IN EARLY JANUARY 1983, editors at the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other major newspapers expressed deep misgivings about the chances that the newly formed president’s Commission on Strategic Forces would succeed in its mission. The New York Times called the task facing the commission “Missile Impossible.”53 Three times already, most recently in December 1982, Congress had voted down the Department of Defense’s proposals on how to base the MX intercontinental ballistic missile, which was the Pentagon’s planned replacement for the aging Minuteman III ICBM. As chairman of the new commission, Brent Scowcroft faced the challenge of getting the US Congress to approve the MX and to arrive on a consensus on the future force structure of US strategic weapons.
The Air Force had already invested billions of dollars on the MX (“Missile, Experimental,” which President Reagan, as of November 22, 1982, began calling the “Peacekeeper”), and Lockheed, Boeing, Rockwell International, other major contractors, and thousands of subcontractors had already been lined up and were ready to go. But deciding where and how to base the MX was a more complicated matter. Between 1965 and 1982, the Pentagon had seriously considered more than thirty different missile basing schemes, including plans to put ICBMs in large Air Force cargo planes, on small submarines, in subterranean shelters, in shallow pools of colored water, and on movable rail platforms.54 Most recently, two panels, both chaired by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Charles Townes (and both, confusingly, called the Townes Committee), had failed to solve the puzzle.
The first Townes Committee, which convened in 1981 and included Scowcroft, Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, David Packard, Gen. Bernard Schriever, and James Woolsey (a former NSC staff member under Nixon and a Navy under secretary under Carter) among its eleven members, recommended a system based on multiple protective shelters (MPS). Two hundred MX missiles were to be dispersed among forty-six hundred separate missile shelters spread across Utah and Nevada. The premise of the MPS system was that the Soviet Union would never know which shelters housed the MX missiles. A majority of members of Congress supported the scheme, but politicians and residents in the Intermountain West protested. And President Reagan, in what Woolsey called a “most unwise decision,” termed the basing mode a “Rube Goldberg scheme” and rejected it as being “unworkable.”55
The second Townes panel, which met in early 1982 and again included Scowcroft, Goodpaster, Packard, Schriever, and Woolsey among its sixteen members, proposed a scheme of tightly clustered missile silos. The principle behind the so-called closely spaced basing plan (also known as dense pack) was that when an incoming Soviet ICBM exploded upon impact, it would commit “fratricide” against the other incoming Soviet ICBMs, while the American ICBMs, still tightly clustered in their hardened silos, would survive to serve as a counterforce.
However, the scientific logic supporting dense pack had never been tested, and the scheme attracted criticism and ridicule from members of Congress, military correspondents, and strategic weapons experts, including former defense secretary Harold Brown and John Deutch, dean of science at MIT and former director of research in the Department of Energy under President Jimmy Carter. Soviet officials also criticized the scheme, pointing out that MX deployment would violate Article IV of SALT II, which stated, “Each Party undertakes not to start construction of additional ICBM launchers”—an interpretation that many US arms control experts agreed with.
The result was that on December 7, 1982—perhaps fittingly, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day—the lame-duck Ninety-Seventh Congress voted not to fund the MX program, with 50 Republicans joining 195 House Democrats in opposition.56
The two Townes Committees had operated under serious handicaps. The panels were creations of the Defense Department, which had charged each panel to come up with a technical solution; neither board had been instructed to also look for a politically acceptable solution that would simultaneously appease the Democratic House, the Republican Senate, and the Reagan White House. (Democrats held a 242–192 majority in the House in the Ninety-Seventh Congress, from 1981 to 1983, and a 268–166 majority in the Ninety-Eighth Congress, from 1983 to 1985, while the Republicans controlled the Senate in both Congresses, 53–46 and 54–46, respectively.) And neither Townes Committee had the unequivocal public support of the Reagan administration.57
Scowcroft had become “quite well” acquainted with Charles Townes through his old mentor Gen. Richard Yudkin. He supported the first MPS scheme and agreed with Woolsey that the Reagan administration had been wrong to reject it, figuring that the Reagan administration had opposed the MPS system mainly because the program originated under the Carter administration.58 For his part, John Deutch, then a member of the MIT’s chemistry department, thought that “the Reagan Administration . . . placed domestic politics ahead of what was in the country’s national security interests.” By abandoning “the racetrack form of basing” proposed under Carter, Deutch said, Reagan had violated the “understandings which had been reached both with our Congress and with our allies.”59
Making an agreement with Congress even more difficult was Defense Secretary Caspar “Cap” Weinberger’s poor reputation among many on Capitol Hill. Weinberger, who had formerly been with the Office of Management and Budget and was a lawyer by training, didn’t suffer fools gladly, viewed members of Congress with contempt, and made no effort to hide his feelings when he went before Congress to defend the Reagan administration’s plans. Worse, Weinberger hadn’t mastered his brief: he was unable to convince members of Congress how particular weapons systems fit the United States’ strategic needs. As Bud McFarlane, who was again working on the NSC staff, put it, Weinberger couldn’t “make the connection convincingly between the system and deterrence. He couldn’t make the case intellectually.”60
The hostility between the Democrats in Congress and the Reagan presidency was mutual, as was that between Congress and the Pentagon. (Many forget that the Reagan presidency wasn’t very popular in the early 1980s, and that in 1982 Republicans lost twenty-seven seats in the House of Representatives.) After the defeat of dense pack, McFarlane went over to the Hill to talk to senators Sam Nunn, John Tower, and William Cohen. Cohen advised McFarlane to “put together a bipartisan team of respected analysts to study this issue for you.” He also suggested that McFarlane establish the group “in the next two months” rather than later, “because if a new plan is sent up [to Congress] in March by Cap Weinberger, it will definitely fail.”61
Both McFarlane and his boss, national security advisor William Clark, realized that Weinberger was a liability for the administration’s congressional relations, and Clark approved of McFarlane’s recommendation that Reagan establish a blue-ribbon commission to break the MX stalemate. McFarlane further suggested that the group be bipartisan and composed of strategic weapons experts who were in favor of the MX. He then consulted with his friend James Woolsey and with Thomas C. Reed, the special assistant to President Reagan for national security policy and a former secretary of the Air Force, and came up with the following list of commissioners: William Perry, former New Jersey senator Nicholas Brady, John Deutch, Alexander Haig, former director of central intelligence Richard Helms, former deputy secretary of defense and Texas governor William Clements, vice president of the AFL-CIO’s subcommittee on defense John Lyons, retired admiral Levering Smith, James Woolsey, and Thomas Reed (who was officially the vice chairman of the commission, thereby giving the White House its own representative).
But Reagan rejected McFarlane’s initial choice as commission chairman, Henry Kissinger. (The president’s first national security advisor, Richard Allen, despised Kissinger.) McFarlane then proposed Brent Scowcroft, and Reagan agreed.62
To add to the commission’s credibility and political heft—as well as to avoid offending any key constituencies, as a student of presidential commission, Kenneth Kitts, points out—McFarlane, Reed, and the newly appointed chairman, Scowcroft, invited Harold Brown, former White House counsel Lloyd Cutler, Henry Kissinger, Melvin Laird, Donald Rumsfeld, former DCI John McCone, and James Schlesinger to become “senior counsels” to the commission. The seven new members all agreed on the need for a strong national defense, had extensive political experience, and were committed to the MX. And despite the different origins of the new commissioners and despite the “senior counsel” title, all eighteen members effectively functioned as a single body. McFarlane, Clark, and Reed had essentially put the Office of the Secretary of Defense into receivership, in the characterization of the journalist Frances FitzGerald.63
The new commission was no mere tool of the Reagan White House. Brown, Perry, Deutch, and Woolsey had served in the Carter administration. Schlesinger was a Republican critic of the administration, as was Haig (who had been dismissed as secretary of state only months before, on July 5, 1982). Other members, such as Laird, Kissinger, Rumsfeld, and Scowcroft, were associated not with the Reagan White House but rather with the Nixon or Ford presidencies. And while Reed was the commission’s liaison to the White House, he attended meetings infrequently, sometimes just sending a deputy, and he didn’t participate on the commission in any meaningful way. He was the “supervisor” of the commission, as Scowcroft referred to him, in name only.64
Reagan officially established the president’s commission on strategic forces on January 3, 1983, under Executive Order 12400. It had until February 18, only six and a half weeks, to issue a report. Reed, for one, knew the close deadline was unrealistic, but the Reagan administration sought the tight schedule so that the MX—assuming it was approved in some form—could be fitted into the upcoming federal budget.65
As chairman of the commission, Scowcroft’s challenges were at once technical and political. The technical challenges were to decide how to base the seventy-one-foot tall, two-hundred-thousand-ton MX, determine how many new missiles to recommend building, and figure out how to modernize US strategic forces for the remainder of the twentieth century.
The political hurdles were tougher. First, Scowcroft had to come up with a single plan that all eighteen commissioners could agree upon. While Scowcroft had “learned a lot” from his experience on the two Townes Committees—especially with regard to technical matters—those panels had been “widely, widely split,” in Scowcroft’s description. As a result, the committee members had issued minority reports along with their majority reports. (In fact, a third of the members of the second committee, including Townes himself, supported a minority report that recommended that no MX missiles whatsoever be built.)66 Scowcroft realized that a divided commission would almost certainly doom the chances of getting any agreement through Congress. So he had to achieve a consensus within the commission itself. Then he also had to obtain the support of the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, get the Senate to agree, and have the Air Force, Joint Chiefs of Staff, secretary of defense, and White House sign off.
The commission had to “come up with a defensible new approach,” the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus summarized, one that was “neither too much nor too little” for members of Congress and the community of strategic weapons experts.67 The challenge was “to make [the MX] survivable” and “to make it something that was not supposedly a first-strike weapon,” Scowcroft said. “Also, to make it big enough to carry a number of accurate warheads.” And “to make it cheap enough that it could be deployed. All of those things.”68 The difficulty was finding a basing mode that was “simultaneously of low cost, [could] resist even the most determined Soviet attack, and [didn’t] require any infringement on the public spaces of this country,” Deutch noted. Such an objective, he conceded, could well prove to be “impossible” to attain.69
The larger political context of the Scowcroft Commission was inauspicious. In the early 1980s, the Cold War was arguably at its height. Ronald Reagan and his advisers had come into office believing that détente was fatally flawed and that the Nixon and Ford White Houses had compromised the strategic interests of the United States. So Reagan and his foreign policy team were determined to take a hard line against the Soviet Union and build up US defenses against the growing Soviet strength.70
Scowcroft acknowledged that US-Soviet relations in early 1983 were “not good,” adding that it was “a substantial understatement” and that “they’re bad.”71 Reagan gave his famous “Evil Empire” speech on March 8, 1983, describing what he and his administration regarded as the irreconcilability of US and Soviet interests. Korean Airlines flight 007 was shot down in September, and later that fall the United States and its NATO allies conducted large military exercises (“Able Archer”) that the Soviets regarded as extremely threatening and highly belligerent.72
Members of Congress had their own concerns. Les Aspin, the chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, and other congressional leaders felt that after two years in office, the Reagan administration “was not making any progress on arms control.” The American people wanted action, according to Aspin and other Democrats, action that wasn’t forthcoming: “Negotiators were not meeting . . . nothing was going on.”73 And while the weak economy bore some responsibility for President Reagan’s low approval ratings and the Republicans’ poor showing in the 1982 midterm elections, Americans were anxious about superpower relations and the dangers of nuclear war—especially when the president or other officials spoke of winning a nuclear war. Caspar Weinberger suggested precisely that in early 1982, when he signed a defense guidance calling for US nuclear forces to be able to “prevail and force the Soviet Union to seek earliest termination of hostilities on terms favorable to the United States . . . even under the condition of a prolonged war.” It was, in Aspin’s view, “a very unstable, dangerous situation.”74
In response, many ordinary citizens had mobilized against the arms race and the threat of a nuclear Armageddon. The nuclear freeze movement peaked in the early 1980s, with millions of Americans, Europeans, and others around the world joining in protest against the danger, expense, and what they saw as the immorality of the nuclear arms race.75 On June 12, 1982, between five hundred thousand and 1 million people, led by nuclear scientists, members of the clergy, and other public figures, had marched in New York City in support of a nuclear freeze.
As the chairman of the commission, Scowcroft was thrust into the midst of all of these issues. He strongly believed that the United States had to have a strong national defense in the face of the Soviet threat and that it had to be the resolute leader of the free world. And he took the arms race and the US-Soviet strategic balance very seriously, as we know, seeing it as the core of the United States’ national security.
Such leadership was all the more necessary since the Soviet Union had only increased in military strength since the mid-1970s with its development of third-generation missiles such as the SS-20 mobile MIRVed missile, its new strategic submarines together with more accurate and MIRVed submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and its modernized tactical aircraft such as the Backfire bomber. Not only did the Soviet Union already have an advantage in conventional weapons, according to US intelligence estimates, but it was outspending the United States on weapons on both a relative basis and an absolute one.76
Neither were things getting any better, in Scowcroft’s view. The United States’ former advantages were now either compromised or matched asymmetrically with the Soviet Union’s own advantages (such as the greater accuracy of US missiles as opposed to the heavier throw weight of Soviet missiles, or the US advantage in naval forces versus the Soviet edge in ground forces). Soviet leaders had a further advantage: unlike American leaders, they didn’t have to worry what ranchers, farmers, environmentalists, other members of the public, and the press thought about where the military stationed its missiles.
What’s more, Scowcroft believed that Soviet leaders did not even accept the validity of the assumption underlying deterrence, that of mutual assured destruction (MAD)—and never had. MAD ran “counter to all their developed and inherited attitudes about warfare,” he wrote.77 “The Soviet Union, as seen through its literature, force structure, and force employment, seems quite obviously to have a very conservative and traditionalist view of strategic military conflict,” Scowcroft told one reporter. “That view is that if a nuclear conflict, for whatever reason, should occur, the Soviet plan is to do their utmost to ‘win’ it.”78 Not surprisingly, Scowcroft concluded that the Nixon administration had mishandled US-Soviet détente. Even as he supported détente, “we oversold it,” he said. “It was a very sophisticated policy, and the American people got the wrong idea that the Soviet threat was over.”79
Yet for all his wariness of the Soviet Union, Scowcroft held a nuanced view of the US-Soviet rivalry. As a student of geopolitics and Russian history, he acknowledged the Soviet leaders’ very real fears of a potential conflict with China and of the possibility they might face a two-front war. He recognized the United States and NATO’s nuclear dominance at the theater (regional) level. He understood that the United States enjoyed a technological superiority in strategic weapons. He knew that the NATO countries had a combined GNP four times that of the Soviet Union. He recognized, too, that the Soviet Union critically depended on the West for its petroleum, with 49 percent of its oil supplies at the time being shipped through the Straits of Hormuz.80 And while he appreciated the fact that the Soviet Union was principally guided by geopolitics and history and not by ideology—as he had learned from his experience in Yugoslavia, from teaching Russian history at West Point, and from his graduate studies—none of these factors necessarily made the United States any safer.
Scowcroft firmly rejected the idea of a nuclear freeze. A freeze “might actually increase the risk of conflict,” he explained. The solution to the threat of nuclear war was not to lock existing force imbalances into place, but to stabilize weapons research and development and to restrict the deployment of new weapons. What was needed, he emphasized, was to get the United States and the USSR to move away from their mutual reliance on nuclear weapons, to make the Soviet Union realize that there would be no advantage to using nuclear weapons, and to reduce the chance that either the United States or the Soviet Union would be motivated to use nuclear weapons, given the possibility that either side could miscalculate in the heat of a crisis.81
The United States therefore had to succeed at deterrence, based on the combination of US military capacity and Soviet leaders’ perceptions of the United States’ willingness to use that capacity. Here, the MX could help. “The MX would be very useful in stabilizing crisis situations, that in some crises, there’s sort of a game of chicken,” Scowcroft said. Only because Soviet leaders respected “strength and resolve,” and “only on that basis,” was it “possible [to] deal satisfactorily with them.”82
The president, Congress, and the Pentagon accordingly had “to demonstrate US national will and cohesiveness,” Scowcroft thought, since US officials couldn’t hope to talk Soviet leaders out of their military ambitions. The United States had to build its own capacity by increasing its conventional military forces, by adding other strategic options—possibly a nuclear “quadrad” or “quintad” beyond the triad of strategic bombers, ICBMs, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles—and by involving NATO in matters beyond the borders of the NATO member states. Only “by strength” could the United States “convince the Soviet Union that its only recourse [was] to enter serious arms-control negotiations.”83 And the MX was a show of this strength. Scowcroft thought that “the MX had to be developed as a short-term deterrent to the Soviets, lest they think that their forces were capable of a first strike. That’s what framed my thinking.”84
If the Reagan administration and Congress could agree on the MX missile and future US strategic force structure, Scowcroft calculated, that might be enough to get the Soviets to come to the bargaining table and negotiate with the Americans so as to tamp down the spiraling arms race, lessen the dangers of a nuclear exchange, and ameliorate the worsening relations between the two superpowers.
Few national politicians, defense analysts, strategic weapons experts, or journalists expected anything to come out of the Scowcroft Commission. Former defense secretary Melvin Laird, who was one of the commissioners and who had “superb political antennae,” observed that the commission was a hundred votes short—referring to how many Democratic votes any proposed legislation would need in order to make it through the House. He figured the commission was dead in the water, and he was by no means alone in thinking that. Even Scowcroft wondered what he’d gotten into. He admitted that he doubted “a solution to the problem could be found” and guessed he would be finding “a decent burial for the MX.”85
Once the commission started its work, however, things began to look up. Scowcroft and Woolsey (the most junior member of the commission) quickly decided on a simple strategy for breaking the impasse: they would go ahead with the MX and at the same time introduce a smaller, mobile missile—the Midgetman, as the Air Force and the press would call it. And because they appreciated the seriousness of the deadlock between Congress and the White House, they immediately sought the support of Representative Les Aspin.86
Aspin was an old friend and tennis partner of Woolsey’s, and he knew and respected Scowcroft from the Nixon and Ford administrations. Aspin realized there had to be “some kind of a political compromise” for any agreement to work. And because he had larger political aspirations—some thought he wanted to become secretary of defense—he had to demonstrate he could get a deal done. Given Congress’s problem with Weinberger, the commission offered another route to a politically acceptable deal. So Aspin soon got “very heavily involved” in trying to work out a solution to the MX issue.87
Scowcroft, Woolsey, and Aspin came up with what amounted to a three-part package: to put the MX in existing silos in the near term; to build the smaller, mobile Midgetman over the longer term; and “to encourage both sides to move toward more survivable ICBMs” so as promote a possible future arms agreement. In a “purely political sense,” Scowcroft observed, it was “a combination which got a variety of different coalitions together,” since the three-part plan offered something for everyone.88
Keeping the MX would appeal to conservatives in Congress and the Pentagon, since the MX had multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles capable of hitting ten targets separately, with each warhead containing twenty times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb. With “their prompt, accurate military destruction potential,” Deutch said, the MX missiles were critical “in the calculation of the Soviet general staff, in deterring them from considering a conventional or chemical or nuclear attack in Western Europe or on the flanks of NATO.”89
On the other hand, Scowcroft and Woolsey “felt very strongly” that cancellation of the MX, “particularly after the Soviets had succeeded in . . . getting the neutron bomb cancelled,” would deal an “absolutely crippling” blow “to NATO and to the notion of the American nuclear deterrent as part of NATO.” The United States would then have no basis for asking its European allies “to deploy Pershing [IIs] and ground launch cruise missiles on their own territory when we would let the citizens of Utah and Nevada . . . essentially, effectively . . . stop all on-going US ICBM modernization.”90
The Scowcroft-Woolsey-Aspin plan would appeal to those who didn’t like the MX by introducing the Midgetman (later the MGM-134). The Midgetman, a thirty-eight-foot-long missile about one-seventh the size of the MX, was to be housed in large, armored tractor-trailers equipped with heavy protective skirts—nicknamed “armadillos”—to protect them from a nuclear blast. Because the huge trucks pulling the missiles could operate in the desert around Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas, Nevada, and in other desert areas near existing Air Force bases, the Midgetman would be mobile and survivable.91 The Midgetman would therefore please those members of Congress, the Reagan administration, military leaders, nuclear arms experts, and others who placed a premium on survivability.
Moreover, the less expensive Midgetman appealed to yet a third constituency—those who wanted US strategic weapons policy to go in a new direction. Since the Midgetman was to have only one thermonuclear warhead, it would be easier for the two superpowers to count ICBM warheads for the purposes of arms control. “Missile silos, submarines, and bombers were relatively easy to count and monitor” in order to verify compliance with the SALT I agreement, Scowcroft explained. But because the number of nuclear warheads on missiles was “considered to be beyond national capacity to verify,” both sides were motivated “to multiply the number of individual weapons or warheads, to be installed in each launcher or silo.” Developing a single-warhead missile would thereby induce predictability in the arms race, Scowcroft wrote, and serve to “integrate arms control . . . with the modernization of our strategic forces.”92
Aspin told Scowcroft and Woolsey he would “run the traps” (a Wisconsin hunting term) by checking with his colleagues in Congress to gauge the likelihood of attracting the votes needed to pass the plan.93 Meanwhile, Scowcroft faced the task of getting the commissioners on board. Since it made little sense to begin diving into the complex issues before the commissioners shared the same basic knowledge, Scowcroft took it upon himself to “review the history of US-Soviet strategic force relationships, of arms control, of previous attempts to solve this problem, and so on,” including the relevant intelligence. He thereby managed to get his colleagues to understand relatively early in the process “why we were where we were” and to nudge them toward a common approach.94
He further helped his cause by how he handled the report-drafting process. The Air Force and the Office of the Secretary of Defense had personnel available for drafting the commission’s report, but Scowcroft instead chose to make Woolsey his scribe and used the drafting process to bring the other commission members along. He had Woolsey, an accomplished writer, circulate a draft of the report, collect comments from the commissioners, compose a new draft (often staying up late at night to do so), and then at the next meeting (sometimes the next day) circulate another draft. And then he would then do it all again, “through days and days of drafting,” Woolsey said. The process got the commissioners to buy into their mission and to dedicate themselves to solving the thorny MX issue.95
Once the commissioners were all in agreement, Nicholas Brady drew up a list of influential people they needed to talk to.96 It was Brady’s “idea to involve the Congress in a way and I thought it was brilliant,” Scowcroft said. He and Brady assigned individual commissioners to meet with selected members of the House and Senate (mostly Democrats), White House officials, Pentagon officials, and presidential candidates (with the 1984 presidential election just around the corner) so as to persuade them of the merits of the MX-Midgetman deal.97
Scowcroft and his colleagues on the commission “systematically” reached out to “many, many individuals,” Woolsey remarked, and “they had lunches and breakfasts and dinners, and private meetings with Congressmen.”98 In essence, they did a “sort of brokering,” Deutch said, “going back and forth between the executive branch, the Defense Department, National Security Council staff, White House and the Congress, particularly key Democrats in the House such as Aspin and [Al] Gore and [Norman] Dicks and others.”99
When it came to Congress, Aspin’s help was critical. He met with younger House Democrats who were similarly conservative on defense but anxious about the nuclear arms race—Representative Dicks of Washington, Oklahoma’s Dave McCurdy, South Carolina’s John Spratt, and Tennessee’s Al Gore among them—to solicit their views. Not long afterward, in late January or early February, Aspin got back to Scowcroft and Woolsey and told them the deal “just might work.”100 Then Scowcroft and Woolsey began talking to members of Congress “likely to be highly influential in the decision.” The two made repeated trips to the Rayburn and Cannon office buildings, working closely with Aspin and Dicks. They talked to senior Senate leaders, Scoop Jackson and other more hawkish Democrats in particular, and presented their arguments at Senate Armed Services Committee hearings chaired by Senator John Tower. Senate Democrats subjected Scowcroft and the others to intense questioning, but with Tower favorably disposed to the MX deal and with the Republicans in control of the Senate, the upper house posed less of a challenge for Scowcroft, Woolsey, and the other commissioners than the lower house. There were “a lot of meetings,” Aspin recalled.101
Securing the cooperation of Al Gore, an up-and-coming Tennessee congressman, was critical to the commission’s success. Scowcroft recalled that when he first proposed the joint MX-Midgetman package to Gore, the congressman told Scowcroft, “You’re crazy,” and “almost threw me out of his office.” Gore was “an apostle of the small missile” who “hated the MX” and who strongly emphasized the arms control element of any modernization of US strategic forces. Together with Les Aspin, Charles Percy, Sam Nunn, William Cohen, and other members of Congress, Gore twice wrote letters to the president stating that they’d agree to the MX only on the condition of progress being made on arms control. In part because of Gore’s insistence, Scowcroft was influenced to place more emphasis on progress toward nuclear arms control in his discussions with the White House and, eventually, in the commission’s report. But Scowcroft succeeded in persuading Gore to support the MX, and by the time the commission finished its work, Gore had become one of the foremost advocates of the MX-Midgetman deal.102
All the work by Scowcroft, Woolsey, Deutch, the other commissioners, and Aspin began to pay off. A consensus started to develop among the commissioners, key members of Congress, White House officials, and the Pentagon. According to Woolsey, at one commission meeting, probably in early February, Melvin Laird came in and announced, “We’re about fifty votes down in the House.”
Woolsey immediately leaned over to Scowcroft and murmured, “We’re going to win.”
“How do you know?” Scowcroft replied.
“Mel Laird just changed from the second person plural to the first person plural,” Woolsey replied.103
Scowcroft proceeded to undertake a full-court public relations campaign. Here, as with many of his actions as chairman of the commission, Woolsey and John Deutch were his closest associates.104 He knew any proposed solution had to be approved by important opinion leaders, since the absence of such persuasive efforts had been one of the chief downfalls of the two preceding Townes Committees—and, indeed, of the Vietnam War. He and the other commissioners wrote op-ed pieces, granted numerous interviews, appeared in dozens of regional and national publications, and met with representatives of leading interest groups. Senator Jackson and Representative Aspin also spoke out on behalf of the commission. Scowcroft even had former president Jerry Ford telephone House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill Jr. to enlist his support.105 Scowcroft himself talked to reporters from Time, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the New York Times, and other publications.106
Scowcroft took particular pains to address concerns over the “window of vulnerability.” The idea, which had surfaced in the late 1970s in opposition to SALT II, mostly from critics on the right, was that the United States’ nuclear forces were vulnerable to a Soviet first strike. Paul Nitze, one of Reagan’s strategic weapons advisers, was largely responsible for disseminating the idea. Often working through the Committee on the Present Danger, Nitze had prepared charts purporting to demonstrate the vulnerability of the fixed-silo Minuteman ICBMs to incoming Soviet missiles. For critics of the United States’ existing nuclear forces, substituting MXs for the Minuteman IIIs did nothing to solve this problem.107
Nitze wasn’t alone in his concern about the vulnerability of the United States’ silo-based ICBMs. The Townes Committee’s 1981 report stated there was “no practical basing mode for missiles deployed on the land’s surface available at this time that assure[d] an adequate number of surviving ICBM warheads.” Indeed, Scowcroft’s own views of Soviet capabilities implied that the United States’ land-based ICBMs were vulnerable.108
Now, however, Scowcroft made a systematic effort in his public relations campaign to put the idea of a “window of vulnerability” to rest. It was just “a slogan,” he told one reporter. “We didn’t deny it. Nor did we accept it.” He also did not think the Soviets were inclined “to risk everything on a single role of the dice” by attacking US ICBM silos with their own ICBMs, since there would be no guarantee that their missiles would all destroy their targets. The unrealistic assumption behind the vulnerability issue, a Washington Post editor wrote, was that the Soviets would risk their country “on an attack that had never been—and could never be—tested, and that would require the most stunning technological coordination and the perfect performance of hundreds of Soviet missiles.” James Schlesinger, a commission member who publicly defended the MX deal, also noted that the “Soviets can never have a high degree of confidence that those accuracies would be achieved in a massive strike.”109
The real risk in crisis situations, in Scowcroft’s view, arose from the Soviets’ own calculations of “the correlation of forces.” If the Soviets were confident of their advantage, “critical dangers” could arise. In such cases, the antecedents to World War I were “much more illuminating” about how war might break out, Scowcroft explained, than was the buildup to World War II. He nevertheless conceded that “the vulnerability is growing and carries with it psychological, if not military, liabilities”—hence the need for the United States to build a smaller, accurate, and mobile ICBM.110
Besides attending to public relations, Scowcroft took Congress’s legislative calendar into account. Although Scowcroft and Aspin had already lined up the votes they needed in the House, Scowcroft asked for, and received, a month’s extension.111 However, the delay wasn’t because the commission needed more time (the public explanation that was offered). Rather, had the commission’s report been released when originally scheduled, the release would have coincided with the debate in Congress over a nuclear freeze, a politically popular cause many moderate Democrats couldn’t afford to ignore. Aspin also wanted to wait until after the upcoming budget vote, since many members of Congress were critical of the president’s budget, as well as after the vote on Kenneth Adelman’s nomination as the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
Members of Congress already faced “three dove votes” (on the freeze resolution, the budget resolution to cut defense spending, and against the Adelman nomination), Aspin pointed out, and those votes were likely to make them “uncomfortable,” causing them to wonder “if they’ve gone too far one way” and “start looking for a way to pop back the other way.”112 The delayed vote on the MX deal would allow them to do that, burnishing their Cold War credentials and balancing their voting records before the next election. Democratic representative Thomas Downey of New York, an opponent of the MX, said as much in his criticism of those House Democrats who went along with the administration’s scheme: “Some of these people were for the freeze, and now they’re for the MX. It’s the same old game: everyone seeks the middle ground.”
However, for Downey, Joseph Addabbo of New York, and other House and Senate Democrats, the middle ground was barren land. They thought the release of funds for the MX and Midgetman would be “a tragedy of the highest order.” They and other critics also pointed out that the Scowcroft Commission was rigged, since none of the commissioners were opposed to the MX—which was, of course, what McFarlane had planned.113
For Scowcroft, the MX-Midgetman deal made obvious strategic sense. As for those House Democrats who attacked their colleagues, he thought they did so out of “partisan political heat” because their colleagues were “supporting the administration” rather than because of any “fundamental strategic differences.”114
In the midst of the push to win support for the MX-Midgetman deal, President Reagan himself produced a giant distraction by unveiling the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), popularly known as “Star Wars.”115
SDI would alter the US-Soviet superpower relationship, and today a missile defense system has been deployed over North America and much of Europe. In the early 1980s, however, SDI was little more than a gleam in President Reagan’s eye—helped by Bud McFarlane, Adm. James Watkins, and Adm. John Poindexter116—an idea to invest research and development funds in the science and technology that could make an extended ballistic missile defense system possible.
The president had visited the North American Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs shortly after being elected president. Appalled by the horrific scenarios of what would happen were the United States to be hit by a nuclear attack, Reagan repeatedly declared his wish that the United States could “protect Americans from this scourge of nuclear annihilation.”117 So when the president learned of the possibility of building a shield against ballistic missile attack in a meeting on February 11, 1983, with JCS chairman Admiral Watkins, he encouraged the service chiefs to work on the issue. Three weeks later, they submitted a formal proposal, and on March 16, a week before the president was scheduled to make a televised speech on the defense budget, he decided to introduce the Strategic Defense Initiative to the American public. He told McFarlane to draft a section on SDI and include it in his address.118
Reagan kept SDI under wraps until the last possible moment. Neither the president, McFarlane, nor any other top advisers wanted weapons experts, journalists, politicians, or others to shoot down the concept before everyone learned of it. But the president did listen to McFarlane’s concern about how his own Commission on Strategic Forces might react, so he had an aide inform Scowcroft shortly before the public address. Although Scowcroft warned McFarlane that the president shouldn’t talk about missile defense publicly until the MX deployment was resolved, Reagan decided to go ahead. He just asked Scowcroft to keep an open mind.119
Scowcroft kept the president’s news to himself, as Reagan had asked. So the other members of the Scowcroft Commission, like almost everyone else in Washington and around the country, were unprepared when Reagan announced the SDI program on March 23, seemingly out of the blue. They were “stunned,” John Deutch remembered.120 Scowcroft himself recalled that his commissioners “went berserk” when they “heard about the SDI speech.” There was “real rage” at the commission’s March 24 meeting, Deutch recalled. The commissioners “were uniformly surprised and uniformly . . . horrified” by the fact that “the President of the United States would make a major public address” that potentially transformed “the whole basis of strategy” from “deterrence to a new concept of strategic defense” without even consulting his “own commission charged with the responsibility of achieving a political solution to a very complicated subject.” SDI “made their task, our task, a great deal more difficult,” Deutch said, and “almost split [the commission] asunder.”121
Even after things settled down, Scowcroft and his colleagues were left “scratching [their] heads” about the implications of Reagan’s words and about how “it all fit together.” They asked to speak with the president, who agreed to a meeting. “Why now?” Richard Helms asked. But Reagan “did not have a good answer,” Deutch emphasized—especially since “no one thought” SDI was technically feasible.122
Since Scowcroft didn’t see how SDI directly affected the commission’s task, he “decided that the only way” to proceed was “to ignore it. Because it was only a speech. It had nothing behind it. We didn’t understand the rationale or anything.” It was “not practical at the present time, nor really in the time frame [the commission] looked at—the next ten to fifteen years.” So “to focus on Star Wars was to in large measure confuse matters, whatever people thought of its desirability.” The MX, in contrast, was a known quantity, and the technology for the Midgetman missiles was already developed and would only take a few years to build. Consequently, “we basically sort of shrugged and went on what we were doing,” Woolsey said, since the commissioners “didn’t know quite how to integrate [SDI] into what we were doing with the Scowcroft Commission.” They “just plowed ahead.”123
Scowcroft’s own theory was that SDI was the product of Reagan’s personal dilemma. He thought the president was psychologically torn between two mutually exclusive approaches to confronting the nuclear problem and his own place in history. One approach was the ideal: a comprehensive ballistic missile defense system. But SDI was “two or three” presidencies “down the road,” and by then, Scowcroft noted, “he’ll be dead.” Scowcroft himself opposed SDI, he later explained. He didn’t know how the technology would work, and he saw it as “severely destabilizing,” since it upset the strategic balance that the United States and the Soviet Union were then working toward.124
Reagan’s other approach, in Scowcroft’s analysis, was the “more tentative arms control approach, which means two or maybe three smallish steps toward agreement” with the Soviets.125 These were the talks that would result in START (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), following in the path of SALT I and SALT II. And while START represented an important step in US-Soviet arms control agreements, it was ultimately a modest achievement for a president concerned about his legacy.
Scowcroft made his statement about Reagan’s “split personality” in a WGBH interview on October 10, 1986. His remarks were remarkably prescient. On October 12, the second day of a historic US-Soviet summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, the president found another way to reconcile the issue of nuclear weapons and his own place in history. He and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev talked about ridding the world of intercontinental ballistic missiles over the next ten years, taking up an idea that had first been floated by Weinberger that June in response to Gorbachev’s offer to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
Nothing came of Reagan’s and Gorbachev’s discussion, since Gorbachev wouldn’t proceed without the United States halting work on SDI, and Reagan refused to do so. (The president said the United States would share the technology, but Gorbachev didn’t find the offer credible.) Reykjavik nonetheless represented a “great moral breakthrough” in the US-Soviet superpower rivalry, according to Soviet Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev. Furthermore, it led to more serious bargaining between the United States and the Soviet Union on intermediate-range missiles and other strategic weapons issues, as the journalist Don Oberdorfer pointed out in his book The Turn.126
In the wake of Reagan’s SDI bombshell, the Scowcroft Commission plowed ahead. On April 11, 1983, Scowcroft delivered the twenty-five-page “Report of the President’s Commission on Strategic Forces” to President Reagan.127 The report argued that the United States needed to balance the threat of mass destruction with the threat of aggressive totalitarianism, and that it could best do so by mitigating the first and containing the second. On the second issue, the United States couldn’t ignore the Soviet Union’s expansion of its military capability and political power, such as its development of the SS-18 and SS-19 missiles, which carried ten and six multiple warheads, respectively.128 Rather, it had to make the Soviets believe that the United States and the West had the military strength and political will to resist aggression.
Successful deterrence depended on the United States’ military strength, its political resolve, and its stable institutions—that is, on the Soviets’ perception that they couldn’t possibly gain from either a nuclear attack or, what was more likely, a conventional attack. The report accordingly recommended the further development of missile accuracy, silo hardening, missile mobility, antisubmarine war, and ballistic missile defense.
The report accepted and incorporated Reagan’s SDI proposal, but it recommended that the United States needed the MX for the foreseeable future, since any missile defense system was years away. Besides recommending the installation of one hundred MX missiles in hardened Minuteman III silos, the commission report recommended developing the mobile, survivable Midgetman, as well as continuing with the Trident II submarine, airborne bombers (the B-1), and air-launched cruise missiles.129 The commission noted that because no single component of national defense—whether the MX, the Midgetman, a ballistic missile defense, or other program—sufficed on its own, its recommendations had to be considered as integral components of a complete package. The report also reassured its readers that the Soviet threat to the United States’ land-based missile sites was insufficient to worry about a window of vulnerability. The bonus was the fact that the combined estimated costs of the MX and Midgetman came out to less than the price of the dense pack or the multiple protective shelters basing mode.130
Scowcroft’s unified approach on the MX issue succeeded in securing the unanimous approval of the other commissioners. On April 19, 1983, Reagan announced his approval of the report and forwarded the recommendations to Congress.
The commission’s work wasn’t complete. Aspin, Scowcroft, and his fellow commissioners continued to lobby members of Congress to see that the deal would go through. Some of their efforts were more complicated than they should have been. The evening before the House vote on the MX, the White House hosted a dinner for twenty-five moderate members of Congress and undecideds. The president opened with a short statement, followed by comments by Scowcroft and Secretary of State George P. Shultz. Unfortunately, according to another dinner guest, Shultz “demonstrated once again that he hadn’t had time to master the issue.” Worse, Reagan’s own response to a question about reducing the numbers of MIRVed warheads was “less than convincing” and “confused.”131 As a result, Scowcroft and other commissioners at the dinner had to circulate around the tables and quietly reassure worried House members that things were well in hand and that they needn’t “be concerned about Shultz’s comments” or the president’s lack of expertise.132
Aspin helped out by convincing Reagan officials and sympathetic members of Congress to downplay their enthusiasm for the Scowcroft Commission’s solution. To ensure that the MX deal would be perceived as “middle ground” and not as a victory for the White House, he told Weinberger, “Don’t crow when this comes out . . . we need you to grouse. Say this isn’t very good, but, etc., etc.,” the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew reported. And sure enough, when Weinberger publicly announced his support for the commission’s package, the Pentagon showed “a lack of enthusiasm . . . about the development of the small missile.” Aspin likewise downplayed his own enthusiasm for the commission’s approach when he talked to his House colleagues about the MX, telling them, “This is as good a decision as you’re going to get to a problem that has no good answer.” This was essentially what the New York Times and other leading newspapers wrote in their editorials approving the MX deal.133
Some House members continued to express their intense disagreement. Some took the commission members to task for reversing their position on the issue of silo vulnerability (in November 1981, for instance, William Perry and Harold Brown had both argued that placing the MX in missile silos would put them at risk). Others criticized the commission’s approach as representing a “cruel hoax” and suggested it was “preposterous” to think that the proposed solution would be able to induce any arms control negotiations between the Reagan White House and Soviet leaders.
Nonetheless, Congress approved the MX package, though with one change: Congress funded only fifty MX missiles, not the full one-hundred-missile complement recommended in the commission report.134
President Reagan and White House officials greatly appreciated the work of the commission and acknowledged the debt they owed Scowcroft and his colleagues. “The MX would have been ‘completely lost’ without the intervention of the panel,” one congressional aide reported McFarlane saying. “Without the Scowcroft Commission, we’d never have the MX,” the journalist Hugh Sidey wrote. “If Weinberger had said he wanted to put the MX in Minuteman silos he’d been laughed off the Hill.” But since “virtually every top expert in strategic affairs had signed on,” the “would-be doubters were instantly humbled.”135 Even Charles Townes, who might have resented Scowcroft’s success where his own efforts had failed, praised Scowcroft for being able to break the impasse between White House and Congress and for tackling “the whole batch [of issues] at once, both political and technical.” The commission, he concluded, had done “a good job.”136
Was the creation of the Scowcroft Commission merely a cynical White House ploy to get the MX, as some critics have suggested? The evidence doesn’t support this claim. In fact, the White House didn’t know in advance what the commission’s solution would be, still less that it would get the support of a majority in the House and Senate. Furthermore, the administration did not get everything it wanted. Weinberger and the Department of Defense had to give in “on building the Midgetman,” as Scowcroft pointed out (the Air Force much preferred the MX to the Midgetman); the White House had “to be more forthcoming on arms control”; and the administration had to integrate arms control more closely with the United States’ strategic programs instead of treating arms control “rather as something one does off to the side.”137 As a result, while some in the administration were in favor of carrying out the commission’s recommendations, others, Aspin pointed out, were not.138
On June 10, the president extended the life of the Scowcroft Commission for the duration of calendar 1983 so that the commissioners could oversee progress on the implementation of its recommendations as agreed upon by Congress. The commission (minus two of its members) met infrequently thereafter, with Scowcroft serving as the White House liaison.
One of the tasks Reagan asked the commission to undertake in the late spring of 1983 was an informal evaluation of the Strategic Defense Initiative. The commissioners’ consensus was “quite negative” for “a lot of reasons,” Scowcroft said. He advised the president to keep the findings quiet and not make them public, since, despite Scowcroft’s own opposition to SDI, he “didn’t take things public in those days.” So the results “never saw the light of day.”139
Because of the attention the Scowcroft Commission brought to arms control, Reagan in early June ordered Gen. Edward Rowny, the head of the US delegation in Geneva, to focus on restricting the number of warheads rather than on regulating the number of launchers. And while the Reagan administration’s negotiations produced no immediate results, they managed to shift the conversation toward achieving an agreement on nuclear weapons reduction. They brought renewed attention to enhancing stability and deterrence, especially in times of crisis, and they eventually led to the signing of START under Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush.140
In the short run, however, formal talks with the Soviets made little progress. With US-Soviet relations continuing to deteriorate over the rest of 1983, President Reagan invited Scowcroft to go to Moscow in March 1984 as part of the private Dartmouth Conference of US foreign policy experts. Once he arrived in Moscow, however, Scowcroft was unable to meet with Soviet party chairman Konstantin Chernenko because of Secretary Shultz’s failure to follow up on Reagan’s invitation. Although Shultz would have been kept wholly informed of Scowcroft’s communications, he was loath to let US-Soviet diplomacy out of his control.141
After Reagan’s reelection in 1984, White House officials considered appointing Scowcroft as its new arms control czar, but Secretary Shultz was again opposed; arms control negotiations were “his job” and he “would resign if need be” to protect his turf.142
Although the Scowcroft Commission didn’t directly lead to any major breakthroughs in the arms race, it achieved its short-term objectives: it saved the MX, it moved the United States to a more diversified and more survivable ICBM system, and it provided for the updating and modernization of the United States’ strategic force structure with the Trident II, the hardening of missile silos, and the continuation of the B-1 and B-2 bomber programs. Most important, it helped ensure the continuation of deterrence. The United States and the Soviet Union refrained from attacking each other despite the worsening political relations between the two superpowers, despite the insurrection in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union (with the rebels supported by clandestine US aid), and despite the situation in Nicaragua.
Most of the credit for the Scowcroft Commission’s success goes to its chairman. Over the course of the dozens of commission meetings, Scowcroft was collegial, considerate, and accommodating. He was also clearly, if quietly, in charge. He had “a rare talent for persuasion,” James Woolsey commented, and “for bringing out the reasonableness in others.” “Scowcroft was great,” Rumsfeld remarked. He wasn’t ideological, didn’t “trip over his own ego,” and was “brilliant at working with hugely egotistical and hugely intelligent people,” another commissioner observed.143
In meetings with Kissinger and Haig, the tables were now turned. “Scowcroft quietly dominate[d],” Business Week reported, and when Scowcroft and Haig went over to Capitol Hill to talk to senior members of Congress, “Haig deferred completely to Scowcroft and hardly said a word.”144 (Scowcroft attributed Haig’s complaisance to the fact that he was his West Point classmate.) Notwithstanding the preeminence, political experience, and scientific expertise of Kissinger, Haig, and the other commissioners, they all bought into Scowcroft’s proposed solutions and then worked to get the MX deal funded through Congress.
Scowcroft even got cooperation from the acerbic Weinberger, “a very powerful man” and a terrific “infighter” in Paul Nitze’s words—and Nitze should know.145 (On one occasion at least, the secretary of defense simply refused to carry out a presidential order. On November 16, 1983, Reagan ordered him to launch an aerial attack against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards stationed in the Lebanese town of Baalbek in retaliation for the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon. But Weinberger didn’t do anything, and Reagan, who was an old friend and hated confrontation, didn’t have the stomach to call him on it.)146 Weinberger thus could have caused serious difficulties, especially since the very existence of the commission was a testimony to Weinberger’s failure as secretary of defense. Instead, Scowcroft and Weinberger met frequently, and their meetings “were always amicable,” Scowcroft reported. Despite the fact that they didn’t see eye to eye on the commission’s proposed solution and despite the fact that Scowcroft worked closely with Democratic members of Congress who loathed Weinberger, the two got along. And in the end, Weinberger publicly approved of the commission’s recommendations.147
As critical as journalist Elizabeth Drew was of the Reagan administration and of the Scowcroft Commission, she praised Scowcroft himself as “an honorable public servant, whose instinctive loyalty is to the Commander-in-Chief. He faithfully and competently gets the job done.”148 While this could be viewed as damning with faint praise—reinforcing the idea of Scowcroft as merely a highly capable civil servant, a “loyal staff officer,” and a trustworthy “fixer”—the compliment has to be viewed in the context of the immense stakes and treacherous politics of the MX missile, and President Reagan’s earlier decision to exclude Scowcroft from his foreign policy team. But when confronted with a seemingly intractable problem, “a problem this nation absolutely [had] to solve,” Rumsfeld said, Reagan and his advisers “turned to Brent as the best man to solve the strategic weapons dilemma.”149
Scowcroft accomplished something else: he helped shift the basis of congressional support for strategic weapons systems. Whereas defense and arms control policy in the House of Representatives were “normally seen to be the province of an older, longer tenured, more conservative element of the Democratic membership of the House”—senior southern Democrats, typically—Scowcroft formed a coalition for ICBM modernization and arms control among younger moderate Democrats.150 He even won agreement for the MX deal from Scoop Jackson and Richard Perle, Jackson’s former aide.151 (Perle was then the assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, perhaps the administration’s most hawkish member, and the intellectual leader of the Madison Group, an informal group of young hard-line conservatives who met regularly at the Madison Hotel.)152
Throughout the process, Scowcroft showed himself to be adept at navigating Washington politics on complex issues of high strategic salience, immense political stakes, and great financial importance. Scowcroft succeeded in getting his fellow commissioners, a majority in both houses of Congress, the Reagan administration, and the Defense Department to reach to a consensus on the United States’ strategic force structure for the rest of the 1980s, the 1990s, and the early years of the twenty-first century. Four years after the commission issued its report, Scowcroft told a reporter he was “still very comfortable with the conclusions” and thought the commission’s recommendations were “very sound.” Such an accomplishment, he said in a moment of self-praise, was “hard to beat . . . in this field.”153
NONETHELESS, THE SCOWCROFT Commission’s policy recommendations would never fully go into effect. In early 1986, when Congress had approved only fifty of the proposed one hundred MX missiles and had not yet funded the Midgetman, Scowcroft, Deutch, and Woolsey wrote a critical op-ed urging Congress to implement the commission’s recommendations.154
Scowcroft also found fault with the shifting arms policies of the Reagan administration. In June 1986, the same three writers expressed their disagreement with the administration’s support of a comprehensive test ban treaty. And they criticized the wishful thinking on display in October 1986 at the Reykjavik summit. In a five-page New York Times magazine article, they defended the concept of nuclear deterrence and attacked Reagan’s proposal that all ballistic missiles be banned in ten years’ time. Not only would this cede to the Warsaw Pact its superiority in conventional weapons over NATO forces in Europe, they wrote, but the move would rashly eliminate two of the three legs—nuclear missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles—of the United States’ strategic triad.155
The three likewise criticized the proposed “zero option” that would have the United States “dismantle its 572 warheads on Pershing II and cruise missiles” in Europe—eliminating a whole class of weapons, in effect—and the 810 warheads on 270 SS-20 missiles based in Europe. Without those NATO intermediate-range nuclear forces, the Soviet Union would have the advantage with its more than five hundred shorter-range missiles, which in the three men’s analysis would only augment the Soviets’ superiority in conventional forces and eliminate the capacity of the United States and its NATO allies to employ a “flexible response” to any aggression by the Soviet Union. And the zero option would undermine US-European relations, since it would contradict the administration’s previous push in 1983 to deploy the Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe.
Eliminating the intermediate-range nuclear forces would be a mistake, Scowcroft wrote in reply to Paul Nitze’s editorial defending the zero option. A reduction in the number of nuclear weapons possessed by both sides did not ipso facto make for greater strategic stability. The zero option did not cohere conceptually, Scowcroft pointed out, and removing the NATO intermediate-range nuclear deterrent would not reassure the United States’ European allies but in fact do the exact opposite.156
The Reagan administration’s proposals to ban mobile ICBMs and put more nuclear warheads on the new Trident II submarines, Scowcroft, Deutch, and Woolsey wrote, would mean that the United States’ fixed MX and Minuteman missiles, its strategic bombers, and its relatively few nuclear submarines (with only eight of the twelve being at sea at any one time) would be vulnerable to Soviet forces as time marched on and technology progressed. The United States couldn’t rely on the Reagan administration’s “childlike faith in strategic warning,” they cautioned. Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, South Korea on June 25, 1950, and Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973 were lessons enough.157
In the end, only fifty MX missiles were ever deployed, and only a prototype of the Midgetman was ever built. “We won,” said Michael Mawby, the political director of SANE, the antinuclear group that worked to stop deployment of the MX.158 It’s possible that the mere threat of the new missiles was sufficient for the purposes of deterrence and strategic balance during what turned out to be the final years of the Soviet empire.
Meanwhile, President Reagan was about to face the worst political crisis of his two terms in office—the Iran-Contra affair. And once again, Reagan and his advisers would turn to Brent Scowcroft for help.