despite strong protests from the peace movements and heavy diplomatic pressure in the European Parliament. NATO's condition for not carrying out its plans was the Soviet Union's willingness to halt the deployment of mobile SS-20 nuclear missiles aimed at Europe and remove the missiles already deployed. In 1979, when the NATO decision was taken, the Soviet Union had 14 (1 operational) SS-20 launch sites. The eighty Soviet SS-20s located in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and Czechoslovakia were aimed at targets in Western Europe. According to Western estimates, at the beginning of 1986, the Soviet Union already deployed 279 SS-20 launching installations with a total of 837 nuclear warheads in the GDR and Czechoslovakia. The first General Dynamics BGM-109 Tomahawk Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles to arrive in Europe went to the 501st Tactical Missile Wing (TMW) at RAF Greenham Common, England. The controversial weapons were delivered by a Lockheed C-141 Starlifter on 14 November 1983. By 1986, there were 32 operational cruise missile launching installations in England (RAF Greenham Common and RAF Molesworth), Belgium (Florennes Air Base), and on Sicily (Comiso Air Base). Because each GLCM launching installation was composed of four weapons, the total number of cruise missiles stationed in Europe was 128. Disarmament talks between East and West resulted in a disarmament treaty being signed by Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan at the end of 1987 during Gorbachev's visit to the United States. The Soviet Union agreed to dismantle the SS-20s and the American cruise missiles were also to be withdrawn. The historic Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, ratified in 1988, mandated the first-ever elimination of an entire class of weapons from U.S. and Soviet inventories. USAFE completed removal of the ground-launched cruise missiles and other weaponry on 26 March 1991, when the last 16 missiles were removed from Comiso Air Base, Italy. Post–Cold War era USAFE never had to fight the Soviet Armed Forces and the Warsaw Pact states in Europe. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1990–91. The end of the Cold War saw a clamoring for a "peace dividend", and questions from many U.S. and Western European officials about the appropriate size and purpose of American military forces in Europe. All U.S. and NATO allies' military forces experienced a series of changes over the next five years. USAFE shrunk from over 850 aircraft and 72,000 personnel scattered among 27 bases