What order in the 1980s: Italy and the challenges of a transformative decade

The 1980s was the decade of the end of the Cold War, which marked a significant transformation of the international system. The presence of nuclear weapons had long been a feature of this system, and Italy, as a N.A.T.O. country, had fully adhered to the logic of extended deterrence, which during the Euromissile crisis the government in Rome helped to reassert by accepting intermediate range nuclear forces (I.N.F.) deployments. In this article I examine how Italy perceived and responded to the changes promised by the Reagan administration’s nuclear, technology and Soviet policies, especially in the first half of the 1980s, when strategic defensive initiative (S.D.I.) was launched. The aim of this analysis is to shed some light on an aspect of nuclear order that is usually neglected, namely the changing technological environment, which has always had a major impact on security and deterrence policies and has increasingly become decisive for the updating and maintenance of the order itself.