Ronald Reagan’s craziest idea turned out to be his most brilliant. In September 1982, two days after the president rebuked Nitze for his walk in the woods, a friend visited and offered inspiration. “Dr. Teller came in,” wrote Reagan in his diary, referring to the physicist who had convinced Nitze that a hydrogen bomb could work. “He’s pushing an exciting idea that nuclear weapons can be used in connection with Lasers to be non-destructive except as used to intercept and destroy enemy missiles far above the earth.”
Six months later, that exciting idea turned into a blockbuster speech. The United States was to devote billions of dollars to the Strategic Defense Initiative, essentially a giant shield that would swat down enemy nukes. Reagan believed SDI could work, would work, and must work.
Nitze had no idea the speech was coming, and neither did most of Reagan’s top aides, many of whom would have tried to scuttle it. They knew the Soviets would see such a shield as an offensive weapon. After all, it would be almost impossible to build a shield that would actually stop a deliberate first strike—thwarting thousands of Soviet missiles heading toward America’s major cities. If it worked at all, it would be much more useful as a backup to an initial American strike. The United States would fire its thousands of weapons at the Soviet Union, blowing up most of its silos. Some Soviet weapons would survive for a retaliatory launch, but the shield could block those. The shield thus might nullify the principle of mutually assured destruction, which had kept peace for a generation. “Reagan did not tell anyone because no one [would have] agreed with him,” recalled the presidential adviser Martin Anderson.
Nitze was a skeptic from the start. Soon after Reagan gave his speech, Nitze followed with one of his own, at the World Affairs Council in Philadelphia, laying out the criteria such a system would have to meet to prove useful. Most important, it would have to be effective. Somehow, we would have to build and launch defensive missiles that would be able to hit incoming missiles—a task roughly equivalent to shooting bullets at bullets. Next, the system would have to be hard to knock down: SDI would do little good if based in, say, a space station that could easily be destroyed. Last, the system would have to be relatively inexpensive. If it were cheaper for the Soviets to fire off a missile than for the United States to shoot it down, then the shield would just spur the arms race. Nitze laid out these points in his speech, and the press soon dubbed them the Nitze criteria.
These were criteria for a rational discussion in a rational world. But Ronald Reagan believed in a dream: the missile shield, promptly nicknamed Star Wars, would magically work and magically keep everyone safe. He also genuinely hoped to rid the world of nuclear weapons—an eventuality Nitze considered extremely unlikely—in which case Star Wars would have the second purpose of thwarting the lone madman who launches a single missile when no one is looking.
With his president believing in a mirage, and the Soviets taking it seriously, Nitze decided the rational thing was to try to trade the mirage for something real. He would help lead a massive sting operation against the Soviets, who had been deluded by a naïve, if earnest, American president. Having seen the Soviet reaction to Reagan’s speech, Nitze wrote a memo declaring that the country “should translate this initiative into Soviet movement on the issues of greatest interest to us—the stabilizing reduction of strategic . . . and intermediate range offensive nuclear forces.” In other words, the United States would promise not to build SDI if the Soviets agreed to massive arms cuts.
It was a good plan, with one obvious flaw: a decade and a half before, the United States had signed, and Paul Nitze had negotiated, the ABM treaty outlawing future defenses. Star Wars, whether possible or impossible to build, appeared to be illegal.
Eventually, the State Department decided to investigate the issue; the department’s legal counsel Abraham Sofaer was instructed to work with Nitze to figure out “the maximum amount of room the president could have under the treaty.” Sofaer pored through the negotiating record and consulted closely with Nitze. The two men ultimately concluded that the treaty did indeed ban the “deployment” of a missile defense system. But read carefully, it did not ban the testing or development of missile defense systems based on “physical principles” that had not existed when the two parties made the initial commitment—including, perhaps, some systems based in outer space. This was soon called the “broad interpretation.”
When announced, the reinterpretation caused an explosion in Washington. The Reagan administration was not just building more weapons, it was destroying the limitations established by the presidents who had come before. The press pummeled Sofaer, and Nitze too. Congress was furious. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan declared that the legal adviser had written things that were “not true,” “wrong,” or “a fabrication.” To some of Nitze’s friends, his endorsement of the broad interpretation was his second great sin, equal to his betrayal of Paul Warnke. He had negotiated the ABM treaty, the unambiguous point of which was to limit missile defense systems in order to prevent a destabilizing of the arms race. “I’ll never understand why Paul did that,” said John Rhinelander, a close friend and former protégé who had helped negotiate the treaty with Nitze in the early 1970s.
Moscow’s response was even angrier. The Soviets saw Nitze’s support for the broad interpretation as a sign of his fundamental mendacity. His country was reneging on the most significant arms deal the two sides had ever signed, and Nitze was reneging on an agreement that he had personally negotiated. “When Nitze joined the broad interpretation of the ABM treaty, I was immediately told by my superiors in the Foreign Ministry how wrong it was to conspire with him in the woods,” Kvitsinsky said.
The criticism overwhelmed Sofaer. Nitze considered it old hat. He told the forty-seven-year-old lawyer, whose career had been a string of successes up to this point, to ignore all the incoming fire. “They attack you, but you have the chance to do great things.”
Nitze also continued to justify his position to the end, and a section of his memoirs is devoted to it. When the journalist David Callahan wrote a long, critical book about him, Dangerous Capabilities, the antihero responded in a letter that took issue with only one substantial point: Callahan’s dismissal of the legal case for the broad interpretation.
Kennan, meanwhile, wrote to Bundy that he considered the Nitze criteria “quite obscure” and the debate quite unfortunate. On the back of a copy of Nitze’s speech, he scrawled a cranky note criticizing what he saw as an effort at dealing with “employment in California, [by] build[ing] superfluous missiles there at vast expense.”
EARLY ON THE MORNING of March 11, 1985, mournful music began to play on Russian radio stations. Listeners expecting the usual state-run programming heard Chopin instead. The semi-comatose General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko had died in the night.
By late afternoon, the Central Committee had gathered. Everyone paid their grudging respects to the dead leader and then waited eagerly to hear who would take his place. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko stepped up to the podium. He represented the old guard: a plodding, difficult seventy-five-year-old hard-liner who first came to prominence under Stalin. But the man he was about to thrust into power was of an entirely different generation and style. He said the name—“Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev”—and the room burst into sustained applause. The Soviet Union had a new leader and the Cold War suddenly had a new direction.
Neither Nitze nor Kennan understood immediately Gorbachev’s significance. Whenever anyone expressed enthusiasm for the new man, Nitze would point out that he was still a communist. Kennan, writing in the New York Times, declared that Gorbachev “should produce a much higher order of vigor, flexibility, and thoughtfulness in the leading positions.” But he added that the Politburo was a collective body, and “it is not to be expected that the advent of Gorbachev will in any way affect Soviet positions at the arms control talks.”
Soviets grasped the magnitude of the change more quickly. Gorbachev was soon cleaning out the top leadership, implementing economic reforms, and beginning a fierce crusade against alcohol. His surprising choice for foreign minister was a reformer named Eduard Shevardnadze. “Yes, this is the opening of a truly different stage in Soviet history,” wrote Anatoly Chernyaev in his diary. “Probably something big will come out of it. Gorbachev does not seem to be one of those who stop a quarter of the way through.”
Meanwhile, Nitze had grown close to a secretary of state for the second time in his career. The first time, with Dean Acheson, Nitze was too young for the position himself. Now, with George Shultz, he was too old.
Appointed in 1984 as special adviser to the secretary, Nitze made it his first task to educate his boss about weaponry. “George Shultz wouldn’t take a step on arms control without Nitze,” said Max Kampelman, a fellow negotiator. Education then turned into collaboration on a plan to reduce nuclear weaponry by 50 percent, the magic figure that Kennan had suggested at the outset of the Reagan administration. Nitze worked up a detailed proposal in which the United States would agree to abide by the ABM treaty for a decade, over which time both parties would halve their arsenals. His staffers were instructed to tell no one about their work.
Once he had come up with the proposal, Nitze plotted with National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane about how to handle the politics. Their plan was for McFarlane to run the idea by Reagan, knowing the president might sign off on it even if he did not grasp anything like its full implications. Then they would try to open a back channel with Moscow through Ambassador Dobrynin; that done, they would set out to enlist the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ultimately, they could present the agreement as virtually a done deal without Perle or Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger knowing about it. It was a sting operation on the American side that would set up the larger sting operation with the Soviets.
The first part of the plan worked. Reagan initialed his support, and Shultz dropped a hint to Dobrynin about setting up a private channel through Nitze. But the Russian ambassador missed the hint. The plot was stalled.
Undeterred, Nitze pressed the idea again in early fall 1985, this time bringing the proposal to Kvitsinsky. But his old friend had no desire to get lost in the woods a second time. Kennan’s, and then Nitze’s, bold idea was dead.
The death of this sweeping plan was the death neither of arms control nor of Nitze’s influence. That November, Reagan and Gorbachev were scheduled to meet for the first time, in Geneva. Nitze’s job was to brief the president on the fine points of weaponry.
Nitze deeply admired Ronald Reagan, but the president had never been an eager student of detail. Right before the summit, one of Reagan’s biographers attended a meeting between the president and Nitze. “I got the impression of a man too polite to say that he thought the distinctions Paul Nitze drew between mobile MIRVed ICBMs (worth banning because of the stabilizing effect of a reduced target-to-warhead ratio) and mobile unMIRVed ICBMs (worth preserving because they would permit a Midgetman RV system to counteract deployment of the SS-25) might just as well differentiate two cans of spinach.” As Kenneth Adelman, head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, once said, Reagan “had no knowledge, no feel, and no interest in whether it was missiles, warheads, SEPs, throw-weights, none of that.”
If Reagan showed little enthusiasm for nuclear acronyms, he also did not worry. Right before his meeting, he wrote in his diary about his preparations for the summit, noting how well he had napped during his massage that day. “I hope I’m ready and not over trained.”
The summit turned out to be a great success. The adversaries decided nothing of great substance. But the two leaders bonded as they sat by a fireplace and chatted. Two men, both with real power this time, now seemed ready to take their own walk in the woods.
There were hints, though, of tension to come. Gorbachev, it seemed, was as unbudging in his opposition to missile defense as Reagan was adamant in his support of it. At one point, Reagan asked his counterpart whether he believed in reincarnation. Gorbachev demurred, but Reagan said he did—and he thought that in a past life he had been the inventor of the shield.
IN EARLY 1986, the historian Gregg Herken publicly and prominently linked the lives of Kennan and Nitze in a way no one had done before. In a well-written and perceptive piece published in American Heritage, “The Great Foreign Policy Fight,” Herken traced the parallel paths of the two men. Though it cast Nitze and Kennan as opposites, through whose lives one could understand the central conflicts of the Cold War, the article actually united them: both hated it.
Perceiving a liberal bias, Nitze sent a marked-up version back to the author—spotted with blunt “not so”s in the margins. The piece, he felt, was too sympathetic to Kennan. “Dear Gregg,” he wrote, “I sense that it is difficult for you to accept that someone might honestly have come to the conclusion that the Western world faced a long term problem with totalitarianism, particularly with the Soviet variety thereof.” Fundamentally, he and Kennan disagreed on how to combat that threat. Kennan had wanted us to take very little action against Moscow; Nitze had wanted substantial action, particularly rearmament. Who was right? He was! “We did in fact do a great deal and were in fact able to put off the worst dangers to the West.”
As usual, Nitze refrained from attacking Kennan personally. “I’ve never criticized the honesty or sincerity of George’s position. I merely disagree with him.” But his frustration came through in the annotations. When Herken wrote “Of the two, Kennan was the first to oppose the [Vietnam] war and the only one to do so publicly,” Nitze crossed off “first” and inserted “second.” In the margins he declared, “I was in government, Kennan was not.” Early in the piece, Herken wrote, “The two men embodied the clash between morality and pragmatism, ends versus means.” In the margins, Nitze scrawled, “No! Later you point out that George was never that much interested in ends; he has not wanted to face up to the means necessary to accomplish his own ends.”
Kennan, for his part, ignored the big themes and focused on technical errors, sending Herken a long memo specifying twenty-six mistakes in the rough draft he had received. He copied Nitze and John Lewis Gaddis on the letter and added a cover note. “While most of these taken individually are trivial, the number of them leaves me to wonder whether the author had more than the most fleeting familiarity with my life.”
The letter revealed more about Kennan’s sensitivity—and acute memory for detail—than about Herken’s (genuinely impressive) scholarship. Most of the errors were trivial, and some were more Nitze’s fault than Herken’s.
Nitze’s memory sometimes substituted drama for precision, and over the years he repeated a number of slightly spurious stories about Kennan, a few of which made it into American Heritage. Perhaps the most irksome to its subject was Nitze’s claim that Kennan had told him in the summer of 1949 that two mobile marine brigades could serve the country’s entire defense needs. All attributions of this view to Kennan come from people to whom Nitze fed the tale. The story never appeared elsewhere. No documents back it up, Kennan vehemently denied it, and it doesn’t square with the views he expressed elsewhere that summer. Kennan no doubt hoped that copying Nitze on the letter would get his former colleague to stop telling the story. But if Nitze read Kennan’s list of errata, he did not remember them. That story and others Kennan debunked would pop up again and again in the interviews Nitze gave and the oral histories he recorded.
Herken’s article circulated widely in Washington. Clark Clifford sent a copy to Paul Warnke with a note attached. “On p. 65 is a fascinating piece on Kennan and Nitze. They both end up frustrated. I thought you might find it interesting.”
FEW LIVES HAVE A SINGLE DAY as intense as Paul Nitze’s October 12, 1986. Phyllis, his beloved wife of fifty-four years, was dying of emphysema, and he was finding it harder and harder to concentrate. Set to turn eighty in three months, he had flown to Iceland with President Reagan for another round of negotiations with Gorbachev at the Hofdi House, a white art-nouveau building on the outskirts of Reykjavík. For more than forty years, since he had walked in the radioactive rubble of Hiroshima, Nitze had obsessed over the forces unleashed by the Manhattan Project. He had studied these powers as closely as anyone alive. If any nonscientist understood them, he did. And though it was his job to talk about them dispassionately, they still haunted him. Now, in Iceland, he suddenly had the best chance of his life to entomb the horrors deep underground.
Reagan and Gorbachev would not have been meeting in Reykjavík had they not hit it off in Geneva the previous autumn. Nor would this summit have occurred if not for the April meltdown of four nuclear reactors in Chernobyl, Ukraine. That disaster, which spread fallout across the Soviet Union and throughout Europe, gave the Soviet high command a new, visceral sense of nuclear calamity. The reactor contained a fraction of the power of one large weapon, yet months later workers in Kiev were still raking up chestnut leaves and sending them off as radioactive waste. That summer, when Gorbachev received the summit briefing papers from his staff, he threw them aside and exclaimed, “Simply crap!” It was the typical stuff—how to score small points and maneuver to get a faint edge—and he was sick of it. He wanted to make some kind of grand proposal.
In late September, Reagan agreed to the meeting, and two weeks later, the two leaders were flying to Iceland. As the Soviets left, Anatoly Chernyaev prepared a memo for his boss. “The main goal of Reykjavik, if I understood you correctly in the South, is to sweep Reagan off his feet by our bold, even ‘risky’ approach to the central problem of world politics.”
Nitze suspected a trap. He had heard rumblings that Gorbachev might offer a serious deal. But the Soviet leader would not mean it, or he would rig it so the United States would have to reject it and appear set on war. He was thus pleasantly surprised when, at the first meeting, on the morning of October 11, Gorbachev offered real concessions, proposing to eliminate the Soviet SS-20s threatening Europe and reducing all weaponry by 50 percent. After that first conversation, the nine-man American team gathered in a tiny acrylic bubble inside the U.S. embassy. There were eight chairs, so Ken Adelman, the head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, sat on the floor, up against the president’s knee. “Boy, this place would look great if it was filled up with goldfish,” said Reagan. When they got down to business, Nitze called the Soviet proposal “the best we have received in 25 years.”
At eight that evening, Nitze sat down to work out the details with the lead Soviet negotiator, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, a veteran of World War II who had been wounded at the siege of Leningrad and who later led the invasion of Afghanistan. He was the toughest man Nitze ever negotiated with, and probably the smartest. At one dinner during the Geneva negotiations, he described how he had fought to protect the same road against the Nazis for eighteen months, never going inside a building, even when the temperature dropped to twenty degrees below zero. Secretary of State Shultz gushed and started to exclaim his wonder at the marshal’s devotion to country. “Mr. Secretary, there was that,” Akhromeyev said. “But I knew that if I had left that road, Stalin would have had me shot.”
Now Akhromeyev’s boss was gentler and the terrain was different. But he would handle this task with the same tenacity and resilience. He met with Nitze in a conference room with a long table in the elegant Hofdi House, flanked by beverages and a buffet.
“Good evening. I hope that today we will be able to make real progress,” began Nitze, according to a transcript of the meeting. The first order of business was how exactly to reduce armaments by 50 percent. The Soviets wanted to cut each category of weapons by 50 percent. Nitze, however, did not like that idea, for the same reason that he had not liked so many proposed arms deals over the past sixteen years. The Soviets were starting with more heavy ICBMs, and if both sides simply halved their numbers, the Soviets would still have more heavy ICBMs. Wouldn’t it be better for the two sides to reduce to equal levels?
Nitze and Akhromeyev argued the point back and forth. The conversation was intense but respectful, with each side yielding a bit when they hit an impasse. Here is a typical exchange.
Nitze: “We do not agree with that.”
Akhromeyev: “Yes, we should record specifically that our opinions differ on this question.”
Nitze: “Maybe we should try to liquidate this difference of opinion?”
They just kept on talking. They made progress, and then they would get stuck. They would make more progress, and then get stuck again. Eventually, they hit the issue of missile defense. Here Akhromeyev was adamant. If the Soviets were to reduce their offensive arsenals so massively, they could not have the United States building space weapons or a shield. Nitze offered to share any missile defense technology created by the United States, a proposal the Soviets considered ridiculous.
At two A.M., Akhromeyev declared, “Right now I suggest we take a break.” They would resume the talks in one hour.
NITZE STEPPED OUTSIDE into the frigid night with one of his colleagues, jumped in a car, and drove to their hotel. They woke up Secretary of State Shultz, who was so cold he put a sweater on over his pajamas, and then a robe over that. They asked Shultz what to do, as well as how to settle a dispute between Nitze, who wanted to give some ground, and another member of the delegation, General Ed Rowny, who did not. Shultz told Nitze to do whatever he thought was right. “This is your working group, and you’re the boss.”
When they returned, it became clear that Akhromeyev had woken up his bosses too, and that they had told him to yield. He picked up the debate with the declaration that “we offer to prepare an agreement for the 50 percent reduction of US and Soviet strategic weapons to an equal number of carriers and warheads for both sides.” It was a breakthrough.
Soon the two sides were negotiating limits upon particular types of missiles, as well as challenges in verification. They made progress and more progress. Issues that had sucked away hundreds of hours during past talks were resolved in minutes. And then, finally, they hit the inevitable and very familiar bump: missile defense. It was now 6:30 in the morning and Akhromeyev had had enough. “We brought closer our positions on strategic weapons quite well, but completely disagreed on the ABM. This makes strategic weapons impossible. . . . Thank you for your cooperation.”
Nitze hustled back to report everything to Shultz. He had just worked intensely through the night—ten hours straight—and his adrenaline was pumping. He met the secretary at a few minutes past seven and explained what had happened, noting all the breakthroughs. “Damn good! It’s what we came for!” exclaimed Shultz. “A terrific night’s work, Paul.”
“I haven’t had so much fun in years,” responded Nitze.
Now it was up to Gorbachev and Reagan.
BEFORE THE NEXT MEETING later that morning, the U.S. team huddled in the one private location they could find in Hofdi House, a small bathroom. Three men stood in the tub. When Reagan walked in, he said, “I’ll take the throne,” and sat on top of the toilet.
When the two leaders met that morning, they immediately returned to their haggling. Nothing mattered except missile defense. If they could resolve that, everything else would fall into place. Reagan could not understand why the Soviets objected to it, particularly since he offered to share the technology if it worked. Gorbachev knew that, if he could not kill SDI, his defense establishment would press ahead with its own, potentially quite dangerous, space weapons systems. And he also understood that SDI actually became more dangerous if built in tandem with substantial weapons reductions. If both sides had massive numbers of nuclear bombs, they could easily overwhelm a proto-defense. But SDI could offer a decisive advantage if each side had only a few weapons.
The rest of the morning session was more of the same. Gorbachev insisted that the United States agree to restrict its research on missile defense technology to laboratories for a decade. Reagan said he simply could not do that. As Richard Perle would later argue, restricting SDI research to a laboratory was like restricting submarine tests to land. The leaders broke for lunch and agreed they would meet again at three. There would be one more chance for the great settlement. Hundreds of journalists waited outside.
When they returned, both sides had come up with radical new proposals that involved eliminating all offensive weapons within the next ten years. Gorbachev, however, continued to insist that the United States restrict its work on SDI to a laboratory for a decade. Reagan said that although he would agree not to deploy SDI for a decade, he needed to be able to test components wherever he wanted.
Discussion grew heated, and the two sides decided to take another break. On one floor, Gorbachev paced, intensely aware of how close he was to a deal. Below him, Reagan asked his top advisers whether he should agree to Gorbachev’s terms. Nitze and Shultz said yes. We had come so far; the Soviets had conceded so much. We should close the deal now. But Perle counseled no. Confining research to a laboratory would kill SDI.
The principals returned and tried one final time. Reagan began by reading his proposal to Gorbachev. “The U.S.S.R. and the U.S. pledge for a period of ten years not to exercise their right to withdraw from the unlimited ABM Treaty and, during that period, to comply strictly with all its provisions, while at the same time continuing research, development, and testing permitted by the ABM Treaty.”
Gorbachev responded tartly. “Your formula omits any mention of laboratory testing. Was this done specifically?” Reagan bobbed and weaved. Gorbachev snapped, “What I’m asking is, did you omit the mention of the laboratories deliberately or not?”
“Yes it was deliberate. What’s the matter?”
Reagan began making an old point that building missile defense was just a way to protect against nuclear maniacs. “Our aim is to safeguard ourselves from a revival of missiles that have been destroyed, in order to make a kind of gas mask against nuclear missiles.”
“Yes, I’ve heard all about gas masks and maniacs, probably ten times already. But it still does not convince me,” Gorbachev said in exasperation.
Each recited his now familiar arguments; each appealed to domestic politics, suggesting that colleagues would allow no further retreat. But none of it worked, and eventually there was simply no way forward. The issue of restricting missile defense research was insurmountable.
“It’s too bad we have to part this way,” said Reagan. “We were so close to an agreement. I think you didn’t want to achieve an agreement anyway. I’m very sorry.”
“I am also very sorry it’s happened this way,” said Gorbachev. “I wanted an agreement and did everything I could, if not more.”
“I don’t know when we’ll ever have another chance like this and whether we will meet soon.”
“I don’t either.”
It was over. They had failed—on what now look like the most absurd grounds. Missile defense research was not going to lead to a workable missile defense, whether confined to a laboratory or not. And none of the people in the debate even knew exactly what “laboratory” meant in this context. No one had bothered to define the word upon which the greatest arms deal ever had been shipwrecked.
Nitze and Shultz drove to a downtown hotel to talk with the press. Nitze was exhausted, run down, and crushed. “We tried, we tried. By God, we tried. And we almost did it.”
WHEN NITZE RETURNED to Washington, he had lost his voice and he was angry. Looking back on the talks a few days later, he declared that their failure seemed like a setup. He speculated to his friend Charles Burton Marshall that the Soviets had actually wanted the talks to fail. They wanted to bring SDI into disrepute by blaming it for the collapse of the peace deal. He was angry at the euphoria he had felt at the Soviet proposals; he thought he and his colleagues had been “taken in.”
Marshall speculated that the Soviets had taken such an adamant position against SDI because they had discovered their own form of defense and wanted to protect their monopoly; perhaps it was something involving high-energy X-rays. Nitze thought that possible too.
It turned out, though, that the Soviet Union had offered so many concessions because Gorbachev understood that his regime was on the verge of collapse. He knew by 1986 that the USSR could not afford its weapons—nor could it afford a race in space. The Soviet Union was like a snake that had broken its jaw trying to swallow an elephant. The system was dying, and Reykjavík was one of the USSR’s last chances to survive. Right before the summit, Gorbachev had told the Politburo, “If we don’t back down on some specific, maybe even important, issues, if we won’t budge from the positions we’ve held for a long time, we will lose in the end. We will be drawn into an arms race that we cannot manage. We will lose, because right now we are already at the end of our tether.”
Reykjavík, in some ways, was like the inverse of Stalin and Kurchatov’s explosion of the atomic bomb in 1949. On that day, the United States had lost its monopoly over the atomic weapon. From then on, the springs of the arms race became ever more tightly wound and ever more dangerous.
After Reykjavík, the springs loosened: slowly at first, and then ever so quickly. Gorbachev hadn’t offered his grand proposals in Iceland because he had a hidden program in high-energy X-rays. He had done it because the Soviet Union’s economy was imploding. Alexei Obukhov, who was deputy foreign minister under Gorbachev, remembers a sudden shift in his concerns. In Iceland, he worried about space weapons. Soon thereafter he worried that, besides a few boxes of salt, the delicatessen below his apartment had entirely empty shelves. It wasn’t long before America’s adversary of four decades was waving a giant white flag of surrender.
In December 1987, fourteen months after the apparent failure in Iceland, Nitze was negotiating the final touches on an INF treaty that eliminated all intermediate-range and short-range ground-based nuclear weapons from Europe. It was a far better deal for the United States than the one Nitze had negotiated in the woods with Kvitsinsky. Playing his usual role, Nitze trudged to Capitol Hill to defend it. A few of his old enemies, among them Jesse Helms, argued against it. But the agreement went through. The Soviet Union was commencing one of the greatest going-out-of-business sales in history. Soon, American inspectors would be heading to Soviet military bases—from which even Soviet civilians had long been banned—to observe missiles being dismantled.
With the signing of the INF Treaty, the two sides had accomplished half of the dream deal of Reykjavík. The second half—massive reductions in strategic nuclear weapons—was the last cause of Nitze’s career. As he worked on what were called the START negotiations in 1988, he knew it was a chance for him to untie the Gordian knot that he himself had wrapped together so carefully over the years. Here was his chance to officially reverse the great arms buildup he had done so much to start with NSC-68, pushed with the Gaither Report, and driven to a peak with his aggressive bugle blowing in the 1970s.
Ultimately, Nitze, personally, would not succeed. The negotiations were too complicated to finish in Reagan’s final year. And Nitze was beginning to slow down. Viktor Koltunov, one of the Soviet negotiators, remembers a late-night session in Moscow especially well. Around one A.M., Nitze quietly stepped out of the conference room where the talks were going on. A short while later, the delegations took a break. In the hallway outside the room, they found Nitze curled up, shoes off, asleep on the couch. They walked by quietly and respectfully, in awe of the eighty-one-year-old man who had done so much through the years and now simply needed a little rest.
When George H. W. Bush became president, Nitze yearned to continue his work. But the new administration had little interest in him. “Nitze was old and crotchety,” said one top aide to Secretary of State James Baker. Two weeks after the inauguration, Nitze wrote to his sister, “It is rather Kafk a-like. Whenever they decide to talk to me, I will make up my mind what to do.”
A few months later, they still were not talking to him. Baker had offered him a big office and the title of ambassador at large emeritus—but nothing to do. It was exactly the opposite of the sort of position in which he had thrived throughout his career. So he resigned. And, naturally, Nitze did not go silently. He left office on May 1 and, on May 3, his wry, smiling face was atop the front page of the New York Times: “Reagan Arms Adviser Says Bush Is Wrong on Short-Range Missiles.” More interviews, and more darts, would follow.
The START talks did indeed end with an agreement—but it was anti-climactic, coming in July 1991, just weeks before a coup started the process by which the Soviet Union disappeared. People were not going to end the arms race. Events would.
ALMOST FORTY-FIVE YEARS before the Soviet Union collapsed, George Kennan accurately predicted the closing act. “If anything were ever to occur to disrupt the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument,” wrote X, “Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.”
The whole thesis of that famous article had been that our adversary appeared strong, but the strength rested on savagery and illusion. Properly contained, the Soviet order would eventually rot from the inside out.
Who can say with assurance that the strong light still cast by the Kremlin on the dissatisfied peoples of the western world is not the powerful afterglow of a constellation which is in actuality on the wane? This cannot be proved. And it cannot be disproved. But the possibility remains (and in the opinion of this writer it is a strong one) that Soviet power, like the capitalist world of its conception, bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of these seeds is well advanced.
The seeds took much longer to sprout than Kennan thought or hoped. But when at last they did, they were like acorns that had slowly germinated and then suddenly burst through the stones above. Every seventy years or so, historians have noted, Western civilization turns upside down. It happened in 1776, 1848, 1917—and in 1989. First came the bloodless revolution in the Baltics, where the Soviet regimes in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania collapsed. In November, hordes of young Germans took their axes to the Berlin Wall. That same year the greengrocers of Eastern Europe took down the party signs from their windows, and the tyrants in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania toppled from their pedestals. The iron curtain was rolled up as swiftly as it had descended. “We have literally no time even to be astonished,” said Václav Havel, the Czech playwright-turned-dissident-turned-president.
The next year, the USSR’s ethnic republics began to defy Moscow’s authority. Gorbachev survived the August 1991 coup of orthodox Soviets against him, but after that he was a ghost. By the end of the month, Nitze’s negotiating partner at Reykjavík, Marshal Akhromeyev, had become so depressed by the course of events in his country that he committed suicide. At the end of 1991, Boris Yeltsin deposed Gorbachev and suddenly the USSR ceased to exist. Its demise was accompanied by less violence than the average revolution in Guatemala.
Kennan had not gotten it all right. But he had foreseen how fast change would come once it began, and he had even perceived the potential role of ethnicity. In The Cloud of Danger, in 1977, he wrote:
This nationalistic restlessness in the constituent republics is not a serious short-term problem for the regime, but it is a hard one to cope with; for both tolerance and repression tend to enhance rather than to dispel it. If, therefore, the regime does not have to fear it excessively in the short term, it has to recognize that it has still not found the answer to it. And this, too, is disturbing for anyone within the regime who has any historical sense; because the very similar nationalistic restlessness that prevailed among certain of these minority people in the Tsarist time proved, when that regime came under severe pressure, to be one of the major factors that conduced to its downfall.
Unlike many other students of Russia and Sovietism, he had seen how perilously loose was Gorbachev’s grip on power. In February 1991, he wrote in the Washington Post of his doubt that “what we know as the Soviet Union can any longer be governed from a single center at all.” And on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour right after the August coup, he declared that neither Gorbachev nor the country would recover. “Kennan was the one person in the United States who really got it,” said James Billington, a historian of Russia and later the librarian of Congress, who was in Moscow at the time. And the endgame in Moscow was not all that Kennan foresaw. Just before Warren Zimmermann headed off to serve as U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia in 1989, Kennan explained to him that the country would soon shatter and that the United States would get pulled into the disaster.
As the Cold War ended, Kennan changed, in the minds of many, from pesky dissident to sage. Forgotten were his cries about the nuclear danger. What people remembered now was that this man had designed the strategy that ended up winning the Cold War. In 1989, he won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. President Bush’s deputy chief of staff, James Cicconi, had the task of notifying the recipients that year. One of them, the baseball star Ted Williams, refused to come because he did not want to appear in public on crutches. Kennan, reached in Norway, responded with utter dignity and his customary grace: “I would be honored to be anywhere that the president of the United States wants me to be.”
“George is a happy man now,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in his diary. “He basks in an atmosphere of belated but heartfelt recognition and approval.” After he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 4, 1989, everyone in the room, including the committee members, broke into spontaneous applause. Asked by Senator Claiborne Pell when that had last happened, the committee clerk said 1966—when Kennan had testified about Vietnam.
Kennan had created the concept of containment, which, whether he liked it or not, had guided America’s foreign policy for half a century. Although the idea had provided the justification for so many initiatives that Kennan disapproved of, the essential strategy had nonetheless won out. Even hard-liners gave him grudging credit. According to Richard Perle, Kennan had been “right for an instant—if wrong forever after.” When Bill Clinton came to power in 1993, aides began trying to come up with a new name for his amorphous post–Cold War foreign policy. They called the quest “the Kennan sweepstakes.”
AS THE SOVIET UNION CRUMBLED, Nitze stayed focused on the tasks at hand. “He didn’t live in the past; he lived in the present,” said George Shultz, reflecting on meetings he had with his partner in the early 1990s to discuss reconstructing what was now Russia.
But eventually Nitze did begin to bask somewhat in the attention awarded to the men who had designed America’s Cold War strategy. “Paul Nitze’s mind and his memory of his experiences are a national treasure,” declared a Senate resolution. Newspapers and magazines ran adoring profiles. The Time reporter Strobe Talbott published The Master of the Game, a meticulous history of Nitze’s career as an arms negotiator. The School of Advanced International Studies renamed itself after its cofounder.
In retrospect, his was a remarkable career. The United States had, for the most part, followed his militant version of containment: arming itself, but never actually trying to roll back the Soviet Union. On nuclear arms policy, he had long pursued two objectives: making the United States a less tempting target for the Soviets and negotiating deals that would make an attack less likely. And whether he could take credit for it—or whether success came in spite of him—Moscow never did launch. “I’ve come to the conclusion we did it pretty goddam well,” he said in a 1995 interview. “The Cold War achieved the eventual triumph of freedom over tyranny, and that was a very important triumph. Thank God for the Cold War, and thank God that it turned out the right way.”
Until the end of his life, Kennan kept in his home office a newspaper front page from the day the Berlin Wall came down. But he was far less enthusiastic about the final result than Nitze was. Yes, the nuclear danger had now diminished. But victory, if it was that, had come at a great cost: to civil society, to our economy, and even to an orderly Russia.
In his view, the conflict had gone on too long and been too militarized. American belligerence had merely encouraged Soviet belligerence, which had encouraged the arms race. In 1992, he published an op-ed in the New York Times, “The G.O.P. Won the Cold War? Ridiculous.” His argument was one he had made many times before: “The suggestion that any Administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish.” He could have retold his story about the fly on the nose of the ox who returns to the village to proclaim, “We’ve been plowing.”
For his part, Nitze was in no position to seek credit for spending the Soviets into oblivion, as many Republicans liked to do after the conflict ended. After all, he had advocated passionately in the Reagan years for cost-saving arms deals. But he could feel vindicated in the principle he had articulated in the 1950s: respond to every problem, day to day, and assume that your efforts will help things work at the end. If you looked at the arms race at any given moment, the future seemed hopeless. Surely, at some point, either the Soviet Union or the United States would launch a strike that would destroy the world. But was it possible to imagine that the United States could survive the next decade? Yes. And could doing so reduce the odds of catastrophe in the decade after that? Yes. That pragmatic approach—despite a few terrifying episodes and a lot of wasted money—had helped to keep the world from Armageddon.
A few years after the Cold War ended, Nitze published a book called Tension Between Opposites: Reflections on the Practice and Theory of Politics. The premise came from Heraclitus: one way to seek truth was to think about the way tension works in a bow or a guitar, which depend on strings being pulled simultaneously in opposite directions. In the first chapter, Nitze quoted from his 1953 commencement speech at his son’s boarding school:
The great problems with which all of us have been wrestling . . . include the individual versus society, change versus continuing order, force versus consent, the East versus the West, power versus responsibility. In each case the answer is to be found not in the elimination of one of the opposites or in any basic compromise between them but in striving for a harmony in the tension between opposites.
One could make the same point about the harmony between Nitze’s and Kennan’s viewpoints during the Cold War. They pulled in different directions but, as suggested by the toasts they gave at Kennan’s eightieth birthday party, the two men complemented each other. Kennan’s ideas and methods were not practical and could do little to help solve day-to-day problems. He could not, for example, have been an effective arms negotiator. Nonetheless, he played a crucial role, both in framing the conflict and then serving as his nation’s conscience as those horrifying weapons hypnotized the superpowers more and more. Kennan, the outsider, accurately foresaw how the Cold War would play out. Nitze, the insider, helped bring about the Cold War’s end by behaving as if Kennan’s prophecy would never come true.