The Cold War had been going on for years, when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1981. At no moment in the previous decades had any world leader in the United States or the Soviet Union announced that they were going to completely destroy a country with nuclear weapons, that was until Reagan took to National Public Radio.
The president was asked by radio engineers to make a pre-broadcast mic check. Reagan agreed and declared: “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”
This looked bad on Reagan’s part especially considering that Reagan once called Russia an “evil empire.” However, this was a parody of the actual line Reagan planned to say which was, "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you that today I signed legislation that will allow student religious groups to begin enjoying a right they've too long been denied, the freedom to meet in public high schools during non-school hours."
Although Reagan’s statement was a joke, it had leaked to the media and the public, causing the Soviet Union to go on red alert and causing political backlash in the United States and throughout the West. Some foreign newspapers and news services called Reagan “an irresponsible old man” based on his remark.
A Parisian newspaper explained that only a trained psychologist would know if Reagan’s remarks reflected “a statement of repressed desire or the exorcism of a dreaded phantom.”
A Dutch news service dryly said, “Hopefully, the man tests his missiles more carefully.”
A Russian commentator wrote, “It is said that a person’s level of humor reflects the level of his thinking. If so, aren’t one and the other too low for the president of a great country?”
Another commentator said, “We would not be wasting time on this unfortunate joke if it did not reflect once again the fixed idea that haunts the master of the White House.”
In response, the official Soviet news agency TASS said that “the USSR condemns this unprecedented and hostile attack by the U.S. president.” They added that “this kind of behavior is incompatible with the great responsibility borne by heads of nuclear states for the destinies of their own people and mankind.”
Despite Reagan’s joke, and the serious responses to it, relations between the United States and Soviet Union never led to nuclear war. Reagan and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev even went on to establish a close personal relationship.