WEIGHING DETENTE'S FUTURE

On 12 December 1979, NATO ministers meeting in Brussels responded to the Soviet Union's stationing of mid-range nuclear missiles in the western part of the USSR with their own far-reaching decision, pending the unsuccessful outcome of negotiations with Moscow, to deploy land-based Pershing II and cruise missiles on West European soil beginning in the fall of 1983. Then, only two weeks later, Soviet divisions rumbled into Afghanistan, for the start of what was to be a long and bloody attempt to impose socialist discipline on that part of the USSR's periphery. Finally, less than a year later, in the summer of 1980, worker unrest swelled to the breaking point in the Polish shipyards of Gdansk and Gdynia, polarizing world opinion.

None of these momentous developments took place within the GDR itself. But their combined impact on East Germany could not have been more profound, since they all threatened to pull the foundations out from under the fragile web of agreements and understandings that had governed East–West relations during the 1970s. Caught in between, the East German leadership found itself in a complex and even paradoxical position. Only a decade earlier, detente's inception had represented a major challenge to East Berlin's ruling authority.