5 Lire Threat of Nuclear War

San Marino issued a series of anti-war themed coins in the early 1980s at a moment when NATO's dual-track decision — deploying Pershing II missiles in Western Europe while pursuing arms negotiations — had brought public anxiety about nuclear conflict to a peak rarely seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The 1983 date is pointed: that year saw the Soviet walkout from Geneva arms talks following the West German Bundestag vote to accept the Pershing deployment.

San Marino's commemorative aluminum issues from this period were struck in comparatively small quantities for a microstate with no standing military and observer status at the United Nations — a position from which such political commentary carried its own particular irony.