According to Schweizer, when the "aging lion" first encountered the "young tiger" in Geneva in 1985, Reagan "established the high ground." The Soviet leader soon began "zeroing in on Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative," because it "provoked passions of fear in Gorbachev." Missing in Schweizer's book the actual Gorbachev's words to Reagan about SDI, reported in his Memoirs: "I think you should know that we have already developed a response. It will be effective and far less expensive than your project, and be ready for use in less time." Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph over Communism is full of errors that for some reason the author has allowed to be in the book in the first place. It has only two logical reasons: the author unintentionally made some mistakes (but I think it is very close to impossible to be mistaken when writing a book like that) or he simply made up some endnotes to support his idea in order to make ideologists happy (or maybe he thought that leaving out some facts will make his book more popular among people and make sales better because a lot of people read and learn only what they want to know but not the actual truth). My another concern is how could Schweizer access the Soviet archives? I think even now, fifteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union even the Russian scholars do not have a complete access to the materials of the Soviet archives, nevertheless, Schweizer uses many of sources from Soviet archives for his book. Personally I think that Russians do not want any outsiders to look in their in their "trash can" because there are probably a great number of references that can impact even modern relationship of two countries.

As I have mentioned in the beginning of my paper, different people have different opinions about Mr. Schweizer's book. It is up to every single person what position about the book to take. The matter of choice is all that matters: some may choose to simply believe in what they just read and not even question that but some will choose to doubt and try to find counter-arguments and generate personal opinions about the topic. Now it is very popular to question everything. We have a number of scholars that question Bible for example and still have not achieved some consensus what is the right way to interpret it and actually look at the book. I believe, that in any case, with any book, we have to look at both sides of the coin and choose the one that best suites us.

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