why was the conflict called the cold war america most successful weapon in the cold war

Upon his retirement, he wrote a classified end-of-tour report that recounted the events of the Able Archer 83 crisis from his unique perspective. In short order, Perroots was promoted to lieutenant general, and he became director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1985. Perroots was promoted to major general and became the senior intelligence officer on the Air Staff, relieving Jim Pfautz.

If SDI were successful, the Kremlin concluded, the United States would possess the ability to launch a nuclear first nuclear strike with impunity.

Those two speeches raised Andropov’s concerns to a fever pitch, and he ordered a redoubling of the RYaN effort. The Western press may have been Star Wars skeptics, but the Soviet leadership believed it could be built, and that it would be a singularly destabilizing advantage for the West.

The concept was immediately dubbed “Star Wars,” drawing from the movie franchise which had not yet released its third installment. General Secretary Andropov viewed President Reagan with deep suspicion, and his distrust seemed justified when Reagan dubbed the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire” in March 1983, asserting the Russian government was the “focus of evil in the modern world.” Soon after, in the same month, Reagan first revealed the existence of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), an ambitious plan to defend the Earth from intercontinental ballistic missiles with space-based defenses.

Why was the conflict called the cold war america most successful weapon in the cold war