The early 1980s witnessed a final period of friction between the United States and the USSR, resulting mainly from the Soviets’ invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up a Communist regime and from the firm line adopted by U.S. president Ronald Reagan after his 1980 election. Reagan saw the USSR as an “evil empire.” He also believed that his rivals in Moscow respected strength first and foremost, and thus he set about to add greatly to American military capabilities. The Soviets initially viewed Reagan as an implacable foe, committed to subverting the Soviet system and possibly willing to risk nuclear war in the process.

Then in the mid-1980s Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR. Gorbachev was determined to halt the increasing decay of the Soviet system and to shed some of his country’s foreign policy burdens. Between 1986 and 1989 he brought a revolution to Soviet foreign policy, abandoning long-held Soviet assumptions and seeking new and far-reaching agreements with the West. Gorbachev’s efforts fundamentally altered the dynamic of East-West relations. Gorbachev and Reagan held a series of summit talks beginning in 1985, and in 1987 the two leaders agreed to eliminate a whole class of their countries’ nuclear missiles- those capable of striking Europe and Asia from the USSR and vice versa. The Soviet government began to reduce its forces in Eastern Europe, and in 1989 it pulled its troops out of Afghanistan. That year Communist regimes began to topple in the countries of Eastern Europe and the wall that had divided East and West Germany since 1961 was torn down. In 1990 Germany became once again a unified country. In 1991 the USSR dissolved, and Russia and the other Soviet republics emerged as independent states. Even before these dramatic final events, much of the ideological basis for the Cold War competition had disappeared. However, the collapse of Soviet power in Eastern Europe, and then of the USSR itself, lent a crushing finality to the end of the Cold War period.

Read the text and express your attitude to the role of women at war

Women and War

Nowadays war becomes a catalyst in the eternal battle for the world supremacy. More and more often world leaders unleash war to multiply their profits at it. But every war brings a lot of suffering and hardship to thousands of people. Families are broken up as men are sent to the front lines to fight, some never to return. Children are sent out of the cities to stay with strangers, away from the bombing. The peaceful routine of everyday life is shattered. Thus, it turns the whole universe upside down, changing everything and everybody, especially social roles. If throughout the history, the business of war has generally been the preserve of men, today the role of women in the armed forces began a process of transformation, that is still happening.

Countless women and girls all over the world suffer the trauma of war - as widows or orphans, perhaps displaced from their homes, sometimes detained. They are often separated from loved ones and become victims of violence and intimidation. For the most part they are civilians caught in the crossfire, and show astonishing resourcefulness and resilience in coping with the disintegration of their families, the loss of their home and their belongings and the destruction of their lives. For example, during World War II the women alongside the men wore khaki uniforms with black shoes. Women were not allowed to go into action with the men or to use firearms, but apart from that they did the same work as the men and were paid the same wages. Jobs in the army varied from cooks, clerks, telephonists and translators to lorry drivers, motorbike messengers and engineers. Women did most of the driving in the army. They drove everything from staff cars to trucks and had to be able to maintain and repair the vehicles. It tuned out that women could also be fighters, and as such as are due the same respect as men if wounded or captured.

Now women serve in an increasingly wide range of jobs, including jet fighter pilots in the Armed Forces. Nevertheless, there remains, however, the over-riding public perception that women are - and have been - excluded from the combat arms of land forces, especially the infantry, armour and artillery, apart from administrative roles. The exclusion of women from combat has revolved around several key assumptions. First, society argued that women were physically weaker than men. To this was added the psychological argument that women were different from men; they possessed the characteristics of caring and nurturing, were less aggressive and tended to be more submissive than men.

Another view, still prevalent, is that the killing or wounding of women is somehow worse than the concept of male battle casualties.

Some armies also exclude women from front line service for fear that their male colleagues will accord them special protection or attention on the battlefield, thus, undermining combat efficiency. Before the 20th century, such debate tended to push women either to conceal their gender, or to gravitate towards the caring roles of nurse or camp follower. The two world wars proved that, given the chance, the physical and mental fighting qualities needed in the services could be developed equally well through training by women as by men.

It is maintained that war widens the horizons for women. For example, nearly all of American women soldiers shared in the patriotism of the war, but the devastation in Europe, the unleashing of atomic weapons on Japan, the deaths of loved ones, and the emotional difficulties many men faced in coming home, made women question war as a means of solving international problems. Although many knew the war had opened new opportunities to them and their loved ones, it also brought abiding sorrow and a sense that the world had entered a new phase of its history, making the most beautiful part of the world take everything into their own hands and turning all women into warriors.

Terrorism

I Introduction

Terrorism, the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear for bringing about political change. All terrorist acts involve violence or—equally important—the threat of violence. These violent acts are committed by nongovernmental groups or individuals—that is, by those who are neither part of nor officially serving in the military forces, law enforcement agencies, intelligence services, or other governmental agencies of an established nation-state.

Terrorists attempt not only to sow panic but also to undermine confidence in the government and political leadership of their target country. Terrorism is therefore designed to have psychological effects that reach far beyond its impact on the immediate victims or object of an attack. Terrorists mean to frighten and thereby intimidate a wider audience, such as a rival ethnic or religious group, an entire country and its political leadership, or the international community as a whole.

Terrorist groups generally have few members, limited firepower, and comparatively few organizational resources. For this reason they rely on dramatic, often spectacular, bloody and destructive acts of hit-and-run violence to attract attention to themselves and their cause. Through the publicity generated by their violence, terrorists seek to obtain the leverage, influence, and power they otherwise lack.

II What is terrorism?

The word terrorism was first used in France to describe a new system of government adopted during the French Revolution (1789-1799). The regime de la terreur (Reign of Terror) was intended to promote democracy and popular rule by ridding the revolution of its enemies and thereby purifying it. However, the oppression and violent excesses of the terreur transformed it into a feared instrument of the state. From that time on, terrorism has had a decidedly negative connotation. The word, however, did not gain wider popularity until the late 19th century when it was adopted by a group of Russian revolutionaries to describe their violent struggle against tsarist rule. Terrorism then assumed the more familiar antigovernment associations it has today.