It was Reagan who broke MAD beyond recovery. By announcing “Star Wars” he upped the ante for the Soviets, by suddenly making their painstakingly created, at tremendous sacrifice, arsenal potentially obsolete. The USSR had nearly bankrupted itself trying to obtain conventional and strategic dominance (although we had no idea at the time how badly they were hurting), and now the US, in addition to possessing a standard of living far beyond the comprehension of most Soviet citizens, was proposing to wipe the slate clean and start over, this time without the “Mutuallly Assured” part.

Whether SDI was workable (only now are we really seeing the promise it displayed), the USSR believed it was, and that we could do it. Hence Gorbachev’s attempts to “restructure” the USSR, to streamline the Communist system so it could compete. In retrospect it was a doomed endeavor, since inevitably any loosening of the tight control the State held anywhere was going to send shock waves throughout the entire society and eventually break it apart. Jonah Goldberg once quipped that Gorbachev was like a man who removes a few bricks from the bottom of a dam, and doesn’t expect anything to happen until he was ready for it.

Well, the former USSR is still pretty much broken, depite the pathetic bluster of Putin and his clique. He threatens to start a new arms race? He can’t even match the defense spending of NATO, let along the US. Too bad they never figured out how a free society works, or even if they wanted to live in one, but perhaps they will eventually.