’81:41

TO THIS day many people have difficulty acknowledging Ronald Reagan’s role in ending the cold war. One version of history has the former movie actor merely rattling the American sabre while the Soviet Union’s strategic errors and military over extension engulfed its capacity to maintain an integral empire. The installation of Mikhail Gorbachev is seen as a decisive personnel change, but so too was the election of the 40th President of the United States. Reagan played a key part by angrily renouncing and upsetting the relatively stability of the 1960s and 70s US-Soviet detente, ratcheting up both the language and the military moves. To those of us growing up at the turn of the 1980s these were terrifying days of Cruise missile deployments, Afghan invasions and Protect and Survive. They were for Reagan, too; a NATO training exercise in 1983 almost triggered nuclear war after the Soviets momentarily mistook it for a real act of aggression.  News of this helped turn Reagan into peacemaker and earnest anti-nuclear campaigner.

And it very nearly never happened at all. In March 1981, just 69 days into his Presidency, an assassin came literally within an inch of putting a bullet in Reagan’s heart. Had he done so, George H Bush would have become the 41st President then instead of eight years later. Whatever you think about Bush’s role in closing out the cold war between 1988 and 1992, there can surely be little doubt that he would have approached the early endgame in a completely different way to Reagan.  A former US Ambassador to the UN under Nixon and Envoy to China under Ford, Bush was steeped in the old approach to the cold war; Mutually Assured Destruction locking in and legitimising the status quo. Not for Bush would have been the “evil empire” speech, nor would he have embarked upon such a serious attempt to negotiate away his country’s nuclear arsenal.

Instead of pushing the Soviets to the realisation that they could not match the US’s technology or spending power long-term (something Reagan deftly managed through the bafflingly maligned Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” programme) Bush would probably have opted for a more limited nuclear weapons reduction programme, ironically keeping the old Soviet way alive for longer. One assumes that some forms of Perestroika and Glasnost would have happened at some point (Gorbachev ascribes these moves to the Chernobyl disaster rather than pressure from the West) but with a more business-as-usual cold war, they might have been more limited or occurred much later. Another possibility is that the peaceful end of the Soviet empire might not have happened; it might have taken another bloody revolution to remove the communists, or perhaps even civil war. Instead of the current discussions to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) we might today be staring at another, perhaps more volatile, nuclear authoritarian regime in Russia.

One assumes that in a 2009 of nuclear tensions with a successor state to the USSR, talk of not renewing Trident would be for the birds. And, as I argued on Monday, the more permissive post-cold war atmosphere was a vital precursor to Welsh devolution. It is possible that a slower and lower thaw might have stopped or delayed a re-visitation of the national question. Sometimes one inch really can make all the difference.