Letters

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In "He Could See For Miles" [JUNE 14], essayist Charles Krauthammer repeated a notion we keep hearing from Reagan's sillier admirers: that he won the cold war by forcing the Soviet Union to go bankrupt in its efforts to keep up with the U.S.'s surge in military spending, culminating in the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Star Wars program. Many critics of Reagan's foreign policy have pointed out, however, that as the Soviet Union started to fray, there was a real chance it would end with a nuclear bang rather than a whimper. Had the U.S.S.R. not been lucky enough to draw Mikhail Gorbachev instead of, say, Yuri Andropov as its last leader, the odds are high the outcome would have been very bad. All any U.S. President could do with that nightmarish regime was restrain it from further expansion while praying that when it finally did collapse, it would somehow manage to do so peacefully — which, finally, was what happened, through pure luck. Reagan's policies had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
BRUCE MOOMAW
Cameron Park, Calif.

Krauthammer may claim that Reagan won the cold war, but in 1990, two years after the Gipper left office, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russian reformer who presided so masterfully over the Soviet Union's demise.
MORT PAULSON
Silver Spring, Md.