re: #452 wlewisiii

Everything you say is correct. But we still kept on increasing spending while even though there shouldn’t have been the need.

Instead we handed Moscow what they wanted - no extremely accurate Pershing II’s in Europe (really the only thing that made Enhanced Neutron Radiation Weapons viable) , still kept spending on “Star Wars” and other fantasy weapons while they could back off on much of their own spending. Not enough for Moscow to save themselves, in the end, as they couldn’t convert it to consumer goods, but that was their real failure not some magic from Ronnie.

Reagan was played like a fiddle by three general secretaries of the Supreme Soviet.

Reagan never really liked the Pershing IIs. He saw them as a response to the threat posed by the Soviet SS-20 ‘Saber’. When the Soviets agreed to withdraw their missiles, Reagan withdrew his.

And I must ask this: If Gorbachev saw SDI as a fantasy, why was he so anxious to see it limited to the laboratory at the Reykjavik summit? It seems more logical to assume that he really saw it as something the Soviets could not match and he was trying to prevent its deployment.

Neither Gorbachev or Reagan ‘played’ each other. Reagan didn’t need to, since he had already secured the upper hand by the time Gorbachev took power.