evil empire

The phrase evil empire was first applied to the Soviet Union in 1983 by U.S. President Ronald Reagan, who took an aggressive, hard-line stance that favored matching and exceeding the Soviet Union's strategic and global military capabilities, in calling for a rollback strategy that would, in his words, "write the final pages of the history of the Soviet Union." The characterization demeaned the Soviet Union and angered Soviet leaders. According to G. Thomas Goodnight, the "Evil Empire" speech along with the "Zero Option" and "Star Wars" speeches represented the rhetorical side of the United States' escalation of the Cold War. In the former, Reagan depicted nuclear warfare as an extension of the "age old struggle between good and evil", while arguing that an increased nuclear inventory as well as progress in science and technology were necessary to prevent global conflict. Through these speeches, the Reagan administration used rhetoric to reshape public knowledge about and attitudes toward nuclear warfare.