"But actually I am really stunned that this fairy tale about Regan's military build up and it's presumed influence on the end of the cold war is being repeated so many times even after many documents of the soviet union are diclassified and available for researchers."

FTA:

"Commenting on the Reagan arms buildup, the Soviet journal Izvestiya protested, 'They want to impose on us an even more ruinous arms race.' General Secretary Yuri Andropov alleged that Reagan's missile defense program was 'a bid to disarm the Soviet Union.' The seasoned diplomat Andrei Gromyko charged that 'behind all this lies the clear calculation that the USSR will exhaust its material resources…and therefore will be forced to surrender.' "

That is exactly what happened. The Russians miscalculated, but you can't blame them because they were doing pretty good. Their proxies had just won protracted wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and had taken over the Sandinista revolution and Grenada, and were fighting in several places in Africa and by 1980 if bets were being made as to who was going to come out on top in the cold war the smart money would have been on the Soviet Union.

The Russians gambled everything they had on the strategy of threatening our southern border and Europe simultaneously. They spent every ruble on a fleet of mobile, accurate IRBM's called SS-20's and aimed them at western Europe. Despite huge anti-American demonstrations all over Europe denouncing it, Reagan had the Pershing IRBM developed and deployed in Europe and pointed at the Russians.

That was it. That was all the Russians had. Reagan armed the Contras in Nicaragua, he invaded and liberated Grenada, he armed the mujahedin with stingers, but his trump card was SDI. No matter what any snooty intellectual has to say about whether or not SDI would work, it didn't matter. Here's why. The Russians thought it would work.

A million critics can write a million stories about how Reagan stumbled through his presidency, history doesn't lie. Reagan knew he didn't have to convince his critics. They didn't matter at all and they still don't. He knew that the Russians were convinced. Our guys had already been on the moon for over 10 years so the Russians had no doubt we had the technological ability devise a way to defeat a ballistic missile attack. That was it for the Soviet Union.