V o L u m e I : a d

to have a short visit with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, whom I

had come to know slightly from other diplomatic encounters. Those of us

present had no idea that a period of relaxation of tension—détente—was

about to begin.

In July 1975, only a month after the visit to Moscow, the Western powers

and the Soviets signed a treaty in Helsinki, Finland, that was destined to

produce serious and unexpected consequences. The purpose of the treaty

was to create some stability in Europe, and to that end both sides reluctantly

made uncomfortable concessions. The West agreed to language that seemed

to recognize the permanency of Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe (which

everyone at that time knew was a hard fact of life). The Soviets, on the other

hand, allowed a paragraph to be included that mentioned human rights,

apparently in the hope that such an innocuous and general paragraph would

go unnoticed.

Neither concession went unnoticed. Many Americans and British were

enraged at our officially recognizing the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe.

In the USSR, where ferment was already beginning, the language of that one

paragraph encouraged dissent. Boris Pasternak in 1948 and Aleksandr

Solzhenitsyn in 1974 had been persecuted for their Nobel Prize-winning

books about the abuses of the Soviet regime. But neither had been extermi-

nated. That would not have been the case under Stalin. The movement

toward individual freedom in the Soviet Union was under way.

In the period of confrontation, both sides made efforts to ease the tension.

As early as 1969, East-West talks on the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty

(SALT I) were begun, followed some time later by SALT II. These disarma-

ment talks, in themselves, were forlorn efforts—both sides had far too many

deliverable thermonuclear weapons, and neither could be expected to leave

the other side at an advantage. Nevertheless, the spirit behind the talks—the

realization that a nuclear exchange would be insanity—made holding them

worthwhile.

In 1986 an event occurred at Chernobyl in the Ukraine that did more, in

my view, than any other to bring the Cold War to an end. A nuclear power

plant there began a meltdown that besides taking many lives affected much

of Europe, reaching all the way to Denmark, and cast atomic energy in a new

light. The Chernobyl reactor was small, only a twenty-kiloton plant, and the

contrast of that small nuclear explosion with a single (one-megaton) thermo-

nuclear weapon, of which each side had thousands, apparently helped the

world to come to its senses. The Cold War could not go on forever.

Although it was not readily apparent to observers in the West, the Soviet

Union’s control over occupied Eastern Europe was far from uniform. The

country enjoying the greatest latitude within the Soviet Union was Poland,

where trouble began fermenting at about the time of the Helsinki Accords.

There an obscure electrician by the name of Lech Waflecsa began organizing

resistance in the Gdansk shipyards.

In June 1979, Pope John Paul II, a Pole, paid a visit to his native land.

The fact of his being permitted into a nominally atheistic country seemed a

sure indication that Soviet control over its satellites was loosening even more.

A Personal Perspective

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And so it did. The next year Waflecsa and two other men organized a trade

union called Solidarnosaca (Solidarity), which survived. His activities became

known in the West, so much so that Waflecsa was named “Man of the Year” by

Time magazine in 1980.

Waflecsa’s rise in Poland was paralleled by that of Mikhail Gorbachev, the

man who shares the credit with Waflecsa as being most responsible for the end

of the Cold War. Gorbachev became secretary-general of the Communist

Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1986. Long aware of the weakness in

the Soviet economy and political structure, Gorbachev initiated two pro-

grams: glasnost, meaning openness, and perestroika, meaning restructuring.

He initiated his reforms gradually. Perhaps his most important single act was

taken in June 1988, when the CPSU launched radical reforms to reduce party

control over the governmental apparatus. He also renounced the Brezhnev

Doctrine, thus allowing the East European nations more latitude in deter-

mining their own affairs.

The loosening up of the Soviet Union—and therefore the end of the

Cold War—was prompted by economic difficulties in the Soviet Union. The

peoples who had heretofore been held under rigid control were now enjoy-

ing new freedoms, but the pressures of a collapsing economy encouraged

Georgia, the Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, and the Baltic states

(Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) to make further moves toward true inde-

pendence. Gorbachev’s attempt to establish a voluntary federation failed.

On 13 November 1989 the Berlin Wall was broken down, and Brandenburg

Gate was officially opened the next month.

Though Gorbachev was—and still is—a hero in the West, he was removed

from power by a more aggressive Boris Yeltsin in 1991. The Union of Soviet

Socialist Republics was a thing of the past, and the Cold War was over.

Retrospect

In looking back at the years of the Cold War, one’s first and overriding reac-

tion to its end is one of relief. Considering the magnitude of the tragedy that

would have befallen the whole human race in the event of a single mistake,

one can only be thankful that the world survived at all.

There are secondary questions, however, such as who was responsible

for the Cold War—the Soviets, the West, or both? It is not a matter of fixing

blame. The answer is of importance simply as a guidepost to the future. We

must ensure that such a confrontation does not occur again. Unfortunately,

we cannot disinvent thermonuclear weapons. (In fact, there are nations today,

far less reliable than the old Soviet Union, that now possess them.) Nations

that have them in their arsenals are never going to destroy them as long as

other nations still have them. It is necessary, then, that policies affecting the

family of nations must be such that the world will never again come to the

brink of nuclear war.

In the early days of the Cold War, beginning in 1945, there was no doubt

in the minds of the Western nations that the instigators were the Soviets.

After all, U.S. policy (and to a lesser extent British policy) was to extend the

hand of friendship to our Eastern ally. During World War II we sent vast

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A Personal Perspective

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