Soviet War Scare 1983

While this story is interesting, early on, the narrator makes the claim that President Reagan spent over a $trillion every year on the military buildup. The entire Reagan military building was about one trillion dollars, the entire national budget was not even one trillion at that point, and it was during Reagan that the national (accumulated) debt passed that mark. Between 1980 and 1985, the number of dollars devoted each year to defense more than doubled, from $142.6 billion to $286.8 billion. The Navy increased its force from 479 combat ships to 525, while the Army bought thousands of the new Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles. An Army attack helicopter called the Apache, a key weapon in both gulf wars, made its debut.

Hundreds of attack aircraft, from the Navy's F-14 Tomcat to the Air Force's F-15 Eagle, took to the skies, while the Pentagon rapidly modernized its nuclear force with the Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missile, the Trident submarine and the B-1B bomber, wrote James Kitfield in his book Prodigal Soldiers, which chronicled the military's buildup in the 1980s.