Thank you for your article.

Keep in mind, the FP article really doesn't do much to discount the piece I linked to and, as a matter of fact, reinforces just how close Reagan brought us to the brink of nuclear destruction.

From the FP article you linked to:

"His dread only grew by year's end when he learned that his nuclear buildup and anti-Soviet speeches had so terrified Kremlin leaders that they interpreted a nato war game as preparation for a real attack and put their military on high alert."

If it wasn't for reforms in the USSR (see Gorbachev), things might have very well ended in a nuclear holocaust due to Reagan's initial war mongering.

> to balance some of that out a bit

I'm not sure you read the article I linked to fully. It mentions Reagan's efforts to bring us back from the brink after he first disparaged and dismissed the nuclear freeze movement. The article actually mentions the fact that Reagan even went further than activists had asked for:

From the article I linked to:

" ... by the time of Reagan’s second term, the nuclear weapons policies of his administration actually went far beyond what the organizers of the freeze campaign had advocated. The Reagan Administration did not just halt the nuclear arms race, it actually began to reverse it."

But, for FP to try to polish Reagan up as a man of peace terrified of war is a bit delusional once we consider what it took to finally get him to cool his heels and desperately kick in massive damage control in the nick of time before nuclear armageddon. It's also interesting that FP didn't mention activists and their effect on the issue.

And, again, if it wasn't for the dumb luck of Gorbachev taking power, I have sincere doubts that Reagan could have rectified his previous war mongering in time.

As I said, we came much closer than most realize and Reagan nearly sent us all off the nuclear rails.

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:

"The greatest catalyst to the Able Archer war scare occurred more than two years earlier. In a May 1981 closed-session meeting of senior KGB officers and Soviet leaders, General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and KGB chairman Yuri Andropov bluntly announced that the United States was preparing a secret nuclear attack on the USSR"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83#Operation_RYAN

>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.