Certainly, our military buildup (of, be it noted, government-owned weapons) was a factor in bringing down the Iron Curtain. Driving them broke trying to keep up did much to sap the strength of the governments and the faith that the ordinary people had in them.Liberty wrote: Your point is well taken, but the citizens may not have used guns but we sure had a bounteous display of them parked right on their border, and It caused the Reds to spend , more money than they really had causing further stress.
So when the governments themselves finally fell it was because at bottom line, the soldiers/police would not obey orders to shoot the people. The government apparatchiks had stopped believing in their own legitimacy to govern by then, and in most cases knew that the soldier/cop would not carry out such orders so they were for the most part never given.
Comtrast this with what happened in 1956 (Hungary) and 1966 (Czechoslovokia). Back then, the Soviets had full confidence in their power. The people, from top to bottom, believed in the primacy of the government's power (whether they agreed with the government's legitimacy or not) and as such, the government did not hesitate to use it, successfully, to crush the opposition.