Though the then Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev tried very much to deescalate the existing arms race between the NATO and Soviet Blocs, world military spending continued to spiral upwards and reached an all-time high of 1.2 trillion dollars in the year 1988. This sparked a wave of fear that an intentional or accidental nuclear war was very much likely to occur at any time. Apart from an intensification of efforts to lessen the arms race, there was another parallel movement to augment world food supplies so that nobody in the world went hungry for even a day.