Let us not be deceived — we are today in the midst of a cold war. Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home. Let us never forget this: Our unrest is the heart of their success. The peace of the world is the hope and the goal of our political system; it is the despair and defeat of those who stand against us.
Although the shooting war is over, we are in the midst of a cold war which is getting warmer.
When I came into office, I was determined that our country would go into the 21st century still the world's greatest force for peace and freedom, for democracy and security and prosperity. We have to promote these values just as vigorously as we did in the Cold War.
A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory…. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
Worldwide preparations for war continued in 1984. For the first time in a decade, the United States Navy deployed nuclear-powered and armed submarines to the North Pole, and the Soviets began deployments of their new, massive Typhoon-class submarines in polar waters. Once again the nuclear competition moved through and north of Canada.
The most powerful western asset during the last cold war was not bigger nukes or higher living standards, but self-criticism. However bad western governments may be, they risk trouble eventually—from the media, the courts or the voters. That is not something that one can say with much confidence about Russia now.
We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.
These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.
If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.
From 1971 to 1986 a total of 20 satellites were launched, each containing 60 miles (100 kilometers) of film and sophisticated cameras that orbited the earth snapping vast, panoramic photographs of the Soviet Union, China and other potential foes. The film was shot back through the earth's atmosphere in buckets that parachuted over the Pacific Ocean, where C-130 Air Force planes snagged them with grappling hooks.
The Nike missiles were deployed at fixed sites in circular pattern around key American government/industrial/transportation and military locations; the larger the defended area, the more Ajax sites that were constructed. For example, larger defenses such as Los Angeles or New York received sixteen and nineteen Ajax batteries respectively. Smaller defenses such as Ellsworth and Loring AFBs received four sites each.
The aircraft that flew into East Germany last Tuesday was the second American plane lost to Communist gunfire this year. Since 1950, about 20 United States planes have been shot down by the Communists in areas adjacent to or inside the Iron Curtain. About 95 United States airmen have lost their lives or are missing in these incidents. In addition, there have been at least 17 other incidents involving United States aircraft.
America's first nuclear war plan, adopted in 1948 and codenamed Halfmoon, called for 50 atomic bombs to be dropped on the Soviet Union. The number was subsequently increased to 133, aimed at 70 cities. Leningrad was to be hit by seven bombs, Moscow by eight. There seemed no alternative to the threat of mass slaughter. This US strategy was called "the nation-killing concept".
By the mid-1950s, the American war plan had shifted from hitting "countervalue" targets (cities) to destroying "counterforce" targets (military facilities). The invention of the hydrogen bomb had created nuclear weapons hundreds of times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The Soviet Union now had its own nuclear weapons, and destroying them became the air force's principal goal.