>I read the article. It was interesting but like so many others it puts all the blame at Reagan's feet, and brushes over the culture of extreme paranoia the Sov

>I read the article. It was interesting but like so many others it puts all the blame at Reagan's feet, and brushes over the culture of extreme paranoia the Soviet leadership had at the time due to poor intelligence You may have read the article, but I don't think you read it very throughly. They didn't put all the blame on Reagan alone. That's incorrect. They mentioned Soviet culpability within the article. via page two: "An argument can be made, of course, that it was not the Reagan Administration alone that was responsible for either the confrontational Soviet-American relations of the time or the acceleration of the nuclear arms race. The two adversaries had been locked eyeball-to-eyeball since the waning days of the Second World War in 1945. The USSR had spent much of the 1970s stirring up trouble and expanding its influence throughout the "Third World." They had deployed troops to Afghanistan to save their tottering client government in Kabul on Christmas Day 1979. They had pursued several rounds of nuclear buildups of their own (and in fact had deployed medium-range ballistic missiles in Europe first). Soviet leaders, of course, always claimed that their international behavior was defensive in nature -- undertaken because we were out to get them. And we always claimed that our international behavior was defensive in nature -- undertaken because they were out to get us. " Considering the other parts you missed previously, I would suggest you re-read the article I linked to if you want to form a more valid opinion of it.