Russian Rulers History Podcast · Mark Schauss

The Cold War - Part Four

·23 min

The episode begins by finishing the story of détente and moving into 1979. It notes that Jimmy Carter was in the White House when the United States and China finally normalized diplomatic relations. In May, a new proxy war broke out in El Salvador. That civil war pitted a pro-communist faction backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba against the existing U.S.-backed government, and it would last 12 years. The episode then turns to SALT II. American and Soviet negotiators had worked on it from 1972 to 1979. Its purpose was to limit the manufacture of strategic nuclear weapons and stop the development of new missile systems and nuclear weapons. The treaty ran into trouble in the U.S. Senate. Carter rescinded the signing after it became public that the Soviet Union had a combat brigade stationed in Cuba. The agreement was voted down after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, although both sides still followed it until it expired on December 31, 1985. The episode also moves into Nicaragua. In July, Marxist-led Sandinista revolutionaries overthrew the U.S.-backed government there. The episode uses these events to show the Cold War as a chain of pressure points rather than a single headline. The narrative then shifts to later arms-control and space-related tensions. It mentions a Soviet proposal for a total ban on anti-satellite missiles. The Soviet side promised not to place such weapons in space if the United States did the same. That idea did not sit well with the Reagan administration. The tone hardens from there. Two events in 1983 drove U.S.-Soviet hostility sharply upward. The first was the shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on September 1, 1983. A Soviet Sukhoi Su-15TM interceptor shot down the Boeing 747 flying from New York to Seoul via Anchorage. All 269 people aboard were killed, including U.S. Congressman Larry McDonald. The episode walks through the Soviet explanations. It says the Soviet Union first denied involvement, then admitted to the shootdown, then claimed the plane was on a spy mission, and then argued it was a U.S. provocation. It later notes that after the Soviet Union dissolved, investigators found that the military had suppressed the International Civil Aviation Organization's inquiry. The episode also connects the disaster to later policy changes. The U.S. changed flights out of Anchorage. The incident helped inspire President Reagan to make GPS freely available for civilian use once it matured. Only 25 days later came the second crisis. The 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident is presented as a near miss with world-ending stakes. Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet Air Defense Forces engineer, saw an early warning system report an American missile launch plus four more. He did not immediately pass the alarm up the chain. Instead, he waited for confirmation that never came. The episode treats that choice as the kind of judgment that kept a catastrophe from spiraling out of control. From there, the story moves toward the wider Cold War aftermath. It links the post-Soviet era to a growing sense of isolation and distrust. It then jumps to Vladimir Putin's era after 2000. It describes him as taking an antagonistic stance, especially through actions in Crimea and Ukraine despite earlier agreements. The episode ends by framing the West's sanctions and Russia's response as a continuing economic cold war with no clear end in sight. It closes by signaling a shift away from this era and toward the Russian Imperial period next.

As heard by us

A blunt, chronological finish to the Cold War, with real stakes and no polish.

This episode closes out the Cold War run by moving from late-1970s detente into the harder years that followed it: SALT II, Afghanistan, Central America, the Reagan administration, the Korean Air Lines shootdown, and Stanislav Petrov's refusal to panic when the alarms went off.

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Why you'd press play

Want the Cold War's late turns laid out without softening the edges?

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