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The Cold War (1979-1985) discusses the period within the Cold War between the Soviet Invasion Of Afghanistan in 1979 to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet leader in 1985 . The period is sometimes referred to as the "Second Cold War". It was marked with a change in Western policy of Detente to more confrontation against the Soviets. Margaret Thatcher became British Prime Minister in 1979, and Ronald Reagan US President in 1981. Tensions increased between the major powers with both sides becoming more militaristic. The Able Archer 83 exercise in November 1983 of a realistic simulated coordinated Western European nuclear release which Soviet Leadership believed may have been an actual attack. America supplied the Mujahadeen of Afghanistan with weapons including Stinger Missile s, which shot down many Soviet aircraft. This Soviet occupation of Afghanistan turned into a long guerilla war. America also supplied arms to the Nicaraguan Contras , funded by the sale of arms to Iran, which caused the Iran-Contra Affair political scandal. The Soviets shot down the Korean Air Flight 007 commercial airliner in 1983 which caused worldwide condemnation. In 1981 American F-14 s shot down Soviet made Libyan planes in the Gulf Of Sidra Incident In 1983, the United States invaded Grenada . In Eastern Europe Martial Law In Poland was declared between 1981 and 1983. THE END OF ''DéTENTE'' AND THE BEGINNING OF THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION , 1979.]] U.S. President , the Nicaraguan Revolution , and Soviet intervention in Afghanistan . Popular anger among sectors of the population opposed to the Shah's rule, seething and repressed for a generation, combined with the Shah's secular reforms, eventually culminated in the 1979 Islamic Revolution , which in turn led to a hostage crisis. Much of the anger in Iran was directed at the U.S., which helped bring the Shah to power in a 1953 CIA-backed coup. In recent years U.S. officials have expressed regret for past U.S. actions that contributed to the Iran Revolution. Madeline Albright in 2000 expressed regret for the '53 CIA role, stating "...it is easy to see now why so many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs." 1 The fall of the Shah, a key Middle Eastern ally, was an embarrassment for the United States; and Carter's inability to get U.S. hostages freed cost him the 1980 election. While the United States was mired in recession and the Vietnam quagmire, pro-Soviet governments were making great strides abroad, especially in the Third World. Communist Vietnam had defeated the United States, becoming a united state under a communist government. New pro-Soviet governments had also been established in Laos , Angola , Ethiopia and elsewhere. Other communist insurgencies were spreading rapidly across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. And the Soviet Union seemed committed to the Brezhnev Doctrine, sending troops to Afghanistan at the request of its communist government. The Afghan invasion in 1979 marked the first time that the Soviet Union sent troops outside the Warsaw Pact since the inception of the Eastern counterpart of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). This prompted a swift reaction from the west, the boycotting of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow , and the heavy funding for the Afghani resistance fighters. Worried by Soviet deployment of nuclear SS-20 missiles (commenced in 1977 ), the NATO allies had in 1979 agreed to continued Strategic Arms Limitation Talks to constrain the number of nuclear missiles for battle field targets, threatening to deploy some 500 Cruise Missile s and ''Pershing II'' Missiles in West Germany and the Netherlands in case the negotiations were unsuccessful. The negotiations, taken up in Geneva , November 30 1981 , were bound to fail. In the countries in question, the planned deployment of ''Pershing II'' met intense and widespread opposition from public opinion across Europe, which was the site of massive demonstrations. 2 ''Pershing II'' missiles were deployed in Europe from January 1984. They were, however, soon withdrawn beginning in October 1988. The shooting down by Soviet fighters of civilian airliner Korean Air Flight 7 also increased tensions. In spite of its successes, the "new conservatives" or " Neoconservatives " rebelled against both the Nixon-era detente and the Democratic Party 's position on defense issues in the 1970s, especially after the nomination of George McGovern in 1972 , saying liberal Democrats were the cause for U.S. international setbacks. Many clustered around hawkish Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat, and pressured President Carter into a more confrontational stance. Eventually they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the conservative wing of the Republicans, who promised to confront charges of Soviet expansionism. While the Soviets had enjoyed great achievements on the international stage before the 1980 s, such as the unification of their communist ally, Vietnam ( 1975 ), and a string of communist revolutions in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, the country's strengthening ties with Third World nations in the 1960s and 1970s only masked weakness in economic terms next to the United States. In 1981, the Warsaw Pact ran the military Exercise Zapad , a massive show of numerical strength, but masking political instability in Poland . The Soviet economy suffered severe structural problems. Reform stalled between 1964 - 1982 and supply shortages of consumer goods became increasingly widespread. The 1980s saw weak leadership in the Soviet Union. In 1982 Leonid Brezhnev died to be replaced by the short-lived Yuri Andropov and then Konstantin Chernenko who also quickly died. CULTURE AND MEDIA Led by heightened public awareness and fears, the period 1979-1985 witnessed the production in Western countries of several films and television dramas depicting the probable effects of a nuclear war and its aftermath. These included the ground-breaking American film '' The Day After '' (1983) and the British television docu-drama '' Threads '' of the same year. Combining a contemporary Western youth culture of computer games and young love with fears of an accidental nuclear holocaust was the 1983 film WarGames . The hollywood film Red Dawn (1984) plays on American fears by portraying an invasion by Soviet and Cuban forces. Somewhat less seriously, the 13th James Bond film '' Octopussy '' (1983) was set against a Cold War backdrop, while the films White Nights and Rocky IV exploited contemporaneous tense Soviet-American relations. 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