension; Moscow walked out of the arms-control talks in protest |
| The peace movements | Mass protests across Western Europe, 1981–83, against the deployments | The largest peace demonstrations in European history; a genuine crisis of public consent within NATO |
The deployments, when they came in the autumn of 1983, provoked the largest wave of popular protest the continent had ever seen. Across Western Europe — in West Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Italy — peace movements mobilised hundreds of thousands of demonstrators against the stationing of the new American missiles. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament revived in Britain; a human chain stretched across parts of West Germany; the women's peace camp at Greenham Common in England became a symbol of the movement. The protesters argued that the deployments made Europe more, not less, dangerous, turning the continent into the likely battlefield of a nuclear war fought over its head by the superpowers. Governments held firm — Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Helmut Kohl (who replaced Schmidt) in West Germany — and the missiles were deployed on schedule; but the crisis exposed a real fracture in Western public opinion and made the Euromissiles the defining European issue of the early 1980s. When the Pershings and cruise missiles arrived in November 1983, the Soviet negotiators walked out of the Geneva arms-control talks, and for a period the two sides were not talking at all — a dangerous silence, as the events of that same autumn would show.
While the superpowers confronted one another over missiles, a crisis within the Soviet bloc revealed the exhaustion of the communist system from the inside. In the summer of 1980, a wave of strikes swept the shipyards of the Polish Baltic coast, triggered by rises in food prices in an economy sinking under debt and mismanagement. Out of the strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk emerged an independent, self-governing trade union — Solidarity (Solidarność) — led by the electrician Lech Wałęsa. Within months it claimed some ten million members, roughly a third of the entire Polish population, becoming the first free trade union in the communist bloc and a mass movement that fused workers, intellectuals and the powerful Polish Catholic Church into a single challenge to the regime.
Solidarity's significance for the European Cold War was considerable. It demonstrated, on a scale never before seen, that the communist system commanded no genuine popular consent even in the industrial working class it claimed to represent; it drew moral and organisational strength from the Church, energised since the election of the Polish Pope John Paul II in 1978 and his triumphant visit to Poland in 1979; and it invoked, in its founding demands, the very human-rights principles that Poland had signed at Helsinki. For sixteen months in 1980–81 Poland was convulsed by a struggle between an increasingly assertive Solidarity and a regime that could neither suppress nor accommodate it — while Moscow watched with mounting alarm, massing troops on the border and threatening the kind of intervention it had launched against Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The crisis was resolved not by a Soviet invasion but by an internal Polish crackdown. On 13 December 1981, the Polish leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law, arresting thousands of Solidarity activists, banning the union, and imposing military rule. Whether Jaruzelski acted to forestall a Soviet invasion — the defence he later offered — or simply to preserve communist power is debated, but the effect was clear: Solidarity was driven underground, and the immediate threat to the bloc was contained. Yet the containment was hollow. Martial law solved nothing; it merely suppressed a movement that commanded the loyalty of a nation, leaving the regime more isolated and discredited than ever. Solidarity survived underground, sustained by the Church and by Western support, and would re-emerge at the end of the decade to lead Poland out of communism in 1989. Analytically, the Polish crisis is the clearest European evidence for the "stagnation" reading of the period: it showed that the real threat to the Soviet bloc came not only from Western missiles but from the terminal weakness of a system that could hold its own peoples only by force.
The figure who gave the Second Cold War its defining character was the American president Ronald Reagan (1981–1989). Where Carter had begun in the language of cooperation and turned to confrontation only after Afghanistan, Reagan came to office convinced that détente had been a one-sided bargain that had allowed the Soviet Union to advance, and determined to confront it with overwhelming strength. His policy had three main strands.
| Strand | Detail | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| Military build-up | The largest peacetime defence increase in American history, with spending rising steeply through the early 1980s | Confronted the USSR with an arms competition it could not afford to match |
| Ideological offensive | The "evil empire" speech of March 1983 and a rhetoric that denied the moral legitimacy of the Soviet system | Reframed the confrontation as a moral contest and abandoned the even-handed language of détente |
| The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) | Announced March 1983: a proposed space-based missile-defence system, dubbed "Star Wars" | Threatened to negate the Soviet deterrent and to reopen a technological race Moscow could not win |
The Strategic Defense Initiative, announced on 23 March 1983, was the most consequential of these. SDI proposed a defensive shield that could intercept incoming missiles, and although its technical feasibility was and remains doubtful, its strategic and psychological effect was immense. It threatened to negate the Soviet nuclear deterrent — the one field in which the USSR had achieved parity — and to reopen the arms race in the high-technology, computing-intensive domain where the Soviet economy was weakest and falling further behind by the year. To an ageing, frightened Soviet leadership, SDI appeared both a mortal threat and an unaffordable challenge, and the anxiety it generated would weigh heavily on the calculations of Reagan's negotiating partner after 1985.
For beneath the drama of missiles and rhetoric lay the deeper reality that the "stagnation" reading foregrounds: the Soviet Union of the early 1980s was a system in decline. Economic growth had slowed towards stagnation; the defence burden consumed a crippling share of national resources; the technological gap with the West was widening conspicuously in the very sectors — computing, information technology — that would define the future; the war in Afghanistan drained blood and treasure; and the leadership itself was a gerontocracy, with the ailing Brezhnev succeeded on his death in 1982 by the equally infirm Andropov and then Chernenko, a rapid succession of dying men that symbolised the exhaustion of the whole system. Reagan's confrontation did not create this weakness, but it pressed upon it, sharpening the economic dilemma and demonstrating that the Soviet Union could no longer compete on equal terms. Whether the pressure or the pre-existing decay was the more important is the central analytical question of the period.
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