John Wohlstetter - Sleepwalking with the Bomb

While a Republican Senate from 1981 to 1986 gave President Reagan support for new weapon systems, a Democratic House of Representatives and the tug of arms-control politics severely limited his options. The House shrunk the domestically unpopular MX “Peacekeeper” program—200 missiles with 10 warheads each, shuttling on railroad tracks between 4,600 launching points in vast western rural tracts—down to 50 missiles in existing silos. Russia could deploy large numbers of such land mobile missiles because its populace had no say in such matters. Strong domestic political opposition—NIMBY: Not In My Back Yard—made mobile missile ICBMs politically toxic in America.

Ronald Reagan dramatically changed arms-control direction. On March 23, 1983, he called for the development of a comprehensive missile defense system to protect the entire population—the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or “Star Wars” to its critics)—in a decisive rejection of MAD. In truth, even though MAD had been public-official declaratory doctrine since 1967, no president ever fully accepted it. Richard Nixon attempted to deploy missile defense but critics crippled the system, which was finally done in by SALT I. Gerald Ford’s years saw James Schlesinger’s tenure as secretary of defense, during which Schlesinger pushed for “limited nuclear options” short of all-out retaliation. In effect, this was a refinement of Kennedy’s flexible response doctrine, seeking options between all-out mutual suicide and total surrender.

Even dovish Jimmy Carter authorized targeting leadership cadres, who were exempt from targeting under a pure MAD doctrine. [13] Presidential Directive 58 (PD-58), issued June 30, 1980, established a program to protect the president and top U.S. leaders in event of nuclear attack. PD-59, issued July 25, 1980, called for targeting Soviet leadership cadres in event of nuclear war between the superpowers. The latter directive ran flatly counter to the precepts of MAD, which called for targeting deliberately unprotected civilians, while leaving alone offensive military assets (missile defense was banned). By inescapable implication, the Soviet leadership would not be targeted under MAD, so it could survive to order retaliation after an American attack. Carter’s defense secretary, Harold Brown, endorsed limited nuclear options, telling Congress that even if it were likely that an initial nuclear exchange would escalate to all-out nuclear war, “it would be the height of folly to put the United States in a position in which uncontrolled escalation would be the only course we could follow.” But these refinements were easily swamped in sound-bite public political debate, and thus stayed in the shadows.

Reagan—unafraid to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and to trumpet “we win, they lose” as his Cold War philosophy—supported stringent high-technology embargoes, and even sabotage, against the Soviet Union. In 1982, with the help of “Farewell,” a rare high-level mole placed by the French inside the top Soviet leader circle, the U.S. arranged for defective computer chips to be sent to Russia for use in its biggest natural gas pipeline. The malicious software in the defective chips caused system malfunctions that led to a massive conventional explosion—at three kilotons, more powerful than small nuclear devices—that destroyed key parts of the pipeline and set Moscow back years.

Reagan formed his view of the Soviets in the early years of the Cold War, which Brezhnev reinforced with a memorable speech in 1973 at a major Communist party conclave in Prague. The Soviet leader predicted:

We are achieving with détente what our predecessors have been unable to achieve using the mailed fist…. Trust us comrades, for by 1985, as a consequence of what we are now achieving with détente, we will have achieved most of our objectives in Western Europe…. A decisive shift in the correlation of forces will be such that come 1985, we will be able to extend our will wherever we need to.

By 1985 the Soviets came to see things differently, with the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev to the position of general secretary of the Communist Party in March. Facing a resurgent America and a president reelected by a landslide, Gorbachev decided to try to reform the Soviet system, which was mired in terminal catatonia.

Even before Gorbachev rose to General Secretary, in late 1984 he gave Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher the first plausible indication that the Soviets might be willing to bargain seriously. Thatcher recalled in her memoir, The Downing Street Years, that before meeting Gorbachev she had heard “modestly encouraging” things, but she remained wary.

On December 16 Gorbachev visited Lady Thatcher at the prime minister’s country residence, Chequers. The two discussed the risk of accidental war, with Gorbachev quoting a Russian proverb: “[O]nce a year even an unloaded gun can go off.” Thatcher ascertained that the Soviets were petrified of Reagan’s missile defense ideas. The Soviets knew they could not match America’s technological prowess and feared a comprehensive U.S. missile defense system might succeed. (Despite their claim that Reagan’s SDI would “militarize space,” the Soviets, notes Paul Nitze, had put more military satellites in orbit than the U.S. had and had the world’s only operational anti-satellite systems.) [14] The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, between the U.S., UK, and USSR, barred offensive weapons and weapons of mass destruction in space. Thatcher found Gorbachev’s dream of abolishing missile defense as unrealistic as Reagan’s belief that nuclear weapons could be abolished but told the press after the meeting she thought the West could “do business” with Gorbachev.

Reagan and Gorbachev first met at Geneva in November 1985. Reagan found someone he could indeed “do business” with. As for Gorbachev, he learned the truth of what his note taker had written after watching Reagan at the first meeting: “When you touch raw nerve, Reagan’s flare will fill the room. He feel something close to his heart, he is like lion!” The two leaders issued a joint statement on November 21, 1985: “[A] nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought.” Russia was in the midst of a five-year spree during which it deployed 15,000 new nuclear weapons, bringing its arsenal to its 1986 peak of 45,000; it added 5,803 alone between the 1985 Geneva Summit and the Reykjavik Summit 11 months later. This was more than the total U.S. stockpile of 5,133 when President Obama took the oath of office.

In Reykjavik in October 1986, Ronald Reagan committed the biggest blunder of his presidency—only to find himself saved from its consequences by an even bigger blunder made by Gorbachev. Seized by a long-held idealistic impulse to push for abolition of nuclear weapons, Reagan accepted Gorbachev’s offer to phase out all offensive nuclear weapons by 2000. (Lady Thatcher later wrote: “My own reaction when I heard how far the Americans had been prepared to go was as if there had been an earthquake beneath my feet.”) The deal died when Reagan insisted that there be no restrictions on his cherished missile defense program—he wanted an exception to the 1972 ABM Treaty, allowing for a defense against a surprise attack. He offered to wait 10 years before withdrawing from that restrictive treaty and to share missile defense technology, but Gorbachev refused. Ironically, had Gorbachev accepted Reagan’s offer, SDI would surely have been killed in the euphoria of the post-Cold War, “peace dividend” 1990s.

Nuclear zero would have given the Russians a grand opportunity, one related to what Herman Kahn called “the problem of the clandestine cache”: When each side has thousands of weapons, a few hundred hidden weapons count for little. But if both sides supposedly go to zero, the strategic value of a few hundred hidden weapons would be supreme—aces of trumps in geopolitics. Detection methods are sophisticated, but hardly foolproof. Hiding weapons in a country the size of Russia is, as Herman Kahn put it, child’s play. It is far easier than concealing WMD facilities inside Iraq. President Reagan grasped this verification limitation, and it drove his insistence on missile defense as insurance.