The Cold War Arms Race and the Last Nuclear Agreement

In ‘This Week in History,’ a string of nuclear arms treaties led to Ronald Reagan’s inconceivable request, which finally manifested as the USSR crumbled.

On July 31, 1990, American President George H.W. Bush (L) and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev sign START agreements detailing the mutual destruction of the two countries' nuclear arsenals. Public Domain

In May of 1972, President Richard Nixon took the unprecedented stop in Moscow. Accompanied by his wife, Pat, his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, and a host of other American officials, Nixon arrived on the heels of his also unprecedented February visit to Beijing. The combative relationship between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) had culminated in the ongoing Cold War, which came with the possibility of nuclear war. It had only been a decade since that possibility careened toward probability with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

John F. Kennedy and Nikita Krushchev meet in Vienna prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Public Domain