Figure 7.8 Arc of Instablity
Into the dusk
AN OCEAN OF AIR*
I'm going to make a cake
Van Allen Belt
Carl Woese compared the genetic sequence of many d…
Toledo Farms
What the plants have to 'say'
Drinking Life To The Lees
On a Winter Morning
On a Winter morning
THE TIDE
The Library hour
Lost in the withering petals
Lawrence of Arabia
A Neanderthal who's been given a shave and a new s…
Me & book buddy
Tolerance
Codex
Spring morning
Shimola
Toyota Prius
El Papagayo
Tacco
Tapato
El Papagayo
Library of Alexandria
Winter night
A leaf
Dogwood on a Spring day
Pioneer Monument
Queue
Before Smart phones
The Grapes of Wrath
To O'Hara from Jack London
Office - Secretary of State - 1902
Office - Secretary of State - 1902
Library desk - Sacramento CA -1904
Sutro Library, SF. CA 1960s
Mobile Library of the yore
There is no choice to strike off...!
Keywords
Authorizations, license
-
Visible by: Everyone -
All rights reserved
- Photo replaced on 17 Jan 2018
-
277 visits
- Keyboard shortcuts:
Jump to top
RSS feed- Latest comments - Subscribe to the comment feeds of this photo
- ipernity © 2007-2024
- Help & Contact
|
Club news
|
About ipernity
|
History |
ipernity Club & Prices |
Guide of good conduct
Donate | Group guidelines | Privacy policy | Terms of use | Statutes | In memoria -
Facebook
Twitter
Many Americans assumed that this must be another clever move in the game of death (so clever, in fact, that they could not quite figure out what the Soviets might be trying to do). "I was suspicious of Gorbachev's motives," National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft later confessed. "My fear," he explained, "was that Gorbachev could talk us into disarming without the Soviet Union having to do anything fundamental to its own military structure and that, in the decade or so, we could face a more serious military threat than ever before."
. . . . In October 1986, Regan and Gorbachev sat across a table in Reykjavik and actually started talking about banning all nuclear weapons. This threw American defense experts into a panic. The Soviets might be terrified of NATO's new, high-tech arsenal, but Americans -- who knew that few of these wonder weapons were yet in service -- were equally terrified that without nuclear deterrence their conventional forces in Europe would be hardpressed to hold off the much larger Soviet armies. Gorbachev, however, was not trying to trick anyone, and is slowly became clear that he really was serious about playing the game without using force. No one knew what to make of it. ~ Page 328
The events in Romania suggested that Gorbachev was right, but by the summer of 1989 the Soviets probably had no winning moves left. Changing one policy just led to irresistible pressure on the next policy. Less than three months after the Berlin Wall came down, East Germany's prime minister told Gorbachev that the two Germanys wanted to merge into one. This could only happen, Gorbachev replied, if the united Germany were demilitarized and neutral. A proposal was put to the Americans, but Bush refused to withdraw the quarter of million American personnel in West Germany. Gorbachev pulled his 300,000 troops out of East Germany anyway, and the new, reunited Germany joined NATO.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is perhaps not surprising that once the Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, and Bulgarians had walked away from the Soviet Empire, the Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians, Azeris, Chechens, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, and Mongolians would follow. What does still seem remarkable, though is that the Russians themselves decided that they wanted nothing more to do with their own empire and announced their withdrawal from the Soviet system. On Christmas Day 1991, Gorbachev signed a decree formally dissolving the Soviet Union. ~ Page 330
Sign-in to write a comment.