CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

I WAS CURLED UP IN my easy chair, wearing glasses, reading a paperback novel.

“It’s the end of the world. I’ve never had to imagine anything like that before.”

John Osborne laughed. “It’s not the end of the world at all,” he said. “It’s only the end of us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan’t be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.”

Dwight Towers shook his head. “I suppose that’s right.…” He paused, thinking of the flowering trees that he had seen on shore through the periscope, cascaras and flame trees, the palms standing in the sunlight. “Maybe we’ve been too silly to deserve a world like this.”

Barbara entered the room, wearing her nightgown. “Honey, it’s late. This isn’t like you.”

I showed her the garish cover. On the Beach by Nevil Shute. I summarized the plot for her. “There’s been this nuclear war, and the whole world is gone. Radiation has killed everybody. Now some people are setting out in a submarine to see if they can find other people alive.”

“I know, honey. I’ve read it.”

Of course she had. Barbara was no stereotypical blonde.

“Heavy stuff,” she acknowledged.

“Doll, it could happen. You know that, right?”

The window next to me was dark, as though nothing existed beyond it. After a long moment, I added, “In fact, it may be happening now.”

Seldom has a time existed in my life that I hadn’t thought of that day at Annapolis when our instructor entered the classroom to announce that the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Japan. It marked the beginning of my interest in unconventional warfare as an alternative to the world’s destroying itself. That was nearly forty years ago, and the drama of nuclear terrorism had not yet reached Act III.

After President Reagan assumed the White House in 1981, I was appointed to various panels and advisory and consulting groups to discuss the U.S. official position on nuclear war. Conferences, meetings, discussions, summits … seemed to consume politics. All we did seemed to be to discuss—while we dug ourselves deeper and deeper into the insane philosophy of Mutual Assured Destruction. Reagan referred to MAD as a “suicide pact” strategy.

I learned of “Star Wars” in a conversation with Secretary of State George Shultz. According to him, shortly after Reagan became governor of California, he attended a lecture by physicist Edward Teller held at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Teller had worked at Los Alamos in developing both the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb. His lecture was on the feasibility of defending against nuclear missiles with nuclear missiles.

Nothing came of Teller’s ideas for more than a decade afterwards. But the concept apparently continued to ferment in Reagan’s mind. In 1979 as he prepared for his second run at the presidency, he visited the NORAD command base at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex where he was shown extensive U.S. missile tracking and detection systems that extended throughout the world and into space. What struck him most was a comment that while the system could track incoming missiles and thereby warn individual targets, nothing could be done to intercept and stop them.

Reagan requested Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham, a campaign advisor, to come up with a strategic defense concept using ground- and space-based weapons now theoretically possible because of emerging technologies. Reagan and Graham referred to it as “High Frontier.”

Shortly after Reagan won the election and moved to Washington, he called a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I attended as an advisor to the CNO, Admiral James Watkins. It was my first meeting with Ronald Reagan, who reminded me of an elderly uncle until you saw the shrewd intellect behind the septuagenarian appearance. He exuded confidence and purpose. The United States, I thought, might be in good hands.

The president stood at the head of the long polished table. He said, “Every offensive weapon ever invented by man has resulted in the creation of a defense against it. Isn’t it possible in the age of technology that we could invent a defensive weapon that could intercept nuclear weapons and destroy them as they emerged from their silos?”

After Reagan finished explaining his “High Frontier” concept, the Chiefs of Staff looked at each other, then asked if they could consider among themselves for a few moments. Reagan nodded and walked out of the room. So did us advisors.

Shortly, the JCS came out of its huddle. “Let’s do it,” said the JCS Chairman, General John Vessey, a rail-thin army officer with a hawkish face.

The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was born.