Salt Lake City and Stereotypes of the Russians

Abstract

In the spring of 2001, when I was in Moscow on a Fulbright grant, I visited the Armed Forces Museum. In an outdoor courtyard that was basically a graveyard for outmoded weaponry, I saw an American Pershing II missile, one of a class of military hardware that had been aimed at the Soviets during the height of the second phase of the Cold War. It stood beside Russian ICBMs, tanks, and artillery pieces, testimony to the hostility that had recently marked the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Pershing II missile, part of a weapons system that went nowhere in conflict but had been decommissioned and dismantled in 1987, wound up in Moscow in peace. In that year, the United States and the Soviet Union made diplomatic progress toward nuclear arms control. The previous year at the summit conference at Reykjavik, Iceland, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had tried to persuade President Ronald Reagan to agree to a complete renunciation of nuclear weapons. The attempt foundered on ReaganOs love of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), but, after much maneuvering, Gorbachev did persuade Reagan to agree to the Intermediate Nuclear Forces