CHAPTER 7 
“A Super Idea”
President Carter approached the 1980 election with the odds stacked against him. By some measures, he had built up American military power—increasing the defense budget by 3 percent per year, establishing a Rapid Deployment Force to stave off Soviet incursions in the Persian Gulf, and, eventually, against his better judgment, approving new weapons for all three legs of the nuclear Triad. But the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the surge in Soviet missile production, the alienation of the NATO allies, the taking of American hostages by the Iranian revolutionary regime and the botched attempt to rescue them—all made it easy for Republicans to lambast him as a weak president. He was beat in a landslide by Ronald Reagan, a former movie star turned California governor who had emerged over the years as a conservative hero, touting the motto “Peace Through Strength.”
Reagan entered the White House with an entourage bent not merely on deterring and containing the Soviet Union but on weakening and rolling back its empire. Thirty-two members of his administration, including Reagan himself, were members of Paul Nitze’s Committee on the Present Danger. In his opening months in office, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger boosted military spending by 13 percent. He revived every nuclear weapons program that Carter had killed (notably the B-1 bomber) and accelerated all the others. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Agency, and the new CIA director, William Casey, took Reagan’s rhetoric as a green light for a more aggressive posture worldwide—funding covert programs to overthrow Communist regimes and repel leftist insurgencies, sending spy ships into Soviet waters and spy planes into Soviet airspace, even disrupting and shutting off the Soviet military’s command-control networks.
In October 1981, Reagan signed a new guidance for the use of nuclear weapons, a National Security Decision Directive called NSDD-13, which cut and pasted various concepts from Carter’s PD-59—especially the idea of waging protracted nuclear warfare—then took them a few steps further. For instance, while the Carter doctrine’s main goal was to convince the Kremlin’s leaders that they could not win a nuclear war (mainly because it was unwinnable), NSDD-13 stated, up front, that, if deterrence failed and nuclear war erupted, “the United States and its Allies must prevail”—must win.
This idea was nothing new. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff maintained that, in a general nuclear war with the Soviet Union, U.S. policy was “to prevail.” But no president in all those years had taken this language seriously. Even Eisenhower allowed that the best hope in a nuclear war was not “to lose any worse than we have to.” And, in 1969, the first year of the Nixon administration, Henry Kissinger issued a directive formally rescinding the Chiefs’ policy.
Now, though, under Reagan, the idea enjoyed a revival, endorsed by the administration’s top civilians. Nitze’s committee had done much to propagate the idea during Carter’s years in the White House, and Reagan named Nitze to be his chief arms negotiator. The chief Soviet affairs specialist on the National Security Council now was Richard Pipes, a Russian history professor at Harvard who had recently written a widely read essay in Commentary magazine called “Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War,” which implied that the United States should start thinking along the same lines. A young scholar named Keith Payne, who had coauthored an article in Foreign Policy called “Victory Is Possible” (referring explicitly to victory in a nuclear war), was now a consultant for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, where Eugene Rostow, Walt Rostow’s brother, a longtime friend of Nitze’s and cofounder of the Committee on the Present Danger, was director. Richard Perle, the combative defense policy aide to Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the Senate’s leading anti-détente Democrat, was now the assistant secretary of defense for global strategic policy.
To the extent that Reagan and his aides thought at all about nuclear arms control, they viewed it mainly as a vehicle for propaganda. President Carter’s 1979 agreement with NATO, to deploy new missiles in Europe, was falling apart, as the continent’s left-wing political parties and disarmament activists were pushing hard to reverse the decision, viewing the Pershing II in particular as a first-strike weapon. Allied leaders told Reagan that the missiles could not be deployed, as a practical matter, unless the United States also put forth an arms control proposal. Richard Perle suggested that Reagan propose a ban on all nuclear weapons in Europe. This would require the Russians to dismantle hundreds of their SS-4, SS-5, and SS-20 missiles—in exchange for which the United States would cancel the Pershing II and Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles, which had not yet been deployed. In other words, the Soviets get rid of a lot of weapons; the U.S. gets rid of nothing. Perle knew full well that the Soviets would reject such a trade, and he wanted them to. Years earlier, as a student at Hollywood High School, Perle had been friends with the daughter of Albert Wohlstetter, the RAND strategist and, later, chairman of the European-American Workshop, which lobbied strenuously for the Euro-missiles. The two discussed nuclear issues in detail, and when young Richard ventured into the professional world, Wohlstetter helped him land his first key jobs, including that of Senator Jackson’s defense aide.
Weinberger liked Perle’s idea—which came to be called the “zero option”—and brought it up at an NSC meeting on October 13. Reagan’s secretary of state, Alexander Haig, a former Army general, didn’t like the idea at all. Haig asked what would happen in a year or two, when it came time to deploy the missiles and we had this zero option on the table. Surely the Europeans wouldn’t let them be deployed.
Don’t worry, Weinberger assured him. The Soviets will reject the idea, and we will be seen as “the White Hats” for having proposed it.
At heart, though, and dating back several decades, Ronald Reagan detested nuclear weapons and, as passionately as Jimmy Carter, wanted to see them abolished—a fact that some of his aides, once they learned of it, worked hard to keep hidden. On March 23, 1982, Reagan let the secret slip. He was in New York, delivering a speech to the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and decided to give an interview to the New York Post. As a final question, an editor at the paper asked him about the Soviet arms buildup.
Reagan began his answer by lamenting that the Soviet leaders were impoverishing their own people to pay for their armaments, a policy that was succeeding, as they were now a military superpower. “This is one of the reasons why we can’t retreat on what we’re doing,” he went on, “because I believe we’ve come to the point that we must go at the matter of realistically reducing”—and here he paused for a moment, as if weighing his words—“if not totally eliminating the nuclear weapons, the threat to the world.”
Some were stunned by the remark, so at odds with his hawkish words and actions as president till then—though, for the same reason, they didn’t take it seriously, dismissed it as clichéd rhetoric.
What may have impelled Reagan to go public was that, a month earlier, on February 26, he received his briefing on the SIOP. He had agreed, a few weeks before then, to observe a high-level exercise at the Pentagon’s Nuclear Military Command Center, scheduled for early March. Thomas Reed, a former secretary of the Air Force and longtime friend of Reagan’s who was now working nuclear issues on the NSC staff, was surprised that Reagan had agreed to take part at all, “given,” as he later wrote, “his personal distaste for the subject.” But Reed was concerned that, without a SIOP briefing ahead of time, Reagan wouldn’t understand what he was watching. So, more than a year into his presidency, later than any of his Cold War predecessors, Reagan consented to hear that briefing too.
The SIOP was still a “horror strategy,” as Kissinger had called it after his exposure. In fact, it had grown deadlier still, since, under Carter’s PD-59, the plan now also targeted Soviet “leadership,” which SAC interpreted as firing nuclear weapons at the offices, residences, summer dachas, and relocation bunkers of every Soviet commissar, minister, regional governor, and oblast chief.
Sitting in the White House Situation Room, Reagan heard the briefers from the Joint Staff calmly tell him that, in a Soviet attack, about 5,700 nuclear weapons would explode on American soil, destroying three quarters of the U.S. strategic nuclear forces and killing 80 million Americans.
The briefers spelled out the Major Attack Options and Selective Attack Options from PD-59, as well as an option for Launch Under Attack: firing the missiles, especially the land-based ICBMs, before they were hit by the incoming Soviet warheads. (Most of SAC’s officers had figured, from the time of the first centralized war plan, that this is what any president would want them to do.) Nothing was said about the small-scale Limited Nuclear Options, which Nixon and Carter had called for and which SAC had never taken seriously. Very little was said about “withholds” (sparing certain categories of targets from attack) or a “reserve force” (holding back certain missiles as a signal of restraint), neither of which SAC had ever thought plausible if the Soviets struck first.
Around the same time, Caspar Weinberger and his staff were writing their own detailed guidance for nuclear targeting, which reversed the Carter administration’s priorities. PD-59, and the SIOP as it stood at the time of Reagan’s briefing, called for hitting the Soviets’ leadership, nuclear weapons, conventional military forces, and urban industries—in that order of priorities. Weinberger’s guidance placed nuclear weapons and conventional military forces at the top of the list, followed by leadership, then urban industries—though it also contained an option for not attacking senior Soviet leaders, so that they could negotiate an end to the war. In short, the guidance was a revival of the idea of nuclear weapons as warfighting tools. It was also an attempt at fleshing out NSDD-13, Reagan’s directive of a year earlier, mandating that, if a nuclear war happened, the United States “must prevail.”
SAC’s officers had no idea how to prevail, nor did anyone tell them how to go about doing so, although the document’s aggressive tone restored some legitimacy to their long-standing preference for an all-out attack. However, by the time the planning got to that stage, Reagan was no longer paying attention to the nuances, realizing, from the SIOP briefing, that nuclear war left little room for nuance.
Clearly, Reagan was no dove. His aversion to nuclear weapons was more than matched by his anathema toward Communism, and the latter restrained him from taking action on the former; in fact, it put him in the same camp as those calling for more nuclear weapons.
Then, on February 11, 1983, Reagan experienced an epiphany—saw a way to fuse his two, seemingly contradictory positions. The moment came after a nearly two-hour lunch with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where they discussed the MX missile and the various proposals for a mobile basing scheme. Reagan supported the MX, but he also recognized the difficulties involved in making the missile mobile and, therefore, less vulnerable to a Soviet first strike. At some point during the meeting, he hit upon what he thought was a way out—“a super idea,” as he called it in his diary. He wrote:
So far the only policy worldwide on nuclear weapons is to have a deterrent. What if we tell the world we want to protect our people not avenge them; that we’re going to embark on a program of research to come up with a defensive weapon that could make nuclear weapons obsolete? I would call upon the scientific community to volunteer in bringing such a thing about.
The diary entry didn’t come out of nowhere. A year earlier, Reagan had met with Edward Teller, the co-designer of the hydrogen bomb, cofounder of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and now an advocate of a laser weapon to shoot down Soviet missiles in outer space as they streaked across the heavens toward American territory. Most people, including other physicists, regarded Teller’s notion as a pipe dream; but Reagan was intrigued, and he would consult with Teller several times as his “super idea” took form.
On March 23, 1983, not quite six weeks after his revelatory meeting with the Chiefs, Reagan delivered a prime-time speech on nationwide television. It started out as a pitch to spend more money, on top of an already boosted defense budget, to counter the Soviet military threat. Then he turned to what he previewed, at the start of his speech, as “a very big decision” that he had recently made. “I’ve become more and more deeply convinced,” he said, “that the human spirit must be capable of rising above dealing with other nations and human beings by threatening their existence,” adding, “Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope.”
He then unfurled the idea from his diary jottings: “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?”
Finally, he made what he saw as his historic proclamation: “I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”
Reagan had written this part of the speech, with the help of only a handful of White House advisers working, at his direction, in total secrecy. His cabinet secretaries—including Caspar Weinberger and the new secretary of state, George Shultz—had reviewed a draft of the speech that left out this section. They learned about it only when they watched Reagan reading it aloud on television. They were surprised—and not in a good way.
They knew that the president was spinning fantasies. Reagan acknowledged in the speech that his vision was “a formidable, technical task,” which “may not be accomplished before the end of the century.” But, he went on, “current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it’s reasonable for us to begin this effort.” Anyone who knew anything about the state of anti-ballistic-missile technology knew that this was simply not true.
When Teller was revealed as the chief inspiration for the speech, and when Teller himself began to brief lawmakers and reporters on his ideas for a space-based laser weapon, Senator Edward Kennedy lambasted the idea as “a reckless ‘Star Wars’ scheme,” a reference to the blockbuster movie that featured Jedi fighters shooting laser beams at intergalactic spaceships. By this time, the Pentagon had officially titled the project the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, for short), but everyone called it “Star Wars” and dubbed Reagan’s TV address “the ‘Star Wars’ speech.”
Reagan’s science adviser told him that the project, as outlined, had little if any technical validity at the moment. State Department officials wrote memos explaining that, if such a weapon got to the testing stage, it would violate the ABM Treaty. Many arms control advocates objected that the Soviets would view it as part of a first-strike threat. They weren’t off the mark. From the onset of ABM research, dating back to the 1950s, many advocates—within the U.S. military and its scientific annexes—viewed missile defenses as an adjunct to a nuclear-war-winning strategy. The scenario went like this: the president launches a nuclear first strike against Soviet missiles; the Soviets retaliate with their surviving missiles, but they would be so few in number that our ABM system would shoot them down with little trouble. Victory is possible indeed.
When Robert McNamara was secretary of defense, he and his whiz kids analyzed the ABM systems on the drawing board and found them wanting: the interceptors had failed their tests or, to the extent they seemed to pass them, it was because the tests were rigged. A few years into his tenure, McNamara came to a more profound realization: even if the ABM system worked flawlessly, the Soviets could overwhelm it by building—and launching—a few extra missiles, and they could keep building more offensive missiles, more quickly and cheaply than the U.S. could keep building defensive interceptors. At best, then, ABMs would spawn an offense-defense arms race, which the offense—the Soviets—would win.
It was this realization that impelled Nixon and Kissinger to negotiate the ABM Treaty with the Soviet Union. McNamara first proposed limits on defensive as well as offensive arms at a 1967 summit in Glassboro, New Jersey, with Soviet prime minister Alexei Kosygin. Initially Kosygin was puzzled, finding the notion of limiting defensive weapons as not only absurd but “immoral.” Over time, though, he and others on the Politburo came to grasp McNamara’s logic and, by the time Nixon entered office, consented to pursuing a treaty.
Senior officials in Reagan’s Pentagon soon liked Star Wars. Neither Weinberger nor Perle believed for a minute that such a weapon would work; but they figured the Soviets might think it would work, and in that case SDI could add another pound of pressure to push the Kremlin’s regime over the edge. And so they—and, after a while, other administration officials—touted the program as avidly as their straight faces allowed. The more exotic branches of the military also jumped on the bandwagon, slapping the “SDI” label on as many projects as possible, in order to win them larger budgets. A special SDI Office was created, with a separate budget, amounting, soon enough, to several billion dollars a year.
Everyone had a reason to get with the program. Reagan was one of the very few who took it at face value, who really thought American ingenuity could make it work, who envisioned it as a shield that could protect the United States—and, as we shared the technology, the entire world—thus rendering nuclear weapons obsolete.
He could not have known it at the time, but his Star Wars speech kicked off the most intense year of the Cold War since the Cuban missile crisis two decades earlier.
Two weeks before the speech, on March 8, Reagan delivered an address to the National Association of Evangelicals, in which he referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Almost six months later, on September 1, Soviet air defense crews shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, mistaking it for an American spy plane, as it accidentally crossed into Soviet airspace, killing all 269 passengers on board, including a U.S. congressman.
On September 26, Soviet early warning radars sounded the alarms for what seemed to be an attack by American ICBMs. False alerts, in the United States and the Soviet Union, were more common than most people knew. In Jimmy Carter’s final year as president, three “false missile warning incidents,” as they were called, occurred in a two-week period from late May to early June, all caused by a computer error. In two of the incidents, senior officers ordered SAC pilots to board their planes and start their engines. In a separate incident, which took place the previous November, the error occurred when a test disc was mistakenly inserted into the North American Air Defense Command’s computer. Worries grew so intense that Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was awakened in the middle of the night and informed that the Soviets had launched 250 ICBMs against the United States; Brzezinski and the officers at NORAD weren’t entirely certain that the alert wasn’t real until the radar indicated that the warheads had exploded on American targets, when, obviously, they had not.
None of these incidents prompted a presidential crisis, in part because the international climate was calm; few believed that the Soviets had really launched an attack. But the Soviet Union’s false warning on September 26 came at a time of intense nervousness. As it happened, the chief air defense officer on duty, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, figured that the radars had to be mistaken and decided, entirely on his own judgment, not to notify his superiors. If Petrov had been less sure of himself and sent an emergency message alert to the next level—in other words, if he’d been more like his comrades who shot down KAL Flight 007 a month earlier under similar circumstances—World War III might have started that day.
In November, the Kremlin broke off negotiations on a Soviet-American nuclear arms control accord. The talks hadn’t made much progress, but they provided the only forum where the two sides could talk about anything. With the suspension of those sessions, communications between the superpowers shut down.
At that point, Reagan decided that the Cold War was getting too hot, that he needed to soften the tone and substance of his policies toward Moscow.
To some degree, on some level, Reagan knew that the United States bore some of the blame for the tensions. Early on in his presidency, analysts at the CIA, NSA, and Naval Intelligence had briefed him on recent technological breakthroughs that allowed their spies, sensors, and satellites to probe more deeply than ever into the Soviet military’s operations, to monitor and disrupt its movements. The upshot was that, contrary to what Reagan and his officials had been saying in public, the Russian Bear was not ten feet tall; in fact, he was quite vulnerable, and American secret sentries could exploit those vulnerabilities. Reagan didn’t completely understand the technical details of these exploits, but he quickly grasped the implication: if the big war came, the United States could win. He urged the directors of the agencies to keep up the pressure. And they did.
Even a little before Reagan took office, the Navy and the NSA, in a joint program called Ivy Bells, were sending specially built mini-submarines into Russian harbors, where they tapped into the undersea transmission cables of Soviet nuclear subs returning to port. Air Force and CIA spy planes were routinely crossing into Soviet airspace on intelligence-gathering missions, to test the readiness of Soviet air defense crews, provoke them into turning on their radar, then record everything about the radar’s emissions.
Under Reagan, these sorts of programs were stepped up. In August and September of 1981, an armada of eighty-three U.S., British, Canadian, and Norwegian ships sailed near Soviet waters, undetected. In April 1983, forty U.S. warships, including three aircraft carriers, approached Kamchatka Peninsula, off the USSR’s eastern coast. As part of the operation, Navy combat planes simulated a bombing run over a military site twenty miles inside Soviet territory. The ships and the planes maintained radio silence, jammed Soviet radar, and transmitted false signals; as a result, they avoided detection, even by a new Soviet early-warning satellite orbiting directly overhead. An internal NSA history noted, “These actions were calculated to induce paranoia, and they did.”
The simulated bombing run, in particular, incited Yuri Andropov—the former KGB director who had ascended to the Kremlin’s top post after Leonid Brezhnev died toward the end of 1982—to issue an order authorizing air defense units to “shoot to kill” any foreign aircraft intruding into Soviet airspace. Though neither Reagan nor any other senior U.S. official made the connection at the time, this order set the stage for the shoot-down of KAL 007 four months later. In fact, just hours before the Boeing passenger plane mistakenly flew across the border, an American spy plane, sporting a similar radar profile, had been spotted in the same area. (Of course, even if Flight 007 had been a spy plane, shooting it down would have been an extreme reaction.)
The KAL shoot-down was one of three events in the fall of 1983 that inspired Reagan to shift his thinking. The others were a blockbuster TV movie and a NATO war game that nearly turned real.
On Sunday night, November 20, ABC aired a two-hour made-for-TV film called The Day After, a drama depicting the effects of a nuclear war on the people in and around Lawrence, Kansas, not far from a Minuteman ICBM complex. In one of the show’s most haunting scenes, a dozen or so missiles are seen blasting off from their silos and streaking up through the sky. An estimated 100 million Americans watched the broadcast. The network and its local affiliates set up 1-800 hotlines staffed with counselors to answer questions and allay anxieties. Many viewers even stayed tuned for the post-show discussion by a panel including Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, conservative columnist William F. Buckley, and astronomer Carl Sagan, who, in a particularly memorable line, likened the nuclear arms race to “a room awash in gasoline” with “two implacable enemies.… One of them has nine thousand matches, the other seven thousand matches; each of them is concerned about who’s ahead, who’s stronger.” For weeks after, discussions were held about the movie at hundreds of churches and schools across the nation.
Reagan watched the movie at Camp David a month before the broadcast. (The network had sent him a videotape in advance.) He wrote in his diary: “It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed.” Still, it did not turn him away from his arms buildup. Quite the contrary, it made him all the more determined “to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war.” At the moment, he saw no choice.
But between the president’s private screening and the nationwide telecast came the third big event that fall, and it may have turned his head around most decisively. A NATO war game, called Able Archer 83, took place November 7–11. It was a command-post exercise to test the procedures that officers and their troops would follow if a ground conflict against the Warsaw Pact escalated from conventional war to nuclear. In one sense, it was a routine exercise, the latest episode of a game that took place every autumn; but in another sense, it was something new.
It was an unusually large exercise and unusually realistic too. A fleet of military cargo transport planes flew 19,000 soldiers, in 170 sorties, from the United States to bases in Europe, all the while maintaining radio silence. The commanders moved from a “permanent war headquarters” to an “alternate war headquarters.” B-52 bomber crews taxied the planes to their runways and loaded them with dummy bombs that looked remarkably real. SAC raised its nuclear alert levels gradually through the five DEFCON settings all the way to “general alert”—that is, to the final stage before war.
The Soviets were monitoring all of this, as they generally did (and as the U.S. commanders knew they would), but they reacted in ways that they never had during any previous exercise—in ways similar to how they might have acted if the U.S. were gearing up for a real attack. Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, the chief of the general staff of the Soviet armed forces, ran the response from a bunker just outside Moscow. Strategic nuclear forces were put on alert. Nuclear-capable aircraft in East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia—the Warsaw Pact’s front-line countries in a war against NATO—were also placed on high alert. Helicopters transported nuclear warheads from storage sites to missile launchers.
American intelligence agencies were watching these Soviet moves, just as Soviet agencies were watching the Americans. Ordinarily, when the Soviets took such actions, the agencies would notify the Joint Chiefs or the secretary of defense or, if things looked particularly dicey, the president—and onward and upward the escalation might spiral. But a three-star general named Leonard Perroots, the deputy chief of staff for intelligence at the U.S. Air Force’s European headquarters in Germany, decided to do nothing. He’d been apprehensive about Able Archer 83, viewed it as needlessly provocative, and so interpreted the Soviets’ actions not as a threat but as a rational, defensive response to what they saw as an American threat.
Six weeks earlier, Lieutenant Colonel Petrov, the Soviet air defense officer who decided not to report the detection of an apparent U.S. missile attack, might have averted war by violating protocol. Now Lieutenant General Perroots, the American intelligence officer monitoring Able Archer, may well have done the same.
While Able Archer was unfolding, Oleg Gordievsky, a London-based KGB colonel who had turned double agent, was providing his British handlers in MI6 with documents revealing that Soviet officials were viewing the exercise as a prelude to an attack by the United States and NATO—and responding to it with their own nuclear alert. The British, as was customary, shared the intelligence with their American cousins.
At first, and for more than a year after, the CIA’s top officials were skeptical, dismissing the Soviets’ “war scare” as “propaganda,” designed to inflame anti-American sentiment in Western Europe. In a Special National Intelligence Estimate on the subject, issued the following May, analysts “strongly” concluded that, both in the context of Able Archer and in general, “Soviet actions are not inspired by, and Soviet leaders do not perceive, a genuine danger of imminent conflict or confrontation with the United States.”
However, six years later, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board—a panel of experts with insiders’ experience and outsiders’ disinterest—disputed this judgment categorically. In a ninety-four-page report stamped Top Secret and six other classification labels (Wnintel, NoForn, NoContract, Orcon, Umbra, Gamma), the board members concluded precisely the opposite: “There is little doubt in our minds that the Soviets were genuinely worried by Able Archer” and feared that NATO was about to launch an attack “under cover” of the exercise. “At least some Soviet forces,” the report added, “were preparing to preempt or counterattack” what they saw as an imminent strike.
The report made a still broader point. From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, it concluded, Soviet military and intelligence forces had been “redirected” in a way that suggested the Kremlin leadership “was seriously concerned about the possibility of a sudden strike launched by the U.S. and its NATO allies.” Jimmy Carter’s PD-59, with its talk of protracted nuclear warfare, was interpreted as preparations “for a preemptive strike”—a view reinforced by the development of the MX and Trident II missiles, which the Soviets saw as “highly lethal” weapons aimed at “their silos and other hardened targets.” More alarming still was the European-based Pershing II missile, which, with its pinpoint accuracy and mere five-minute flight time to Moscow, was seen not as a counter to the Soviet SS-20 but as “yet another step toward a first-strike capability,” specifically as a weapon to “decapitate” the Soviet leadership, to prevent the Kremlin from responding to a larger American first strike, which would follow. These conclusions, the report noted, were based on “sensitive reporting”—an intelligence-world euphemism for communications intercepts or well-placed spies. It was the deployment of the Pershing II that provoked the Soviets into walking out of the arms control talks near the end of 1983. It also prompted them to create a device, known as the “dead hand,” which would detect a nuclear explosion on Soviet soil and, in case it was an American first strike that killed the Kremlin leaders, would send a signal that launched a Soviet retaliatory strike automatically.
On the day that Able Archer began, Grigory Romanov, the Politburo member in charge of the Soviet military-industrial complex, exclaimed at a meeting of his comrades, “The international situation at present is white hot, thoroughly white hot!”
Reagan had no idea these things were going on at the time. Still, just days after the wrap-up of Able Archer, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, his national security adviser, showed him Oleg Gordievsky’s reports of Soviet activities during the exercise, suggesting that Soviet leaders really thought the United States was getting ready to launch a nuclear first strike under the cover of an exercise—a report that Reagan received with “genuine anxiety,” McFarlane later recalled. Reagan had been pushing hard against the Kremlin, in hopes that the pressure might bring down the system; but “it did bother him” that the Soviets could seriously entertain “the very idea” that he would launch a first strike. In his memoir, Reagan wrote about “some people in the Pentagon who claimed a nuclear war was ‘winnable,’ ” adding, “I thought they were crazy.” He may have forgotten by then that he had signed a National Security Decision Directive, declaring that, if nuclear war broke out, the United States “must prevail.” He may not have known that American generals had pushed and planned for a first-strike capability ever since the dawn of the nuclear age.
On November 18, one week after Able Archer, Reagan met with Secretary of State George Shultz to discuss setting up a back channel of communication with Moscow. He wrote in his diary that day: “I feel the Soviets are so defense minded, so paranoid about being attacked that without being in any way soft on them we ought to tell them no one here has any intention of doing anything like that.”
The next morning, at seven-thirty, a group of twelve senior officials—including Shultz, McFarlane, Vice President George H. W. Bush, and CIA deputy director Robert Gates—met for breakfast in Shultz’s dining room at the State Department. The very topic of reopening talks with Moscow was extremely sensitive; Shultz told the group not to tell anyone else that the meeting had even taken place. For two hours, they discussed possible courses of action. Bush made the central point—that the public was uneasy about the lack of communication with Russia. All the participants agreed that high-level contact should resume. Some endorsed the move to keep tensions from escalating; others thought the moment was ripe because America’s recent actions had ratcheted up tensions just enough. McFarlane, who was among the latter faction, advised starting talks again, “now that we are in a position of strength in dealing with the Soviets.” In the end, the group decided that Reagan should try to shift perceptions, both at home and abroad, by doing what he did best—delivering a speech.
McFarlane set about writing the address with Jack Matlock, a former State Department official who had taken part in every Soviet-American summit during the era of détente and who now ran the Soviet affairs desk at the NSC. Reagan was set to deliver it on December 20, until his wife, Nancy, urged him, on the advice of her astrologer, to push the date back to January 16. (Matlock shrugged and said the postponement would do no harm.) The speech, televised from the East Room of the White House, was a dramatic contrast from Reagan’s earlier pronouncements on the Soviet Union. There was no talk of an “evil empire” or the irreconcilable conflict between freedom and Communism. The key line was this: “If the Soviet government wants peace, then there will be peace. Together we can strengthen peace, reduce the level of arms, and know in doing so that we have helped fulfill the hopes and dreams of those we represent and, indeed, of people everywhere. Let us begin now.”
He had to wait a while for a response. Andropov died of kidney failure on February 9. Four months later, CIA analysts, after more fully absorbing the Gordievsky reports, took the first steps toward changing their minds on the effects of Able Archer, even acknowledging the possibility that the Soviets might genuinely be fearful of an American first strike. William Casey, the agency’s director, spelled out the full details of the Soviet war scare in a memo to Reagan, who described it to his aides as “really scary.” In mid-June, Reagan talked with McFarlane and Shultz about a possible meeting with Andropov’s replacement, Konstantin Chernenko. “I have a gut feeling we should do this,” Reagan wrote in his diary shortly afterward. The one exchange of letters that he’d had with the new Kremlin leader bolstered his view “that the Soviets are plotting against us & mean us harm.” But, he added, “maybe they are scared of us & think we are a threat.” Either way, he concluded, “I’d like to go face to face & explore this with them.”
Nine months later, on March 10, 1985, Chernenko—who’d been old and ill when he took the helm—died of heart congestion. A few months earlier, during his election campaign for a second term, a reporter asked Reagan why, unlike every other president since Herbert Hoover, he hadn’t met with the Soviet leader. Reagan replied, with a grin, “How can I? They keep dying on me.” And now here went another one.
Then, almost immediately after the Kremlin’s spokesmen announced Chernenko’s death, they also declared that his replacement would be Mikhail Gorbachev.
Gorbachev was a true reformer, the first to rise to the top since Khrushchev, and Gorbachev’s vision of reform went far beyond what any Party leader had ever proposed, at least in public. He recognized, and maneuvered to act on, the fact that the Soviet Union was in shambles: its ideology was moribund, its economy dysfunctional. He wanted to restructure everything, open up the country to the world; but that would require slashing the military budget, which consumed nearly all of the government’s resources—and that would require assurances that the United States and NATO no longer posed a threat to the USSR’s existence, a threat that he and his comrades felt in their bones was very real.
In his first months in power, Gorbachev talked a good game, but few senior officials in Washington took him seriously. Gorbachev too was less than certain that all the pieces of his plan would fall into place. Though he differed from his comrades in many ways, he shared their dread of the United States as an imperialist power, fueled by the military-industrial complex and bent on world domination. Still, to get his reforms under way, he needed to take a chance; he needed to meet with the leader of this power—another high risk, since he viewed Reagan as a “class enemy” with a “caveman outlook”—and so, a summit was arranged between the two men for November 19–20, at a château on Lake Geneva.
The meeting started out tense. The two men argued over the Strategic Defense Initiative, which Gorbachev viewed as a threat and Reagan still saw as a shield for peace; Reagan complained about Soviet support of socialist revolutions in the Third World; Gorbachev complained about the influence of the military-industrial complex over American policy. After a few of these rounds, Reagan suggested that they go for a stroll along the lake, outside the château, just the two of them and their translators. A few minutes into the walk, they ducked into a nearby cabin.
When they sat down next to a roaring fireplace, Reagan suddenly asked Gorbachev what he would do if the United States were attacked by aliens from outer space. “Would you help us?” Reagan inquired.
Gorbachev replied, “No doubt about it.”
Reagan said he felt the same way; he too would help the Soviets if aliens invaded them.
This was an age-old obsession of Reagan’s, dating back at least to a 1951 Hollywood movie called The Day the Earth Stood Still, about an enlightened scientist from outer space who visits earth to warn its leaders that they need to halt their dangerous games with nuclear weapons. Two years after the Geneva summit, well into his new détente with the Russians, Reagan raised the theme again, this time in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly. “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish,” he told the gathered heads of state, “if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” As the speech was being drafted, the Joint Chiefs excised this line, finding it too mawkish and, frankly, loony. Reagan put it back in. They took it out one more time. Reagan put it back in. This was how he viewed the world.
From the moment in Geneva when Gorbachev told Reagan that the Soviets would aid America if the aliens attacked, the atmosphere between the two men lightened, turned cordial. When they came back to the château for more talks, Shultz noticed that they seemed like old friends, in a good mood, engaged in animated conversation.
When the summit ended, the two leaders released a joint statement declaring that a nuclear war “cannot be won and must never be fought”—a rebuke of Reagan’s national security directive, NSDD-13, four years earlier—and directing their diplomats to negotiate a treaty cutting both sides’ nuclear arsenals by half.
For the next ten months, Shultz and his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze, kept in touch and developed their own good relationship—Shultz was the sole member of Reagan’s cabinet who took Gorbachev’s reformist rhetoric seriously—but the arms negotiations stalled.
Gorbachev was getting desperate. In February 1986, three months after the Geneva summit, he gave a speech to the Communist Party Congress, calling for new policies of perestroika (restructuring the economy, specifically loosening the government’s controls) and glasnost (openness, free speech, and the relaxation of censorship). But he needed that arms treaty—some concrete steps toward relaxing international tensions—before his comrades and rivals would accept such radical measures.
In mid-September, he asked Reagan for “a quick one-on-one meeting” to break the logjam. The meeting took place just one month later, over the weekend of October 11–12, in Reykjavik, Iceland. In the run-up to Geneva, Reagan had subjected himself to an intense tutorial on the Soviet Union, reading more than a hundred single-spaced pages of materials prepared by the CIA and the State Department’s intelligence bureau as well as listening to weekly two-hour briefings. He headed to Reykjavik with no preparation, not even a set of proposals; it wasn’t billed as that sort of summit.
Gorbachev, on the other hand, arrived with a full-blown agenda to jump-start dramatic cuts in nuclear armaments. Just before this second summit, he outlined the agenda at a meeting of the Politburo, warning his comrades that, if the cuts weren’t made, the Soviet Union “will be pulled into an arms race that is beyond our capabilities, and we will lose it because we are at the limit of our capabilities.” The “pressure on our economy will be unbelievable.”
At their first meeting, on Saturday morning, after talking broadly on the need to eliminate not just weapons but the sources of mutual distrust, Gorbachev unfurled a proposal for a comprehensive arms treaty—not just cutting strategic nuclear weapons by 50 percent but also eliminating all medium-range missiles in Europe (the “zero option” that the Pentagon had put forth as a propaganda ruse at the start of Reagan’s presidency) as well as freezing the number of short-range missiles, committing to a ten-year period when neither side would withdraw from the ABM Treaty, and, during that same ten years, banning tests of SDI weapons except in a laboratory. As a bonus, Gorbachev would exempt the British and French from the zero option; they could keep their independent nuclear arsenals.
The two leaders took a break, so Reagan could take the surprise offer to Shultz and his other advisers. After three hours, he came back with a counter. The 50 percent reduction should apply not only to the number of strategic weapons but also to the throw-weight of long-range missiles, since the U.S. viewed the Soviets’ heavy, MIRV’ed missiles as a first-strike threat. In exchange, the U.S. would include its new air-launched cruise missiles—which were being placed on B-52 bombers—in the numerical limits on strategic weapons. He also said the elimination of medium-range missiles had to be global, otherwise the Soviets could take the SS-20s that they had in Asia—which were aimed at China—and move them across the Urals to Europe. However, Reagan added, as a compromise, he would agree to a limit of 100 missiles in Europe and 100 in Asia. Finally, he rejected any limit on SDI, noting that if the two sides got rid of all their ballistic missiles (which he considered the ultimate goal), a defensive system would be vital to guard against cheating.
Gorbachev took Reagan’s concessions a step further, proposing that both sides cut not just ballistic missiles but all strategic offensive weapons—the bombs and warheads—by 50 percent.
Reagan said he was fine with that.
Gorbachev was excited. These are bold steps, he said, and we need bold steps. “Otherwise,” he sneered, “it goes back to Karpov and Kampelman”—referring to Viktor Karpov and Max Kampelman, the chief Soviet and American arms negotiators—spooning out the “porridge we have eaten for years.”
First, though, Gorbachev wanted some clarity. If the experts on both sides worked out some kind of deal on medium-range missiles in Asia, would Reagan accept zero missiles (again, excepting the French and British weapons) in Europe? Reagan said that he would.
Gorbachev then returned to the issue of SDI. If both sides slashed the number of strategic weapons, he argued, we would need to strengthen the ABM Treaty. Reagan replied that there was no need to worry about the U.S. gaining an upper hand in some offense-defense arms race because he planned to share the SDI technology with Russia and any other country that wanted it. Gorbachev scoffed at the notion. The United States, he pointed out, had refused to share technology for oil drilling equipment or even for milk factories. “Giving us the products of high technology,” he said, “would be a second American Revolution,” and he didn’t expect that to happen.
Reagan insisted he was sincere. “If I thought the benefits wouldn’t be shared,” he said, “I would give it up.” The session ended in frustration.
Their conversation resumed the next morning, this time with Shultz and Shevardnadze joining in. Gorbachev emphasized that they were entering uncharted territory, which they might never have a chance to explore again. “I wasn’t in a position to make this proposal two years ago, and I may not be one year from now,” he said.
Shultz asked if the 50 percent reduction applied to ballistic missiles or to all strategic nuclear weapons.
Gorbachev said it could apply to all weapons, but only if SDI research was confined to the laboratory. Reagan insisted that he harbored no hostile intent toward the Soviet Union, but Gorbachev countered that no one in the Soviet leadership could accept a deal permitting the United States to revoke the ABM Treaty and test defensive weapons in outer space.
They took a break. When they returned in mid-afternoon, Gorbachev outlined a still more drastic proposal. It included, as before, a ten-year nonwithdrawal clause in the ABM Treaty and a 50 percent cut in strategic offensive weapons, but with the following new spin: a 50 percent cut in each side’s ballistic missiles over the next five years, then the elimination of all ballistic missiles after an additional five years. At that point, since neither side would have any ballistic missiles, there would be no need for ballistic missile defenses—no need for SDI.
Reagan took the proposal to his team. When he returned less than an hour later, things took a wild turn. Reagan accepted Gorbachev’s proposal of halving, then eliminating offensive ballistic missiles. Gorbachev took the idea a step further: what about the bombs on aircraft?
Reagan said he was fine with including those weapons in the formula.
“Then let’s cut the whole Triad,” Gorbachev said—all three legs of the nuclear arsenals: land-based ICBMs, submarine-launched missiles, and bombers. Let’s eliminate all strategic offensive weapons.
Shultz caught the spirit. “Let’s do it!” he said.
But then Gorbachev repeated the catch: there must be no testing of ballistic missile defenses—SDI—in outer space.
Reagan wouldn’t go that far. He allowed that the United States might end up not building SDI; it might turn out to be too expensive. But, he went on, he’d promised the American people that he wouldn’t give up the program just yet. If he went back on that pledge, he confided, the “right wing” politicians back home “would kick my brains in.” Reagan then appealed to the personal chemistry that the two men had clearly struck up. “I’m asking you for a favor,” he pleaded.
Gorbachev said that he had promised his political comrades that he wouldn’t allow SDI testing in space. “This is a last opportunity, at least for now,” he said. If he and Reagan could agree to ban testing defensive weapons in outer space, he would sign the deal for zero offensive weapons “in two minutes.”
Reagan said he couldn’t do that, and the talks ground to a halt. Reagan was bitter, mumbling to the Russian leader, “I think you didn’t want to achieve an agreement anyway.”
It was a tragicomic denouement to ten hours of substantive conversation, in which the leaders of the two superpowers came so close to ending the nuclear arms race, obstructed only by their fantasies and fears—Reagan’s fantasies, Gorbachev’s fears—about a high-tech super-dome that hadn’t yet been conceived, much less developed, tested, built, or deployed.
When he first came to power, Gorbachev had asked his chief science adviser, Yevgeny Velikhov, whether SDI would pose a threat. Velikhov replied—just as American science advisers had concluded through the decades—that the notion was fanciful and that the Soviets could design countermeasures, or build additional offensive missiles to saturate the system, more quickly and cheaply than the U.S. could augment its defenses. However, perhaps succumbing to pressures from his own military-industrial complex, Velikhov advised Gorbachev that it might be wise to build more missiles, just in case. But Gorbachev knew he couldn’t afford another round of an arms race. At a Politburo meeting in March 1986, Gorbachev said, “Maybe we should just stop being afraid of SDI.” The Americans were “betting precisely on the fact that the USSR is afraid of SDI.” That was “why they are putting pressure on us—to exhaust us.” Yet clearly, when Gorbachev met Reagan at Reykjavik, he and his comrades were still sufficiently afraid of SDI that any grand disarmament scheme would be unacceptable if the program weren’t halted.
Still, Gorbachev came away from this summit elated. He now knew that this American president, though peculiar in some respects, had no intention of launching a first strike against the Soviet Union—a point he made fervently to the Politburo upon returning to Moscow. And so he turned up the throttle on glasnost and perestroika, which required not just economic reforms but—as a precondition—massive cuts in defense spending and a transformation of East-West relations. He needed assurances of external security in order to move forward with his domestic upheaval. Reagan gave him those reassurances. Subsequent conversations between Shultz and Shevardnadze bolstered his confidence.
In December 1987, Gorbachev came to Washington, where he and Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, banning all U.S. and Soviet missiles of that type, not just in Europe but worldwide: in short, dismantling all the SS-4s, SS-5s, and SS-20s, even those aimed at China, as well as the Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles and Pershing IIs—2,600 nuclear-armed missiles in all.
The following May, Reagan flew again to Moscow, where he hoped to conclude a new strategic arms treaty but wound up making a bigger breakthrough still. In the early evening of Sunday, May 29, not long after their arrival, he and Nancy took a walk along the Arbat, a pedestrian thoroughfare near the U.S. embassy, and found themselves greeted warmly, even cheered, by a crowd of Muscovites out enjoying the balmy weather. Reagan was struck by how friendly, how normal, the Russian people seemed. The next day, strolling through Red Square after a meeting inside the Kremlin, he was asked by a reporter about his speech in 1983, five years earlier, in which he referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Reagan replied, “I was talking about another time, another era.”
Many in Reagan’s entourage were not so sure things had changed so dramatically. They didn’t yet quite trust Gorbachev or the people around him. And they were alarmed by the apparent flip of their president—from Cold Warrior in his first term to nuclear disarmer in his second term. During the Reykjavik summit, when word got around that Reagan might trade away the entire U.S. arsenal, some of the NATO allies, especially the West Germans, panicked. The nuclear umbrella—America’s guarantee to launch nuclear weapons at the Soviet Union in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe—still formed the centerpiece of transatlantic security. Was Reagan folding it up?
Soon after Reykjavik, Reagan’s national security adviser, Admiral John Poindexter, wrote Reagan a six-page Top Secret/Sensitive memo titled “Why We Can’t Commit to Eliminating All Nuclear Weapons Within 10 Years.” In it, he argued that such a treaty could not be verified, that the other nuclear powers might not follow suit and would thus achieve supremacy, and that the security of Western Europe would deteriorate, given the Soviet Union’s advantage in conventional forces. In short, Poindexter concluded, “neither our military experts [n]or our allies would support the idea of moving to the total elimination of all nuclear weapons until the world conditions change so that such weapons are unnecessary—and certainly not within 10 years.”
Five months later, amid fears that Reagan and Gorbachev might resume their pitch for zero nuclear weapons at a summit in the near future, Poindexter’s successor, Frank Carlucci, sent a slightly revised version of the memo to the new White House chief of staff, Howard Baker, along with a cover note acknowledging that “the President has long believed” in nuclear “abolition” but stressing that “it is the unanimous judgment of the national security community that such abolition would not be in our interest.”
Around the same time, Carlucci sent Baker another memo arguing that a treaty banning medium-range missiles, which was in serious negotiation, would also be unwise. He acknowledged that the Defense Department had first put forth the “zero option” back in 1981, but only “as a ploy” to make the Soviets look bad when they rejected it. Withdrawing the Pershing IIs and Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles from Europe, even if it also meant the dismantlement of SS-20s, would return NATO to a time when a Soviet invasion could be halted or deterred only by nuclear weapons fired from inside the United States, thus reviving the question of whether an American president would “risk New York for Paris.”
Reagan and Gorbachev signed the treaty for zero medium-range missiles anyway, but the prospects for a new strategic arms treaty were fading away, as negotiators failed to resolve disputes over such recondite matters as how to count bomber aircraft (which could carry between one and a dozen nuclear bombs) and whether to limit air- and sea-launched cruise missiles at all.
What these officials—American and Soviet—missed in their critiques and hesitations was that Reagan and Gorbachev were aiming not for some optimal refinement of the military balance but for the end of the Cold War, a goal that the officials viewed as naive fantasy but that, in fact, the two leaders had begun to bring about.
In the decades since, partisans have debated whether to credit the Cold War’s end to Reagan’s hostile rhetoric and arms buildup in his first term or to his turn toward détente and disarmament in his second term. In fact, it took both—Reagan the super-hawk and Reagan the nuclear abolitionist—and, at least as important, the rise of Gorbachev as his collaborator.
They were the most improbable leaders of their respective nations, and the great change could not have happened without the doubly improbable convergence of their reigns. Gorbachev needed to move swiftly if his reforms were to take hold; Reagan exerted the pressure that forced him to move swiftly and offered the rewards that persuaded his Kremlin rivals and skeptics to take the risks.
History sometimes moves in serendipitous patterns. If Yuri Andropov’s kidneys hadn’t given out, or if Konstantin Chernenko’s heart had kept ticking a few years longer, Reagan’s bluster would have come to naught and might even have exacerbated tensions; the Cold War could have raged on for years. Similarly, if Reagan hadn’t been president in 1985—if Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale had defeated him, or if Reagan had died and his vice president, George H. W. Bush, had taken his place—Gorbachev would not have received the push that he needed; those other American politicians were too traditional, too cautious, too sensible, to have pushed for such radical arms reductions or to take Gorbachev’s radicalism at face value.
The Reagan years marked a time when the superpowers came closest to both a catastrophic war and a grand peace. The years also produced the first Cold War arms accord that reduced the number of nuclear weapons. But the big cuts would come in the years immediately following Reagan’s time in office—and for reasons having little to do with any treaty or president.