James Mann: The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

On the question of whether to deal with Reagan or wait him out, Gorbachev needed little persuading. According to the Soviet notes of the Nixon meeting, Gorbachev himself raised this issue. Some had argued that he should postpone any hopes of an agreement with Washington until after the next presidential election, the Soviet leader said. “It would mean that we were ready to wait another three or four years,” Gorbachev said. “But during this time, much could change…. In today’s tense atmosphere, we simply cannot afford to wait.” 6That was a vague, fleeting acknowledgment of the huge problems of the Soviet economy and of the Soviet leadership’s desperate need for agreements that would limit their military expenditures.

Nixon and Kissinger were hardly unique in expressing the view that the arrival of Gorbachev meant little or no change for Soviet foreign policy. In fact, they were merely expressing the conventional view at the time within the U.S. government, particularly within the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community.

In June 1985, William Casey, CIA director, informed Reagan that Gorbachev and his associates “are not reformers and liberalizers, either in Soviet domestic or foreign policy.” Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and the CIA’s top Soviet specialist, Robert M. Gates, believed that Gorbachev was “simply a new and more clever and subtle proponent of Soviet global imperialism abroad and communism at home,” according to Gates. They found confirmation for their beliefs in some Soviet actions overseas during Gorbachev’s first two years, particularly the continuing Soviet war in Afghanistan. Yet they erred in extrapolating from these events sweeping conclusions about the nature of Gorbachev and the future direction of his policies. They were trapped in a clichéd world of steel fists and old wine in new bottles. They failed to see the dynamics that were propelling change. Reagan would come to grasp the situation better and more quickly than they did.

Within months, Nixon and Kissinger came to an open break with Reagan. They were supported by quite a few others at the top of America’s foreign-policy establishment who had been imbued with the geopolitics of an endless Cold War. The catalysts for this change were Reagan’s summit with Gorbachev in Reykjavik in October 1986, and more generally, his willingness to move toward a world without nuclear weapons.

Reagan had arrived in the White House with a well-deserved reputation as a conservative Republican, a hawk on national defense and a proponent of openly confrontational policies toward the Soviet Union. However, after he became president, his own advisers were increasingly taken aback to discover that he also favored the abolition of nuclear weapons. “Reagan had a totally naïve view against nuclear weapons, which I saw time and again,” Kenneth Adelman, a Reagan aide and for a time the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, recalled many years later. “All of us who were conservative thought that when [Jimmy] Carter said, ‘I want to eliminate nuclear weapons,’ that was the stupidest thing we’d ever heard. We all made fun of it, and then we have our hero [Reagan] who says things really more extreme than Carter ever does, and he’s unstoppable in doing it.” 1

Some commentators have argued that one can detect evidence of antinuclear sentiments throughout Reagan’s career. It is true that he occasionally voiced alarm about the impact of nuclear weapons. At the 1976 Republican National Convention, after President Ford had accepted the Republican nomination, he called Reagan to the podium and invited him to address the audience. Reagan, who had not prepared a speech, talked extemporaneously about the horrors of a world where the great powers have missiles and nuclear weapons “that can in minutes… destroy virtually the civilized world we live in.” Reagan told the assembled Republicans he had just been invited to write a letter for a time capsule. “Suddenly it dawned on me: those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired.” 2

Those remarks stand out only in hindsight, however. More frequently, the early Reagan struck a belligerent pose. A more representative quote from the era of the 1960s and 1970s was Reagan’s reaction to North Korea’s seizure of the USS Pueblo and its American crew in 1968. Asked what he would have done, Reagan replied, “How many people were on that ship?” Told there were sixty-eight, Reagan continued, “Right, right, sixty-eight. I’ll tell you what I’d do, I’d send them a cable tonight listing sixty-eight cities, and I would tell them I’m going to bomb one city an hour until I get the boys back.” 3(As president, Reagan responded very differently to the seizure of American hostages in Lebanon. There was no city-an-hour bombing; Reagan instead negotiated for the hostages’ release, without acknowledging that he had done so.)

At the time Reagan arrived in the White House, there was no reason to think of him as antinuclear. He had run two extended campaigns for the governorship and two more for the presidency without letting on to voters that he favored the abolition of nuclear weapons. His address to the 1976 convention was given only after his primary challenge to Ford had ended—and even then, the speech was more an expression of anxiety about nuclear weapons than a specific call for their abolition. During his 1980 campaign, Reagan had spoken about the need for civilian defense programs to help the United States survive a nuclear exchange.

Nor were there grounds to think of Reagan as opposed to nuclear weapons during his first years in the White House. After Reagan took office, his administration not only moved to bolster civil defense, but also approved a new defense policy that included plans for a “protracted” nuclear war. The new administration also launched extensive preparations to keep the federal government running with teams of officials outside of Washington if the president and vice president were killed or incapacitated during a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. (Among the leading participants in this secret program for “continuity of government” were a former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and a member of Congress, Dick Cheney.) During Reagan’s first term, the movement for a nuclear freeze gained in strength both in Europe and in the United States. Reagan determinedly opposed this movement, arguing that the United States should build up its forces and deploy Pershing missiles in Europe to offset the military power of the Soviet Union.

It seems likely, however, that Reagan’s opposition to nuclear weapons crystallized during these early years in the White House. Once he became president, Reagan was gradually obliged to confront the reality of what nuclear war would mean, and to recognize the necessity of split-second judgments and the possibility of error. By several accounts, including Reagan’s own, he was taken aback when he was briefed by the Pentagon about the details of America’s nuclear war planning—how many Soviet cities would be attacked, how many people would be killed, and what would happen to the United States as result of a Soviet attack. The White House and Pentagon carried out detailed exercises for nuclear war, in which Reagan was sometimes obliged to participate. A 1982 briefing on the Pentagon’s war plan, known as its SIOP, or Single Integrated Operational Plan, “made clear to Reagan that with but a nod of his head all the glories of imperial Russia, all the hopes and dreams of the peasants in Ukraine, and all the pioneering settlements in Kazakhstan would vanish,” wrote one U.S. official present for the briefing. 4

In the fall of 1983, at the height of the nuclear freeze movement, ABC television produced the movie The Day After , an account of what would happen to a single town, Lawrence, Kansas, in a nuclear war. In the film, Kansas City was hit by nuclear missiles, and nearby Lawrence suffered from the fallout of the attack. After viewing a tape before it was aired, Reagan wrote in his diary that it was “very effective and left me very depressed…. My own reaction: we have to do all we can to have a deterrent and to see there is never a nuclear war.” Not long afterward, Reagan was again briefed on nuclear war planning in the White House Situation Room, and he wrote that it reminded him of the movie. “Yet there were still some people at the Pentagon who claimed a nuclear war was ‘winnable,’” Reagan observed. “I thought they were crazy.” 5