Through NATO, the United States impose their missiles in Western Europe, blaming “the Soviet menace.” At the December 1979 NATO summit meeting, the decision was made to install missiles in Western Europe that would be pointing east. The USSR denounces this decision as a new example of American imperialism. In reality, two years earlier, taking advantages of loopholes in the 1972 SALT I disarmament agreement, the Soviets had installed SS-20 medium-range missiles on their own territory. At that point, the Western Europeans called on the USA and NATO to engage negotiations that would force the Soviets to withdraw their missiles, or, if that failed, to deploy cruise missiles and Pershings II on European soil in order to provide a response to the Soviet rockets. Those were the causes of the Euro-missile crisis. In the end, it was settled with the arrival of Gorbachev in 1985 and the signature of the Washington Agreement in 1987, which led to dismantling all missiles stationed in Europe.

"The same old product in a new package" The Space Race was a favorite battlefield between the USA and the USSR during the Cold War. With the election of Ronald Reagan – who ran on the slogan “America is back,” – in 1980, the rivalry between the two major powers stepped up a huge notch: the American president launched a gargantuan armament program called SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative), better known as “Star Wars”. The idea was to deploy a network of satellites aimed at detecting and destroying Soviet missiles before they could reach their targets. This rearmament program gave the USSR the chance to point their fingers once again at the war-mongering American super-power.

Peace campaign in the USSR in the mid-80s, telling the story of two little girls, the American Samantha Smith and the Russian Katia Lytcheva. In 1983, after writing a letter to Yuri Andropov in which she expressed her concern about the possibility of a war between the USSR and the USA, Samantha Smith, a 10-year-old American girl, was invited to visit the USSR, and her stay caused a media frenzy. In reply, a little Russian girl, Katya Lytcheva, was invited to the USA, becoming another young Peace Ambassador. In a context of rising tensions (invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR, Euro-missile crisis...), the girls featured in peace campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic.

The theme of defending peace was widely used by Communist-bloc propaganda during the Cold War. So protest movements cleverly echoed it when they wanted to criticize the authorities. While the Euro-missile crisis in the late 70s and early 80s stimulated pacifist movements on both sides of the Iron Curtain in Germany – a country that was particularly threatened, in other Eastern-bloc countries, freedom of expression was so curtailed that the movement had to resort to acting out the Biblical expression, “They will beat their swords into plowshares” (Micah 4:3 and Isaiah 2:4). This symbolic action, which was well-covered in the media, was performed during a peace meeting attended by some 4,000 people in Lutherhof, in 1983. A protest against both rearmament and the East German authorities’ policy of militarization, one of the participants was the theologian Friedrich Schorlemmer, a respected member of the East German movement for peace, human rights and environmental protection. This meeting illustrates the need for political dissidents to seek protection from the Church, the only institution that had preserved even a limited amount of autonomy.

On 27 December, 1979, Soviet troops entered Afghanistan: it was the end of 10 years of détente between the two blocs. For the first time since 1945, the Red Army intervened beyond the zone it controlled directly. The operation caused a wave of indignation in the West and was the beginning of a war that would last for 10 years and cost more than a million Afghans their lives. Afghan resistance fighters (the mujahidin) opposed Russian helicopter rockets and antipersonnel mines with their machine guns – the damages they inflicted were kept under wraps by the Soviets. Yet the Soviet Army, and Soviet society, refused to pay the price of victory. A total of 630,000 Soviets, for the most part low-ranking soldiers, fought in Afghanistan: More than 13,000 of them lost their lives, and another 54,000 were wounded. The Afghan conflict – this “bloody wound” (Mikhail Gorbachev), sped up the collapse of the Soviet system. In the sense that it was a difficult and costly war, that although it did not lead to actual defeat the men fighting never truly understand why they were there, it is comparable to what the Vietnam War was to the United States.

In a context of détente symbolized by the Helsinki Act, the Americans proposed a joint space mission, including docking the Apollo and Soyuz vessels together in space, at an altitude of 250 km. On July 17, 1975, astronaut Thomas Stafford and cosmonaut Alexis Leonov shook hands in space. Above and beyond the technical challenge this represented, the encounter was a striking symbol of détente between the two super-powers. Yet it would be another 20 years before another Russo-American handshake in space – when Atlantis docked at the Russian MIR station in 1995.

After the acme of détente at the Helsinki conference of 1975, tension began to build once again from 1979. Despite the SALT I (1979) and SALT II (1979) treaties limiting strategic arms, the arms race had started up again. In response to Soviet SS 20 missiles being deployed in the USSR, American Pershing missiles were based in Western Europe, and American president Ronald Reagan launched the “Star Wars” program in 1980. Soviet propaganda used it as a chance to reprise the Zhdanov Doctrine, as presented in Stalin’s right-hand man’s famous 1947 report to European Communist Parties denouncing “the expansionist course of the United States,” aimed at “the establishment of world domination.” This film also argues that the Soviet Union’s main rival represents a threat to world peace – which the USSR liked to portray itself as having been defending since the end of World War II.