Reagan's Fear of Nuclear Weapons

Reagan maintained a healthy fear of nuclear weapons. He ordered the Star Wars program because he simply could not believe that the United States had no way to defend itself from an incoming nuclear attack. Even while Reagan was plowing money into Star Wars and the Pentagon's budget, he kept pressing his advisors for ways to reduce or possibly even eliminate nuclear weapons. But in 1985, Reagan got a new negotiating partner in Moscow, one who shared his dreams of a world without nuclear weapons Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union on March 10, 1985. In December 1987, they agreed to remove intermediate range ballistic missiles from Europe. By the late 1980s, the ideological foundations of the Cold War were