A Pizza Hut Parade | Part 13

This is Megan Basham of The Daily Wire, inviting you to join me for the 2026 issues, etc., making the case conference Friday, June 12th, and Saturday, June 13th at Concordia University, Chicago. I'll be speaking and signing copies of my book, Shepard's for Sale, and joining me at this annual conference for Christian Leigh-D are Molly Hemingway of the Federalist, Robert Spencer of G-Hodwatch, and Aaron Holley of Alliance Defending Freedom. Learn more at issuesetc.org. Issuesetc.org. Colorado is trying to silence free speech again. A state law forces businesses to use customers, preferred pronouns, even if they're biologically inaccurate. With the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian bookstore and a sports apparel company are challenging the law, but a court recently ruled against them. They appealed the ruling, and with ADF's help, they'll keep fighting another attempt by Colorado to skirt the First Amendment. Learn more about how you can support free speech by texting wire to 83848 or going to join ADF.com/wire. It is an absolutely charming little town. It streets tidy and its small square beautifully painted. Its Basilica is the final resting place of St. Bonaface, the patron saint of Germany. Located nearly dead center of the German nation, the town itself has passed largely into obscurity, but during the Cold War, this was the closest West German town to the extreme southwestern tip of communist East Germany, just decide the narrow waste of the German Federal Republic. A communist invasion from this area would have the smallest distance to cover to cut West Germany in half and what's more. The small storybook German town lies in the relatively flat terrain needed for a lightning fast armored attack from the East. Just beyond it lay the massive NATO installation at Reinhman Air Force Base and the key West German city of Frankfurt. This picturesque little German town is named Fulde. And if the end of the world were to arrive, this is almost certainly where it would begin. Today in the world of freedom the proudest post-election is being unveiled. The only answer to communism is a massive offensive. Well, it is a must be a system of international control and conformity. You and I have a rendezvous with them. Never give in. Never, never. Mr. Gorbachev teared down this world. Late one night, well to the north of Fulde in the central German planes, East German troops backed by red army units and elite forces from the rest of the Warsaw Pact would cross the border into West Germany. But this was merely a faint, a false attack designed to draw off and tie up the much more limited conventional resources at the West. A few hours later, the real attack would begin, a massive, overwhelming conventional assault out of the extreme southwestern tip of communist East Germany. And its immediate objective would be what became known as the Fulde Gap, a relatively narrow choke point of flatland providing a twin forked pathway into West Germany. Station just across the East German border lay the elite Soviet 8th guards, which included but was no means limited to. The 11th and 449th Missile Brigade, the 79th Guards Tank Division, the 27th, 39th and 57th Guards Motor Rifle Divisions, the 390th Guards Artillery Brigade, the 18th Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, the 943rd Anti-Tank Battalion, the 678th Electronic Warfare Battalion, the 325th Engineer Battalion, the 900th Air Assault Battalion, the 336th Helicopter Regiment, the 65th Pantoon Bridge Regiment, and the 794th Spetsnats Special Forces Company, among many, many others. Once south of the Vogelsberg Mountains, they would close in on the major NATO resupply base at Reinhman and then unite into a steel gauntleted fist, aiming straight into the heart of Frankfurt. From Frankfurt, advanced elements could push Northwest to threaten the West German capital at Bonn, or circle back towards the NATO forces tied up in central Germany in the general vicinity of Hanover and attack them from the rear. Second tier Warsaw Pact units would continue to pour through the faulty gap, reinforcing and growing the bridgehead around Frankfurt. From there, one armored spearhead would continue to the West, stopping at the West German border with Belgium and cutting northern and southern West Germany in half. Other units would continue southwest to Sarbrookin, just inside a French territory, and through Stuttgart to secure the southern border with Switzerland and Austria. NATO forces would respond, of course, and now, finally, the quality versus quantity strategies would be played out not on tables in the Kremlin or the Pentagon, but on the real battlefield. Top of the line, MiG-29 and SU-27 fighters would be patrolling ahead of the ground forces, covering the armored invasion, while others would fly combat air patrols over Warsaw Pact strike packages of SU-25 frogfoot ground attack aircraft, in an effort to eliminate NATO air forces while at their bases on the ground. The Soviet forces would deploy the massive Mi-24 hind attack helicopter, known as the Flying Tank, to interdict or at least disrupt NATO armored columns and supplies moving northeast to engage Pact forces flooding through the folded gap. This would either become the F-15 Eagles finest hour or an early end to World War III. Their job would be to kill the top tier Soviet fighters and establish air superiority over the battle space. If this could be achieved, then less capable assets would deal with the Pact ground attack and fighter bomber aircraft. If the Eagles could gain control of the skies, American F-16 and British and German tornado strike packages would be launched against Pact supply depots and troop and armor concentrations. If air superiority could be maintained, then the United States military would get a chance to do the one thing it had been designed to do, kill Russian tanks. A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack aircraft, the slow, tough, ugly and lethal warthogs, would move in. Swarms of deadly and accurate AGM-65 Maverick air to ground missiles would slide off the warthogs rails. These fire and forget weapons would wreak havoc on enemy tanks and armored personnel carriers. Cluster bombs would be used against the soft target, such as trucks or troop concentrations. And all the time, hour after hour would come the unmistakable "Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!" of the GAU 8-Gathling Cannon, a seven-barrel fire-breathing gun the size of a school bus, a gun so powerful that the A-10 had to be built around it. Upgraded, modernized, Vietnam era phantoms called wild weasels. Armed with a radar-homing AGM-88-Harm missile, would fly into the teeth of enemy air defenses in order to get them to light up and be taken out. A H-64 Apache helicopters would hug the Earth, stay out of sight, and then ambush armored columns with unrelenting fury. But air power alone was not going to stop Soviet armor, what would stop it if anything could? Was the culmination of the quality versus quantity argument? The M1A1 Abrams main battle tank, which has been and likely even today remains the most advanced and deadly tank in the world. The Soviet T-72 outnumbered at 3-1, the older T-55 outnumbered it by almost 10-1. But the 1500-horsepower turbine-powered Abrams, with its low profile, huge turret, improvements to the revolutionary, British designed chop-up composite armor, and most of all, a big, big, stabilized gun with night vision, laser range finders, and a revolutionary stabilization system that allowed the Abrams to shoot while in motion while enemy tanks would have to stop in order to fire accurately. This, combined with the Abrams 500 meters of additional effective range, gave the American tank an unbeatable advantage. How unbeatable? Well, on February 26, 1991, at a gridline called 73 Easting, 9 M1 Abrams tanks of Eagle troop commanded by Captain H.R. McMaster encountered 8 T-72 Iraqi tanks, units of the elite, Iraqi, Talwakalna division. McMaster destroyed 3 T-72 tanks in 10 seconds, and the remainder of Eagle troop quickly got the rest. It pushed on through the defensive earthworks and mines where they encountered 18 more T-72s and destroyed them all. The total engagement took 23 minutes. During the Battle of 73 Easting, US forces destroyed 160 Soviet-era tanks and 180 armored personnel carriers, 12 artillery pieces, and an additional 80 wheeled vehicles and several anti-aircraft artillery systems. Between 600 and 1,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed, US losses were 6 killed, and one light M3 Bradley reconnaissance vehicle destroyed. Not a single Abrams was lost. If the US and NATO forces were to come even remotely close to this level of superiority against identical Soviet units in Germany, then the Warsaw Pact forces would be slowed, then halted. World War III would enter a third phase, and then it would be up to the Navy. The unimaginably furious tempo of the air-land battle doctrine that NATO forces would need in order to halt a Warsaw Pact invasion meant that supplies and reinforcements would be even more critical than usual. It would be the US Navy's job to get them there, and the Soviet Navy's sole objective would be to stop them. Soviet hunter killer subs would sail south from their northern ports in order to attack the NATO convoys. That meant they would have to run the GI-UK gauntlet, three relatively narrow routes south, through a line formed by Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. The NATO's sosis systems of underwater hydrophones were more densely clustered here that at any other place on the globe, and the Los Angeles class 6 avi8 attack boats of the US Navy the deadliest subs in the world would be waiting for them. A silent, horrifyingly lethal battle would be taking place out of sight beneath the cold and stormy North Atlantic. The extremely powerful Soviet Navy surface fleet would also move south to engage maneuvering to stay out of range of NATO land-based aircraft. But the biggest threat to the Atlantic convoys would be huge flights of red air force TU-22 backfire bombers. Attacking as the NATO ships sailing east came into range, the large, fast backfires would move to intercept them at about 150 miles short of their target. They would each launch up to three KH-22 kitchen or 6K-H-16 kickback anti-ship missiles before turning tail and retreating to their airfields at supersonic speeds. US Navy Air 14 Tomkats would face sickening numbers of inbound missiles and be forced to decide whether to shoot their long range AIM-54 Phoenix missiles at either the arrows or the archers. In other words, to thin the scores of air to ship missiles inbound toward the fleet or to take out as many of the bombers as they could before they returned to base. As the seemingly endless waves of Soviet missiles continued inbound, shouts of vampire, vampire would be heard throughout the combat information centers on escorting destroyers, cruisers, and frigates. And the Aegis combat system would prioritize targets and begin launching a counter-punch of standard surface-to-air missiles to take them out. All available combat air patrol Tomkats would be heading towards the incoming cruise missile strike on full-afterburners. Their medium range AM-RAMs and their short-range sidewinders being launched at whatever Soviet anti-ship missiles had made it through the fleet Sam defenses. And then as they close to terminal range, flares and chaff would fill the air above the NATO warships in a last-ditch effort to decoy what had gotten through. Finally, a last-gasp as the fail-anks, radar-guided Gatling cannons filled the air with tracers, then explosion after explosion as the surviving inbound missiles got hit, and then either the scopes would be blank or US aircraft carriers, each with the crew of about 5,000 sailors, would be sinking into the frigid North Atlantic along with some or all of her escort ships and some or all of the transports racing across the ocean to resupply the carnage south of Fulda. But should any of these conventional responses fail and it seems exceedingly likely that they would, NATO commanders would face ever more desperate options. One form of escalation would be to use nerve gas or bio weapons to slow the invasion. Now that assumes that the packed forces had not already used them in chemical attacks on NATO airfields. But if all conventional means of defending Western Europe had run dry, then there was one final step to take. Tactical nuclear weapons, not the 25,000 city-leveling multi-megaton hydrogen bombs in each side strategic arsenal, but rather smaller yield A-bombs very approximately the size of the Hiroshima bomb would be the next to last resort. Outnumbered and overwhelmed, NATO commanders made a side that the only way to stop these advancing tanks, planes and troops would be to use theatre, nuclear devices, battlefield weapons directly against military concentrations. But that of course would let the nuclear genie out of the bottle. It is almost unimaginable that the use of tactical nukes by one side would not be immediately countered by the use of short-range tactical nukes on the other. As the battlefield around Fulda, then Frankfurt, then Middle Germany, and finally all of Europe grew ever more contaminated from the fallout of these tactical nuclear weapons, there would come a time when the invasion had either been stopped or it had not. By this point, the diplomatic and political situation would be in fever-pitch freefall, with only one card left to play. Both sides would have been at an unbearable level of fear, tension, aggression and sweat, drenched in verifiable horror and all of it cloaked in the fog of war. The advantages of a first strike were so enormous, but much more importantly, the consequences of not being the first to strike were so monumental. That the missile silo doors would have inevitably opened. The bombers on airborne alert would have received the go codes to strike their targets and the nuclear ballistic missile subs, the boomers, would have risen to their hover depth and started opening the outer hatches. That would have been the cue for several of them to be sunk by the other sides' attack subs, but with each individual boat carrying many, many more times the explosive power unleashed by every bomb and artillery shell used during World War II. If even one boomer was operational and there would have been more than one, then Armageddon was not only likely, it was inevitable, because has there ever in human history been a case where a nation losing a war would not use the most powerful weapons it possessed. Now for those of you who may be history buffs like I am, you're probably aware that none of this ever happened. And it nearly did as a result of something that happened back on June 17th, 1972 at 2600 Virginia Avenue Northwest in Washington DC. I'm just speaking for myself here, but my mailbox is a pretty depressing place. Utility bills, political flyers, coupons, more coupons. It's really kind of a drag, but once a month I have a chance to get excited about opening up the mailbox and getting the mail because once a month I get my box of awesome from bespoke post. Now my favorite box of awesome item that I've gotten so far was the champagne saber. I've pre-ordered the Kovacier howitzer and I'm waiting for that one to get online, but right now I just my favorite part of the whole month. Bespoke post sends guys only the best stuff every month and no matter what you're into, box of awesome has you covered from style and grooming goods to bar wear, cooking tools and outdoor gear. Box of awesome has carefully built collections for every part of your life. Now I could tell you what my favorite collection is, but it's tailored specifically to me. It probably won't do you much good. If you want to, you can go to boxofawesome.com and take the quiz. Your answers will help them pick the right box of awesome for you. They release new boxes every month across a ton of different categories. It's free to sign up and you can skip a month or cancel anytime. Each box only costs 45 bucks but has over $70 worth of gear inside. Get 20% off your first monthly box when you sign up at boxofawesome.com and enter the code "cold" at checkout. That's boxofawesome.com code "cold" for 20% off your first box. A few months earlier on February 21st, 1972, Air Force One landed in Beijing, China. The two countries had spent 25 years not talking to each other and suddenly there it was. Nixon went to China. Now it may seem hard to believe in this day and age of ours at the very beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, but throughout the Cold War, China was essentially a stone age nation with a huge standing army and hundreds of nuclear weapons. Aside from its direct involvement in Korea in the 1950s, China was noticeable by its absence during the Cold War. The reason we've spent so little time on China is that for all intents and purposes, China wasn't there. At least that was the view from America and its NATO allies, whose eyes remain firmly fixed on the faulty gap and the Warsaw Pact nations arrayed on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But to the Soviets, China was of enormously more importance. China, an ancient enemy of Russia had begun the Cold War as Russia's baby brother in world communism. But to say that the relationship between Mao and Stalin was cool is to understate the case somewhat. The two dictators despised each other. They spent a sizable length of time sitting side by side touring Moscow in the back of the same limousine in absolute Stony Silence. As Mao's hold on power grew and his early dependence on Moscow lessened year by year, China began to deviate from the Communist Center of Gravity in Moscow, and ancient emnities along their huge common border split them ever further asunder. The centripetal forces of nationalism, pushing them further apart, growing ever stronger than the centrifugal forces of communism could bind them together. By the late 1960s, the best chance for all-out nuclear war was not between East and West, but rather between nuclear communist Russia and nuclear communist China. US President Richard Nixon had the strategic vision to see that it was an America's interest to turn the Cold War from a two-power struggle into a three-power struggle. If he could woo China, the Russians would suddenly have to look to their south as well as to their West. He didn't really have to win the Chinese over to any degree because Nixon could see that if he could simply deny the Soviet Union the luxury of taking China for granted, he would gain enormous leverage. Nixon didn't spend a week in Beijing because of the effect it would have on the Chinese. He did it because of the effect it would have on the Russians. Nixon would poke the Soviets where they were tender. It was a masterstroke. What had previously been a contest between East versus West, world communism versus world capitalism, with one bold move the American president has split the communist block. It was now triangular diplomacy. At the Soviet American summit held on May 26, 1972, Nixon and Brezhnev signed the ABM or anti-ballistic missile treaty limiting the amount of defensive installations each nation could maintain but much more importantly. They also signed an interim agreement known as SALT-1. The first in what both sides expected would be a series of strategic arms limitation talks SALT. For the first time in the Cold War, both sides were willing to discuss not only limiting their ever-increasing stockpiles and nuclear weapons. They were now at the table and preparing to discuss actually rolling them back. Through masterful diplomacy and an especially keen sense of Soviet politics honed during his eight years as Vice President under Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nixon brought about what appeared to be the beginning of the end of the Cold War. This was the time of detente from a French word meaning the release of tension. With East-West trust slowly growing and Chinese power also growing year by year, the Soviets seemed much more willing to deal with the Americans. Now no one really knows of course if this would have continued, but it might have. There was a possible future where both the United States and the Soviet Union would continue to walk back their arsenals. It's not at all impossible to imagine that they taught culminating symbolically with the Apollo Soyuz handshake in space would have reduced the principle Cold War players from adversaries to competitors if not actual partners. They taught. Could have meant a relatively gradual soft landing for the Cold War. Those of us living through it felt real hope that this might in fact be the beginning of the end, an actual future for all of us. But they taught would not be the end of the Cold War, it would only be a late intermission the 7th inning stretch. That fork in history that took us from the peace treaties in Moscow to the hair trigger potential horrors of the Fuldegab happened not in the Kremlin or in the White House or in foreign capitals or embassies or battlefields or any of what seemed to be the likely places. It happened instead on the night of June 17, 1972 on the 6th floor of an apartment complex located at 2600 Virginia Avenue Northwest in Washington, D.C. One of a six building complex in Fulge bottom just a stone throw from the Potomac known as Watergate. When news broke that Richard Nixon or high ranking members of his administration had authorized a break in of Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972, the entire geostrategic political situation changed almost overnight. Richard Nixon, who's break through visit to China, had led to the triangular diplomacy that had given the United States the leverage it needed for a detente was under attack and the nature of his response, the cover-up, proved far more damaging than the break in itself had been. Newspaper reporters relentless pursuit of the story forced the Nixon administration down a path of ever greater denials, deceit and cover-ups. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were driving the ever-increasing scandal. There's an anecdotal report that one of them once said that all Nixon had to do was take a cocktail napkin and write something to the effect of "I did not authorize and was not aware of the break in, but the people who did were members of my administration, and that means I bear full responsibility for the consequences." Something like that. And that would have been the end of the Watergate scandal, at least according to Woodward and Bernstein. But that was not the path that Nixon chose. And so what Nixon's successor described as "our long national nightmare continued, day after day, week after week, revelations, testimonies, erased tape recordings and all the rest." The Kremlin watched as Nixon was drowning before their eyes, and they would wait and see if America would go down with him. Two years, one month and 23 days after the break-in on the 6th floor of 2600 Virginia Avenue, Richard Millhouse Nixon, 37th President of the United States of America, became the first President in U.S. history to resign from office. His running made in both the 1968 and 1972 Republican victories, former Maryland governor's Spiro T. Agnew, had resigned in disgrace over an unrelated tax evasion scandal on October 10, 1973. The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ratified just a few years earlier in 1967, clarified the rules for presidential succession or incapacitation. And two stated, quote, "Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the vice president, the president shall nominate a vice president who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both houses of Congress." With Agnew's departure in disgrace, Richard Nixon knew that what America needed in the fall of 1973 was a man of unimpeachable honesty and integrity. And when he approached Republican leaders in Congress about such a vice presidential successor, the result was unanimous. We gave Nixon no choice but Ford, House Speaker Carl Albert later recalled, House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford was surprised and flattered by Nixon's offer, telling his wife Betty that the vice presidency would provide, quote, "unice conclusion to his political career." The Senate vote on November 27 was 92 in favor with three Democrats opposed. In December 6, the House confirmed him by a 387-35 vote margin and an hour later he was sworn in as the 40th vice president of the United States. One year, eight months and three days later, Richard Nixon would walk out of the White House and out onto the South Lawn. It was appropriately enough an overcast, gray, and gloomy day. It was August 9, 1974 and the 37th president of the United States had just resigned on national television. As the former president and his family boarded the presidential helicopter Marine One, Nixon turned, waived, and then extended both arms with his trademark V for victory gesture and then disappeared down the darkened aisle. He his right hand was clearly visible behind the dark bulletproof glass of Marine One's window. Nixon's face was lost in the gloom of the political disgrace that he was about to disappear into. The Ford stared stoneally ahead as if it a funeral service, which of course it was. Just as the helicopter rotors began to dig into the gray mist, the small group of supporters started to waive goodbye. The man who in a few hours would be sworn in as the 38th president of the United States of America was among the last to do so, you could tell that Gerald Ford thought it unseemly somehow. But the wave he did, as Marine One climbed into the gloom, flew behind the granite of the Washington Monument and disappeared below the distant tree line. No one knew it yet, but with him went the very real chance to end the Cold War in the mid-1970s. For while it was not Richard Nixon's departure that had added another 15 long and increasingly dangerous years to the Cold War, what happened in the immediate aftermath of the sight of that helicopter disappearing into the gloom most certainly did. Gerald Ford was a good and decent man. Not blessed by an overabundance of charisma, he was nevertheless a strong and capable president who did much to start healing a near mortally wounded nation in its darkest hour since the Civil War. As the first president in U.S. history to have assumed the presidency, without having been elected either as president or vice president, he appeared on national television late on August 9th while the shock of Nixon's resignation and departure earlier on that momentous day that held the nation's spellbound and his plain spoken honesty and humility were immediately apparent. I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your president by your ballots. So I ask you to confirm me as your president with your prayers. My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule. But there is a higher power. By whatever name we honor him. Who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice, but mercy. Let us restore the golden rule to our political process and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate. Now paradoxically, in fact, cruelly, it was that same clear-eyed love of country that would cause this president so much of his trust and credibility. Ford had really believed that with the resignation of Richard Nixon, our long national nightmare was indeed truly over. But it wasn't. The recriminations, investigations, ranker, and seemingly endless self-destruction continued. In a broadcast to the nation on September 8th of 1974, just less than one month into his presidency. Gerald Ford further shocked a still stunned America and declared. Now therefore, I, Gerald, are Ford, president of the United States. Pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution, have granted and by these presence do grant a full-free and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States, which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from July 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974. Ford's popularity fell from 71% to 50% practically overnight. Ford's friend and press secretary, Gerard Terhorst, resigned in protest. Critics immediately charged that there had been a quid pro quo that Nixon had chosen Ford predicated on Ford's secret promise to issue a pardon in return for the vice presidency. The New York Times charged that Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon was "a profoundly unwise divisive and unjust act" that had done irreparable damage to the new president's "credibility as a man of judgment, candor, and competence." "Two months later, the midterm elections of 1974 took place on November 5th. Two years of lies and cover-ups on the part of Nixon's Republican administration and the widespread anger and disillusionment of Ford's pardon of the former president in September resulted in a massive gain for the Democrats who had already held majorities in both houses of Congress. Ford continued the salt talks that Nixon had initiated and for a while it seemed that Daytona would survive the departure of its architect. But the Kremlin, which had done so much to actively undermine US morale throughout the Cold War, continued to stare at the tea leaves and look for signs. Was this the same America that had performed with such confidence in 1972 or had watergate broken the back of American morale? According to the terms of the Paris peace talks that ended American involvement in Vietnam, the process of Vietnamization begun by Nixon in 1969 had come with an open-ended commitment. For every South Vietnamese helicopter lost for every arvin bullet fired, the United States would make good in the form of a commitment of massive aid for the South Vietnamese government. Nixon had requested $1.45 billion a far larger sum in 1972 purchasing power than it is today and additional emergency funding would be provided as needed. Now those most actively opposed to the Vietnam War had claimed and continued to claim that it was unwinnable. But one fact is undeniable. When the United States and the Republic of Vietnam and the South signed the peace accords with the Communist North, the so-called Democratic Republic of Vietnam, so-called because it was not nor had ever been either Democratic or Republic, the North Vietnamese, which had spent 10 years invading and trying to overrun the American back South had failed. All of their forces on the paper that they'd signed at least were back over the 17th parallel where they had started. When America shooting war in Vietnam was over, the Communist forces were back where they had been before the war began. If the entire purpose of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam was to repel the Communist invasion and if that Communist invasion's objective was to unite Vietnam into one Communist entity, then despite all of the mismanagement failed tactics, lack of strategic vision and all the rest. From a military perspective, when both sides signed the peace agreement, the military objective of the United States had been achieved, and the military objective of the Communist North had failed, that simple fact is beyond dispute. And the North stayed behind that line for more than two full years. From the time they signed the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973 until North Vietnamese General Venn Tien Dung began what became known as the Spring Offensive by crossing into South Vietnam on March 10, 1975. So what had happened to change that post-war status quo between those two milestones, the signing of the peace agreement in January of 1973, and the re-invasion of the South in April of 1975? Well, water gated happened, Nixon had resigned. Ford had issued his pardon. The American divisiveness grew. anti-war Democrats swept the 1974 midterm elections, and when South Vietnam called for the aid promised to them at the close of hostilities, they did not get it. This idea that America won the war, but that anti-war Democrats lost the peace has not surprisingly been incandescently denied by the American left. They claim that the entire Democrat sold out South Vietnam's story is false because the Democratic Congress did not in fact cut off funds to South Vietnam. It turns out that this is indeed true, but that same argument admits that only 700 million was authorized for the relief and support of the Republic of Vietnam. But 700 million dollars was not what had been agreed upon. It was in fact pretty precisely half of what had been agreed upon, and when it was clear that the North meant to test those waters, an additional emergency grant of 300 million dollars also stipulated as an American guarantee in the peace accords was not issued either. None of it. So there it sits. America had promised to throw South Vietnam a rope if it started to flounder. One side says that the Democratic Congress of 1974 did not throw the rope. The other claims that they did throw a rope, which is true, but they usually neglect to add that the rope they threw only reached halfway to the person that was drowning. Meanwhile, the second invasion of the South began on March 10th 1975, continued to gather steam. The southern cities of Huay fell on March 25th and denang on the 28th, both of which had seen fear-spiting throughout the war. But there was no response from the Americans. Growing more confident by the day, both North and South Vietnam looked to see if the promised American aid would be forthcoming. It was not. After the loss of denang, it became clear that nothing short of a resumption of massive B-52 strikes against Tenoi, the same irresistible pressure that had brought the North back to the peace tables at the end of 1972 could stop the spring invasion. But by this point, the North Vietnamese Politburo had seen enough to know which way the wind was blowing. Having initially urged Dung's forces to proceed with caution and be prepared to fall back, should they encounter serious resistance? On April 8th, they radio their decision that Dung should proceed with "unremember" committing vigor in the attack all the way to the heart of Saigon." On April 9th, North Vietnamese forces had reached the outer defensive perimeter of Saigon. The Arvin fought a fierce 11-day long last stand, but once it was clear that America would not be delivering on its promise, what was left of South Vietnamese morale completely collapsed. As American and South Vietnamese personnel raised to escape the surrounded city, the defensive perimeter continued to collapse. The final image of the American presence in Vietnam was of an anthlike line of terrified civilians precariously climbing a makeshift ladder to the roof of an apartment building where a CIA helicopter sat with a rotor spinning with nothing like the capacity to take all of those refugees on board. That was on April 29th, 1975. Today, that same apartment building at 22 G.A. Longstreet is a Vietnamese tourist attraction. Now, the following day, April 30th, 1975, the surviving South Vietnamese defenders surrendered. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Somewhere between two to 300,000 South Vietnamese civilians were sent to communist re-education camps where many died of starvation, disease, and torture during their years of hard labor. Over the next 20 years, perhaps 800,000 Vietnamese would flee communist rule many of them in primitive boats. As with the hundreds of thousands of Cubans who also fled from communism in Cuba, no one knows how many were lost to see through drowning dehydration, starvation, piracy, or shark attacks. But it is certainly tens of thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of individual lives lost. Today, Vietnam is a hotbed of capitalism, but they taught, died on the roof of an apartment building in Saigon in 1975. They taught, could only work with a strong America, a droid diplomacy, and the kind of continual pressure that had been put on the Soviet Union in the early 1970s. But by 1975, all the Kremlin could see was an America that appeared weaker and was weaker than it had been at any time during the Cold War. They taught, would end, because the Soviets thought they no longer needed to abide by it. The self-evident American weakness convinced them to take a more aggressive path, one that in 1975 and for the five years that followed, did not seem to have it downside for the Russians. This was the road that might very likely end with a final push into the small German town of Fulda. For if the United States would no longer spend neither blood nor treasure to try and stop a rag-tag bunch of under-equipped, underfed, and under-trained Asian communists, what could it have feeded and demoralized the United States possibly do against the might of huge columns of highly disciplined, well-equipped Warsaw Pact armor, determined to end the Cold War with a triumphant communism surging across the Iron Curtain and pushing the beaten and demoralized west back into the sea. It would get worse on October 6, 1973. Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal in force, and on that same day Syrian forces attacked Israel in the Golan Heights to the north. These joint sneak attacks took place on the holiest of Jewish holidays, Yam Kapoor, and took the Israeli forces completely by surprise. As the IDF slowly halted the twin advances and stabilized their lines, the US began to airlift military aid to its Israeli ally. Ordinary Americans were about to learn a new four-letter word, OPEC, the organization of the petroleum exporting countries, composed of Venezuela, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, Algeria, Libya, and Nigeria. On October 17, 1973, OPEC's Arab oil producers cut production by 5% and announced an embargo against the United States as retaliation for its support of Israel in the Yam Kapoor War. By December of 1973, the amount of OPEC oil reaching the United States was 25% of what it had been in September. Once by far the world's largest oil exporter by the time of the Arab oil embargo, US production accounted for a mere 16.5% of global output, and that is far, far below what the nation consumed. Then the Arab oil embargo hit and all of a sudden virtually overnight. Gasoline could not be had for love or money. Line stretched for miles that's not hyperbole. There were lines for each pump that stretched for miles and wait times just to get some gas for often several hours long. And this was happening in America. Vietnam, Watergate, now this. Shortages and lines were supposed to be what happened to the communists. In 1974, the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act was signed into law. In an attempt to cut fuel consumption by a little over 2%, it ended up saving less than half of that. A nationwide speed limit of 55 miles an hour was established. Now crawling the length of the floor to turnpike that's 250 miles of the most boring highway on the face of planet Earth at 55 miles an hour was enough to make grown men cry, radar detectors and CB radios made you feel it was your patriotic duty to break that particular law. And yet there was nothing to do but just sit back and take it. And we weren't done yet far from it. 1976 was the nation's bicentennial. America was 200 years old. It looked it. The famous Hollywood sign above Los Angeles was rusted and filled with holes and collapsing by 1978, it would say lollywood. The Statue of Liberty was falling apart. Her internal skeletons so badly corroded that not only were trips inside the statue prohibited until further notice, there was a real and growing risk that her entire right arm would fall off and crash onto the pedestal below. The country was sick and more and more it looked terminally sick. Gerald Ford had just survived a tough primary challenge from the former governor of California. His opponent in the general election was a peanut farmer who had gone on to become governor of the great state of Georgia. His name was James Earl Carter but no one ever called him that. He'd been known for his entire political career as Jimmy. And in the beaten up years after Vietnam and Watergate it had a comforting sound to it somehow. Jimmy Carter was a Washington outsider and he ran like one and on November 2nd, 1976, he was elected America's 39th president with an electoral count of 297 votes to Gerald Ford's 240. Many people, including Gerald Ford himself, believed that Ford would have won in 1976 headed not been for his pardon of Richard Nixon two years before. Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, who upon hearing the news of Ford's pardon yelled that son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch, the same Carl Bernstein that had been so mercilessly accusing Ford of a quid pro quo that simply was not true, said 40 years after the Watergate scandal that quote, "it turns out it really was a courageous and necessary act." In 2001, Senator Ted Kennedy presented Ford with the John F. Kennedy Profile Encourage Award in recognition of the courage Ford displayed in issuing the pardon that Kennedy himself had so vigorously denounced at the time Ford had issued it. Gerald R. Ford died on the day after Christmas in 2006 at his home in Rancho, Maraj, California. His 895 days in office remained the shortest term ever served by a president who did not die in office. He deserved better. After being sworn in, Jimmy Carter decided to break with tradition and walk his inauguration route, and whether he did this out of a genuine sense of populism or because no gasoline could be found for the presidential limousine has not been recorded. In April of 1977, just a few months into his presidency, President Carter declared that the US energy crisis was "the moral equivalent of war." His strategy for winning this war was to install solar water heating panels on the White House roof and turn down the heat and wear a sweater inside at the White House a policy he advised all Americans to follow. He formed the Department of Energy in August. As a person who lived through the energy crisis, I was too young to know what the energy department did exactly, but I did observe that the one thing it did not do was provide more energy. Now, advising Americans to lower their thermostats in winter and wear sweaters indoors may not sound like the kind of thing that would trigger a Soviet breakout through the full de gap and the beginning of World War III, and to suggest that it was only that is, of course, absurd. But in an age where the military power on both sides of the Iron Curtain was literally overwhelming, in other words, unstoppable, the world had entered a dynamic it had never seen before. All throughout human history, the leaders of tribes and empires, city states, clans, and modern nations have had to worry about their enemy's capabilities and their intent. But when both NATO and the Warsaw Pact each possessed 25,000 thermonuclear weapons, enemy capability became essentially infinite. For the first time in human history, defense planners on both sides were faced with the reality that there is no defense. Mad, mutually assured destruction, was never what so many claimed it was, namely a strategy. Mutual assured destruction meant that there could be no strategy, because in a world with infinite offensive capabilities, defense was impossible. If enemy capability is infinite, well, that leaves you nothing to work with, but enemy intent. And now we come to the fold of gap equation. Forget Brezhnev, forget Khrushchev, forget Malinkov, forget even Stalin. Lenin knew that the state he created could never coexist with the Western democracies and their capitalist economies. For the Soviet Union, the Cold War was and would forever be a zero-sum game. They knew America's capabilities, they were infinite, like their own. That meant that the only path for Soviet survival would be to bet the collective farm on American intent. America was weak. America seemed lost. Its naive peanut farming president lamenting his own nation's lack of confidence and spiritual energy, its national malaise. He'd cancelled the supersonic B1 nuclear bomber capable of penetrating Soviet air defenses at low altitude and releasing swarms of new, deadly accurate, nuclear-tipped Khrush missiles. So the question, wasn't what such a man would do if pressed into a corner? The real question was, what did these paranoid, Machiavellian isolated oligarchs think he would do if pushed into a corner? On November 4, 1979, not an army but a rabble of Iranian fundamentalist students climbed the wall of the U.S. Embassy in Iran. When embassy guards first brandished their firearms, one of the students explained, "We don't mean any harm." The embassy guards lowered their weapons and at that moment it became clear that the most powerful nation in the world was not prepared to use deadly force to defend the sovereign territory of their embassy against a small group of disorganized, unarmed invaders. 52 hostages were taken captive and led blindfolded out of the embassy in front of the entire world. In response, America sent off a strongly worded letter of protest. On December 24, in a final test of American and NATO resolve, the Soviet Union launched a full-scale military invasion of Afghanistan. And Carter responded to this open act of military aggression by declaring that American athletes would not participate in the 1980 Moscow Olympics. On April 24, 1980, the United States launched a daring attempt to free the American hostages by military action, codenamed Operation Eagle Claw. The RH-53DC-Stalley in helicopters that would evacuate the hostages from the American embassy in Turan lacked the range to get there and back from their launch point aboard a US aircraft carrier. So the first night of the operation would be spent consolidating fuel, troops, helicopters and other resources at a remote location far from Turan known as Desert 1. While hover taxiing into position to refuel, a sudden sandstorm blinded the pilots of one of the six rescue helicopters. His tail rotor struck the vertical stabilizer of one of the four EC-130 Hercules transports that had been preparing to refuel the C-Stallion. The main rotor then tore into the four engine turbo-props wing route. Both vehicles exploded. US forces then boarded the remaining EC-130s and departed, leaving five helicopters behind. Three of them were too badly damaged to ever fly again, but the other two remain in service with the Navy of the Islamic Republic of Iran to this day. When Iranian officials arrived on the scene the next morning, they found the five helicopters, burned out shells of the six helicopter in the C-130 and the charge remains of eight US servicemen that had been abandoned in the wreckage. The road through the faulty gap was wide open. When watching the video of Leonid Brezhnev being kissed by Jimmy Carter at their 1979 summit, reinforce the memory that I'd always had of the Russian leader, a barely alive automaton stone-faced, somewhat confused, staring blankly out into the lights and waving with the reflexive monotony of any world leader who has been on the world stage for far too long. It made me wonder if he'd always been that way. Well, it turns out he had not. There's a video from the Richard Nixon Presidential Library on YouTube of Nixon and Brezhnev signing agreements during the Soviet leaders visit to the United States in 1973. Each signs one copy of the joint agreement and then aids switch copies for the other leader to sign. Nixon finishes signing first and glances over to Brezhnev. It looks as if he's trying to time it so that neither appear to have finished first. Nixon then looks up and catches Nixon eyeing him. He smiles. He then makes a point of rushing his signature in order to catch up with Nixon, then he glances over at Nixon again and half-rises from his chair to look over at Nixon's document. He's pantomiming, copying his answers as if on a fifth-grade math test. Nixon breaks into a huge grin and moves his document back under his arm as if to protect his answers. Nixon ebbs smiles and nods as if he got what he was looking for and as the room erupts in laughter, he pretends to write down the correct answer from the math nerd. Nixon is delighted and as Brezhnev finishes signing, Nixon makes a playfully and fatic period on his document. Brezhnev dots his name with the same exaggerated poem. Nixon then throws up his hands. Both men close the leather-bound agreements. Nixon ever moves his glasses as both men rise and warmly shake hands. Nixon is delighted Brezhnev is warm, playful and yet seems absolutely sincere. I'd never seen that clip before and it has since become officially my favorite single moment from the Cold War. Soviet society, which had advanced both technologically and economically throughout the 60s, was about to enter what became known as the Brezhnev stagnation at precisely the worst possible time for the Russians. Even as America was struggling with the bitter aftermath of Vietnam, the energy crisis, water gave it all the rest. The world was changing in a way. It had only changed twice before in all of human history. Something new had appeared. The world had arrived at 2066 Chris Drive in Los Althos, California, an utterly nondescript suburban home owned by an American named Paul Jobs, a Coast Guard mechanic and his wife Clara and their adopted son Steve. Paul had built an electrical workbench for his son. He used to fool around with it with another neighborhood kid, also named Steve, but usually just referred to as was. What Steve was, Nick, had built and Steve Jobs had envisioned and marketed from the house on 2066 Chris Drive, would launch the beginning of the information age. And if time was running out for the Soviet Union and its attempt to keep up with Western industrial technology, the advent of the information age and its effect on a society built to control all access to information of any kind, was going to push the Soviets ever faster and deeper into that most dangerous of corners. The Brezhnev stagnation could not have come at a worse time. Moscow had installed a communist regime in Afghanistan in 1978 and sensing weakness in an American president held hostage to the hostage crisis. They decided to do what they had done in Korea, Hungary, Vietnam and Czechoslovakia. During the final days of 1979, they sent in their tanks to expand their empire and then came 1980. Now as it turns out, I remember exactly where I was. On November 4th of 1980, I'd been a theater major at the University of Florida. And I was getting out of costume and makeup backstage at the Gainesville Little Theatre at around 10.15 pm on that first Tuesday in November. We were sitting in front of the dressing room mirrors when we heard a muffled whale and a moment later, the stage manager burst into the dressing room with tears streaming down her face. It's over. What's over? We asked. "Ragan won. Carter just conceded. Russian missiles are probably already on the way," she screamed, and she wasn't kidding. That's really what she thought. Even then, I thought that was laying it on a little thick, but as a 21-year-old fine art student, I hadn't been on Earth long enough for life to beat the stupid out of me yet. Reagan scared me. And the reason he had scared me was not because of his policies or his speeches. I didn't know and hadn't heard any of them and the same went for Carter. I really. knew about Reagan, was that he seemed itching for a fight with a thermonuclear enemy, and this struck me at the time as a bad idea. It would take me another 20 years to figure out that the most likely way to World War 3 would have been if the guy who I wanted to win had actually won. And apparently I wasn't the only one who was worried about what Ronald Reagan might do. In the final hours of his presidency, Jimmy Carter's signaled US agreement to what became known as the Algiers Accords, which immediately granted Iran $7.9 billion in what had been frozen assets. It also granted Iranian immunity from any lawsuits they may have faced in America as a result of their fundamentalist Islamic revolution, and finally, an exchange for the 52 Americans who had been held hostage for the 444 days since unarmed students overran the US Embassy. The United States also pledged, quote, "It is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene directly or indirectly, politically or militarily in Iran's internal affairs." President-elect Reagan had stated repeatedly that he would not, quote, "pay ransom for people who'd been kidnapped by barbarians." Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th President of the United States of America in the early afternoon of January 20, 1981. About two-thirds of the way through, he had this to say. Above all, we must realize that no arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have. It is a weapon that we as Americans do have. Let that be understood by those who practice terrorism and pray upon their neighbors. Now, I know it strains credulity to mention it, but near as it is possible to reconstruct it, at some time during Reagan's actual inaugural address conceivably, just as those lines were being spoken. 52 American hostages left Iranian airspace and were on their way home. It was like a switch had been thrown. To many of us who lived through it, the reversal of fortunes for both the United States and the Soviet Union seemed to have happened overnight. By 1981, America had put Watergate and the answer to Watergate well behind it. A decade of grief, division, and very, very hard one lessons from a brutal war was well behind us as well. And strangely enough, the surge of optimism and energy had come from Ronald Reagan who at age 70 was the oldest man ever inaugurated president up until that time. It had been that spring chicken, Jimmy Carter, 52 years old when he began his presidency that had complained about malaise and hectored us about wearing sweaters and turning down thermostats to save energy. Now at first, those in the Kremlin who had scrutinized Reagan throughout his career believed that despite the tough talk, Reagan would likely be a bigger pushover than Carter had been. He was an actor, forgot six. What kind of man was this simple, relentlessly optimistic movie star? The Soviets would not have to wait long to find out. In August 3rd, 1981, just a few months after his inauguration, the 13,000 men and women that made a patco, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association, decided to go on strike. Now, strikes by government employees were illegal, but patco decided that they could get around this technicality by staging a sick-in. On August 3rd, only 1,300 of the country's 13,000 air traffic controllers had shown up for work. The rest of them, 11,700 of them, all called in sick that day. Reagan immediately declared the strike illegal and ordered them back to work within 48 hours or they would lose their jobs. Now the Soviets must have thought this was a terrible, rookie mistake on the part of the new president. When patco called his bluff, Reagan would be forced into a humiliating retreat. And retreat he must, the United States economy would be crippled without commercial aviation and everybody knew it. It looked like a stupid, empty threat. But 48 hours later, on August 5th, 1981, Reagan fired all 11,345 air traffic controllers that had failed to show up for work. Retired controllers would be brought back out of retirement, military controllers would be transferred to civilian towers. It took three years to train an air traffic controller. The US commercial aviation sector would not fully recover for 10 years. Ronald Reagan fired them all anyway because he said he would. Now in just three months, it felt like a different country. American confidence was on the rise. But meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, precisely the reverse had occurred. It was the Soviets now, not the Americans, who were bogged down in what would be their decade of frustration, grief and failure in Afghanistan. Now it was Soviet policy and military doctrine that had become fossilized and ineffective. By the time of Ronald Reagan's inauguration, it was apparent to everyone that the sparkle in the eyes of Leonid Brezhnev as he played with Richard Nixon had dimmed long before. Brezhnev had remained on the world stage long, long after he should have taken his final bow. But he'd presided over the Soviet Union longer than anyone except for Joseph Stalin and it was Brezhnev, not Stalin, that had taken the Soviet Union to the peak of its strength and had done so without rivers of blood on his hands. He was an old and very sick man, but somehow he still managed to endure hours of icy wind standing atop the granite of Lenin's Mosleum while the parade marking the October revolution ground endlessly passed him. He died of a heart attack three days later. He was to have been followed by Constantine Cernchenko, a cipher of a man whose soul claimed to the position other than a reputation for being easily manipulated, was that according to the Byzantine rules of Kremlin politics, he was the next man in line. But that ascension was derailed in a last minute power play by the man who had been so beat ambassador to Hungary during the uprising in 1956. The man who had convinced a reluctant cruise chef to invade Hungary mercilessly crushed the rebellion and execute in Rheonagi and the rest of the leaders of the revolt. His name was Yuri Andropov, fourth chairman of the Committee for State Security, the KGB, in Hungary in 1956 they'd called him the butcher of Budapest. It had been Andropov that had tried to retighten the screws of state power as Brezhnev's mental powers slowly faded away. A direct linear descendant of Irin Felix Jerzynski, Genrich Yegoda, Nikolay Yezhov, and Lavrenty Beria, whom he closely resembled. Andropov was the kind of old school spy chief who meant business, a shiny steel tip on what had become the warped and termite eaten Soviet spear. This was the kind of man to face a resurgent United States under Ronald Reagan, who had already begun rebuilding America's military strength and quickly, too, by restarting the B-1 bomber program canceled by Jimmy Carter. Yuri Andropov was the new communist hammer. But unfortunately for him, it soon became apparent that all Andropov knew how to do was drive nails. The stagnant Soviet economy baffled him, and all he could do in response was to launch a series of KGB investigations of longtime communist party officials for lack of party discipline and party mindedness. His answer to the burgeoning information age taking root and coming to rapid bloom in America was to criminalize true and see on the part of common Soviet workers. They may not be building anything worth having, and even what they would build, they would not be building well, but at least they would be building it on time in the morning. Now, it's very difficult to say whether Yuri Andropov's pension for brutality would have bought a few more years for the Soviet Union or merely hastened its fall. Fortunately for the Russian people and those countries in orbit around the Kremlin, we didn't get a chance to find out. He died in February of 1984 after just 15 months in office. Vice President George H.W. Bush flew to Moscow as a representative of the United States government as he had over a year earlier when Leonid Brezhnev had died. Reagan signed the official condolence book at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Andropov was followed by the man who should have preceded him, Konstantin Chernyenko, who spent virtually his entire tenure as leader of the Soviet Union in a heavily guarded Moscow hospital battling emphysema, an illness that had bedeviled this lifelong heavy smoker who smoked his first pack of cigarettes at age 9. His final months of near total incapacitation as he laid dying had resulted in the Politburo simply rubber stamping his signature to state documents as they'd done in the final months of Andropov. Chernyenko died of chronic emphysema, congestive heart failure and cirrhosis of the liver on March 10th. 1985. Vice President Bush, who by now was amassing a significant amount of frequent flyer miles, returned to Moscow for the third state funeral of a Soviet leader in as many years. Ronald Reagan, awoken in the middle of the night with the news of Chernyenko's death, is reported to have said, "How am I supposed to get any place with the Russians if they keep dying on me?" Well, he was about to get his chance. Micheal Gorbachev would go on to have five summits with the American President and seven more with George H. W. Bush after his election in 1988. Of these 12 summits between Gorbachev, Reagan, and Bush, I only remember one of them. If you live through the Cold War, likely you only have one firmly in your mind as well. In a modest, white and gray house under what seemed to be the perpetual low-overcast of Iceland. Gorbachev and Reagan sat just a few feet across from each other and what could easily have been a small dining room of a modest American home. Now, the big three conferences of World War II would bring entire armies of secretaries, generals, diplomats, bureaucrats, and spies all arrayed around enormous circular tables. But from October 11th through 12th, 1986, at this isolated house in Reykjavik, it was four men at just a regular dinner table, Reagan and Gorbachev on each end, and two translators won to a side. But it was what was on the table that was simply breathtaking. The complete removal of nuclear-tipped, intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Europe. The importance of human rights throughout communist East Europe and around the world Mikhail Gorbachev offered a 50% reduction of Soviet ICBMs, Reagan, countered with a plan to get rid of all of them in 10 years. And as the news leaked out, there it was, a future. A chance to get out of the mutually assured hell that IC skeletal hand that had gripped the heart of the world for 40 years. I watched on TV thinking there might in fact be a chance for me to live to be 30. Both leaders had gone into the house smiling and confident, and that in itself was something new to Americanize a Soviet premiere who smiled. But when they came out the following day, they had the kind of look that a long married couple might have after a final session of marriage counseling had made it clear that a divorce was the only option left. Gorbachev was somber. Reagan looked physically ill. The only time I can remember seeing him depressed. As the two men shook hands beside Reagan's limousine, the American president turned to the Russian premiere and said, "I still think we can find a deal." I don't know what else I could have done," replied Gorbachev. Then they stood there for a long moment in silence as if each was waiting for the other to gesture back to the house, but neither did. Reagan looked down at the door of his limo, Gorbachev nodded, and Reagan slumped inside. Later, in private, he would hold up his hands, thumbs and forefinger just an inch apart and tell his chief of staff, Don Reagan, that we were this close to getting rid of all the missiles. But Reagan had walked out, walked out because of a single ten-letter word. Just before the two men emerged from the cozy house out into the gloom, Reagan gestured. At all of the earth-shaking proposals both sides had put on the table and asked the Soviet leader if he really would, "turn down a historic opportunity because of a single word," unquote. Well, it turns out that the Soviet leader would. That word was "laboratory." Shortly before taking office, Reagan had told his closest advisors about his strategy for the Cold War. "It's simple, really," he said. "We win. They lose." Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson had tried containment. Nixon had made a strong effort with diplomacy and detente, Ford and Carter attempted to keep up the pressure on the Soviets, but despite the Brezhnev stagnation, Russian conventional forces continued to grow. Reagan wanted to win the Cold War, and that meant changing the fundamental equation. What if there was an alternative to mutually assured destruction? What if the inevitable nuclear retaliation was not inevitable? What if there was a way to change from infinite capability and reading the tea leaves and chicken entrails of intent? Reagan came to believe there might be an answer. Now looking back on it, it seems incredible that SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative, could have been taken as seriously as it was. Fast orbital battle stations, X-ray lasers powered by nuclear explosions and swarms of small, hunter-killer satellites called Smart Rocks or Brilliant Pebbles, SDI instantly mocked as Star Wars. It was a plan to be able to shoot down 25,000 inbound Soviet warheads simultaneously. Surely the entire idea was ridiculous. But Reagan didn't think it was ridiculous. Reagan had promised the American people that he would investigate whether or not SDI was viable. Whether SDI would work or not was no longer the point. The point was that Reagan believed it would work and meant to go ahead with it. And looking back on how he'd handled the Pat Goes strike, the Soviets had come to the conclusion that Ronald Reagan considered himself a man of his word. The American determination to move ahead on a defensive shield meant that the Soviet union would have no choice but develop similar technologies themselves. It was either that or Newk America right then and there and get it all over with while they still could. And while the United States had spent somewhere around 3% of GDP for defense during the run of the Cold War, by the time both men arrived in Reykjavik, the Soviets were spending 25% of their GDP on defense and was still unable to feed its own people. They'd simply run out of rope. A world freed from nuclear armageddon was on that small table coming into the summit, the Soviets. In the words of an American official had "shoured us with gifts." And it seemed that all Gorbachev had wanted in return was a promise that SDI research would be confined to the laboratory. But Star Wars was a space-based system. It had to be tested in space. Space is not a laboratory replied the Soviets and on this point they would not budge. So Reagan walked away and watching the two men leave Iceland. I remember feeling physically sick. The last helicopter out of hell had just departed. We were that close. In the darkness after the First World War, as the Treaty of Versailles tapped deep into the well of bitterness in Germany, an American expat living in Britain named T.S. Eliot caught the mood of despair in a poem called "The Hollow Men." This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper. And this is the way our story ends as well, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Many years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Reagan's secretary of state George Schultz had a chance to speak with Mikhail Gorbachev at Stanford University. When they came to high office at Schultz, the cold war could not have been colder. And yet, when we left, it was basically over. What do you think was the turning point? Reykjavik replied Gorbachev without hesitation. Why, as the former secretary of state, expecting the former leader of the former Soviet Union to respond with talks of missiles and tanks with aircraft carriers and all that stuff? But Gorbachev said, for the first time, the two leaders really had a chance to talk to each other. And it was true. They didn't talk about missiles. They talked about their wives and children. They talked about their childhoods on opposite sides of the world divided by an iron curtain. They talked about a future without fear. And they had both put everything on the table at Reykjavik everything. And yet both had walked away on principle. But both men had seen the promised land and neither of them would forget it. Eight months after their meeting in Iceland, President Reagan stood before the Brandon Burgate in West Berlin. And he said, General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. McKeill Gorbachev's programs of glass-noss are openness and perestroika restructuring. We're intended to save the Soviet Union, not destroy it. But the wall, the real wall, the one inside people's heads had already been torn. down. The Soviet system could withstand restructuring, but it could never survive glass-nose, could never survive openness because secrecy was the coin of the room. Six months before the summit at Reykjivik, the number four reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic exploded. Over the strident, nearly violent opposition of the technicians running the reactor, safety protocols had been disabled in order to achieve a political objective. The Kremlin refused to admit that there had been an accident and it was only a week later as a sea of radiation swept across Eastern Europe that they grudgingly conceded that there had been a problem. Communism and openness were mutually exclusive. On November 9, 1989, a spokesperson for the East German government casually mentioned over the radio that starting at midnight, East German citizens were free to cross the border. Now, no one knows how this happened. It was just time. By midnight, the roads were flooded. Two million people had gone to the west. United at last with the relatives they had not seen in four-year years. The citizens of Berlin used hammers and picks and bare and bloody hands to tear down the gray monstrosity that had cut through their lives for two generations. Over the long gray years of the Cold War, they'd stolen armored cars and crashed them through barricades. They'd floated out to sea on air mattresses. They'd used a bow and arrow to fire a zip line into West Berlin and then zoomed over the wall. They'd constructed ultralight airplanes. They'd made their own hot air balloons. One of them had walked an unused power line like a tightrope and broke both his arms as he fell into freedom. And about a dozen elderly men and women spent months of backbreaking labor and escaped through what became known as the Senior Citizens Tunnel. All of that ended on November 9th. Someone had spray painted a message on the gray concrete. Only today at Red is the war really over. The Berliner who wrote it was referring to World War II. In an act of monumental personal heroism, Lec Valesa, an electrician at a shipyard in Gdansk had started a labor union called Solidarity. It was the first competition the Communist Party had seen since 1917 and a direct and rapidly growing challenge to communist rule. In Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia 1968, Russian tanks had invaded and crushed the nascent rebellion. But in Poland in 1980, they did not. The Baltic SSRs declared their independence from the Soviet Union. They would be Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia once more. Novilis Valklev-Havl, who broadcasts live as his native Prague was crushed by the Soviets in 1968, led a bloodless transition in Czechoslovakia that became known as the Velvet Revolution. But the husband and wife Romanian dictators, Nikolai and Elena Czachescu, were simply put up against a wall and shot by their own people. There had been a coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev by Russian hardliners in August of 1991, but it was far far too late for that kind of thing. The coup collapsed after three days and Gorbachev returned to the Kremlin but his personal power. Like that of the state he had tried to save was irrevocably shattered. He resigned as the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991 and the next evening. The red and gold hammer and sickle flag flying above the Kremlin was run down without ceremony and the white blue and red flag of the Russian Federation was raised in its place. When all was said and done, it had not been submarines or bombers or ICBMs that had decided the matter, the Cold War was not won militarily, was not won politically or even economically. The Cold War ended once Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Lechvelessa, Valklev-Havl and the citizens of Berlin simply spoke out about what the Soviet system was and what they saw. It was in the end a moral victory and 43 years after the Berlin blockade it was nothing more nor less than the voice of free people speaking the truth that had doomed the Communist Empire. There was no American victory prayed to mark the end of the Cold War but in 1997 Mikhail Gorbachev, former Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, appeared in a TV commercial for Pizza Hut. Now the Cold War could have ended with Ronald Reagan dying of tuberculosis in a Soviet gulag but it didn't. When I saw the eighth and final leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics eating pizza in an American TV commercial I knew that the Cold War was finally over and that we had won. Oh, one quick post script. On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov was on duty as Lieutenant Colonel in the air defense force of the Soviet Union. It was another endless overnight shift just like every other and then suddenly it wasn't. An alarm shattered the boredom of the control center. On the central screen five thermonuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missiles were inbound for the Soviet Union. Petrov was understanding orders to release his retaliatory missiles the instant American warheads had been detected on both sides of the giant screen. A huge red backlit sign had a single word on it and that word was launch. It was Petrov's duty to his nation to inform Moscow the instant. His radars had detected the long-feared American decapitation strike. Launch was automatic from that point onward. All I had to do was reach for the phone to raise the direct line to our top commanders but I couldn't move for called Petrov. I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan and so Lieutenant Colonel Petrov did not make the call that would have automatically launched a full-scale Soviet thermonuclear strike against the United States of America. The radar blips disappeared into the ground. The fact that Petrov himself would have been summarily shot for dereliction of duty was the least of his concerns. The minutes dragged by and after a few phone calls it became clear that the targets of the American strike were still there. Petrov had bet the world that what he was seeing was a computer malfunction. He was right. Stanislav Petrov had followed his orders instead of his heart. I wouldn't be recording this series and you wouldn't be listening to it. We'd still be radioactive ash high up in the stratosphere. Stanislav Petrov died unknown, unloved, and alone in his Moscow flat on May 19th, 2017. There's a photo of him as an old man hands clasped in front of him on a badly made table with a rusting electric kettle perched on top of the small closet in his tiny and depressing apartment. But the sadness in his eyes and the kindness too is unmistakable. And of all of the heartache in this longest of America's wars, of all of the soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines on both sides, of all the lives lost, of all the families divided, of all the millions of tragedies that we refer to as the Cold War out of all of that. If there was one single outcome that I had the power to change, then the fate of the man who saved us all is the one that I would choose to set right. The Cold War, what we saw, is written and presented by Bill Whittle, produced by Robert Sterling, directed by Jonathan Hay. Executive producer is Jeremy Boring. Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our associate producer is Katie Swinerton. Post-production producer Alex Singaro, story producer Jared Sashel, edited by Matthew Sheller, audio recorded by Mike Coramina, original music and mixed by Kyle Perrin, designed by Cynthia Angulo. The Cold War, what we saw, is an esoteric radio theater production copyright esoteric radio theater 2020. We begin today's meditation with the few sipping exercises to remind us a little treat can go a long way. So pick up your McAfee iced coffees, close your eyes, and deep sip in, and deep satisfaction out. Take a treat retreat at McDonald's. Right now get a McAfee iced coffee in any size and any flavor for just 99 cents until 11 a.m. Price of participation may vary.