Did the Soviets know what they were doing to the Western alliance when they deployed their SS-20 missiles? Listen in on a debate of that subject, as featured on the weekly CNN program "Postscript" -- which accompanies the COLD WAR series.

CNN World Affairs Correspondent Ralph Begleiter, Former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Jean Kirkpatrick, Russian historian Vladislav Zubok and American scholar Thomas Blanton debate whether the Soviets had a goal in mind when they deployed their missiles -- and whether the divide created in the West by the missile deployment could happen now, in the post-Cold War world.

Kirkpatrick is Leavey Professor of Government at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She served for more than four years as Washington's representative to the United Nations and was a member of the Reagan cabinet. Kirkpatrick received the Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor, in 1985.

Zubok is one of the leading historians of the Soviet side of the Cold War and the author of "Inside the Kremlin's Cold War." He has studied extensively in Soviet and American archives and has taught classes on the Cold War at Amherst College, Ohio University in Athens and Stamford University. In 1993, Zubok was employed by the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, and since then has worked at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo and is now a fellow at the National Security Archive in Washington.

Blanton is executive director for the National Security Archive. The NSA is a non-governmental research institute providing information from U.S. government and official archives for scholars, journalists, members of Congress, lobbyists and others. Their research teases out documents still classified to give a complete picture of what really happened.