Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  Reagan’s shudder underlined the dual purpose of the MX in his national security strategy. He accepted the arguments of the MX proponents that Soviet progress in nuclear arms put America’s existing arsenal of land-based missiles at risk. He concluded that the MX was vital for its own sake. But he also saw the system in the light of his negotiating position with respect to the Russians. Congressional approval of the MX would demonstrate America’s resolve to match the Russians missile for missile. Moscow, realizing it couldn’t outspend the Americans, would come to the negotiating table to talk seriously about arms reductions. Perhaps those reductions would include some of the proposed MX missiles; if so, the missiles would have served a purpose without ever being built.

  Negotiators typically keep their cards close to the vest. Reagan had done so as head of the actors’ guild when bargaining with the studios. Yet he was quite open with his nuclear strategy of bulking up for the purpose of slimming down. “The United States wants deep cuts in the world’s arsenal of weapons, but unless we demonstrate the will to rebuild our strength and restore the military balance, the Soviets, since they’re so far ahead, have little incentive to negotiate with us,” he told the American people in a televised address. “Let me repeat that point because it goes to the heart of our policies. Unless we demonstrate the will to rebuild our strength, the Soviets have little incentive to negotiate. If we hadn’t begun to modernize, the Soviet negotiators would know we had nothing to bargain with except talk.”

  The Democrats weren’t buying. They continued to oppose Reagan’s strategic missile upgrade. “Tip O’Neill has mounted an all out campaign to kill the MX,” Reagan complained privately. It was one more thing he held against the House speaker, and it was perhaps the most damning of all, for it went beyond politics to the heart of national security.

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  EVEN WHILE BATTLING for the MX, Reagan opened a breathtaking new front in the arms race. In March 1983, two weeks after his speech to the evangelicals in Florida, the president addressed the nation on national security. His tone was decidedly different; his sole claim to the moral high ground was his assertion: “The United States does not start fights; we will never be an aggressor.” America’s defense policy was defensive, he said. Yet it had to be robust. Reagan repeated that American arms had failed to keep pace with Soviet arms, hence the need for the current buildup. A nuclear freeze would dangerously lock into place the Soviet advantage. The MX missile was essential to the parity at which American policy was aimed. Members of Congress must stay the course, and American voters must make them do it. “We must continue to restore our military strength. If we stop in midstream, we will send a signal of decline, of lessened will, to friends and adversaries alike.”

  Much of this was boilerplate by now. The novel part came toward the end. Reagan reminded his viewers that America’s nuclear defense policy was based on deterrence through the threat of retaliation. The Soviet Union would not attack the United States, because it knew it would be destroyed in response, perhaps along with much of the rest of the world. Deterrence had worked so far. Or at least it had not failed. Yet Reagan found it fundamentally wanting. “I’ve become more and more deeply convinced that the human spirit must be capable of rising above dealing with other nations and human beings by threatening their existence.” There must be another way. An obvious alternative was arms control, to which the administration remained committed. But arms control within the existing framework of deterrence would leave the world’s billions in the crosshairs. “That’s a sad commentary on the human condition,” Reagan said. “Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them? Are we not capable of demonstrating our peaceful intentions by applying all our abilities and our ingenuity to achieving a truly lasting stability? I think we are. Indeed, we must.”

  What Reagan proposed were defensive technologies that would shield the United States from nuclear attack. Such technologies could produce a transformation in human hopes and expectations, he said. “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?”

  Reagan granted that constructing the defensive system he envisioned was not possible at present. “I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century.” Yet current technology permitted making a start. “Isn’t it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war?” He answered his own question. “We know it is.”

  And so he was taking the crucial first step. “I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles. This could pave the way for arms control measures to eliminate the weapons themselves.” A world beyond nuclear weapons, beyond nuclear fear, was the objective. The quest for this new world began at once. “Tonight we’re launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history.”

  REAGAN ARRIVED LATE at his own revolution in some respects; the key concepts associated with the “Reagan revolution”—smaller government, lower taxes—had been embraced by conservatives for decades before he came along. But with his articulation of a vision of a world beyond nuclear weapons, Reagan took the lead in a revolution that was far more audacious than anything else he ever attempted.

  What he and the administration would call the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, marked the first step in this revolution. The idea had been percolating in Reagan’s mind for years. “When he was governor of California,” Caspar Weinberger recalled, “he had expressed to me the not surprising view that we would be better advised to rest our defenses on military strength not only of an offensive character, such as the missiles themselves, but also on means of protecting against the missiles of the other side.”

  Reagan wasn’t alone; many nonspecialists thought defenses against nuclear missiles would be a grand idea. But no one could figure out how to make such defenses work. Ballistic missiles—the kind that blasted up into space and then hurtled back down into the atmosphere—approached their targets at many thousands of miles per hour, far faster than any interceptor in existence or planning. Moreover, because potential targets for enemy missiles were scattered across the breadth of the United States, it was impossible to know where to place the interceptors. Finally, no defensive system ever created had been wholly effective; a certain percentage of incoming fire—whether crossbow shafts, musket balls, or bombs dropped from airplanes—always managed to get through. In the pre-nuclear era, this was a problem but usually not a disqualifying one. In the nuclear age, even a few missiles that penetrated a defensive shield could kill millions.

  For these reasons, nuclear strategists pinned their hopes for deterrence on the concept of “mutual assured destruction,” acronymed as MAD. The MAD concept never made anyone very happy. It required constant rationality in those with their fingers on the nuclear triggers, and rationality had failed innumerable times in humanity’s past. It also required that Soviet leaders perceive crises in roughly the same terms American leaders did. The MAD approach invited nuclear bluffing—“brinkmanship,” in the vernacular—with one side or the other hinting or openly threatening nuclear war. Dwight Eisenhower had rattled his nuclear saber during crises in East Asia in the 1950s; John Kennedy had pushed to the brink of nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962. The Soviets had declined to test the American resolve in these cases. But skeptics wondered whether this was simply dumb luck, and almost no one believed it was indefinitely repeatable.

  The best that could be said of MAD was that it was the least bad of the feasible options. The worst that could be said of it was that it was morally bankrupt, holding billions of innocent people hostage to the failure of world leaders to find an alternative; that it bl
ighted the lives of all who dwelled under the nuclear shadow; and that it was bound to fail eventually, humans being the imperfect and unpredictable creatures they are. Meanwhile, it compelled the two sides in the Cold War to accept the grotesque paradox that the most dangerous thing either side could do was to develop a defensive system. If Soviet leaders, for example, learned that the United States was about to deploy a defensive shield that would repel Soviet missiles, they would be tempted to attack before the system became operational. And they would feel this temptation even if their sentiments were otherwise peaceable, for they would have to allow that the Americans might soon experience the euphoria of invulnerability and act on their delirium.

  Reagan was no student of nuclear strategy, and he had never immersed himself in the soul-warping arcana of the craft. But his instincts told him MAD was wrong, and he hated the position it put him in. Reagan’s son Ron recalled discussing the grim subject with his father. “Several years earlier, prior to my father’s announcement of SDI, I had spoken with him about the possibility of some sort of umbrella defense against nuclear attack,” Ron said. “Dad’s greatest horror as president—and one hopes he’s not alone in this—was the thought that through misunderstanding, unforeseen circumstance, or some bizarre technical glitch, he would be compelled to launch our nuclear missiles on warning. ‘I have to believe the Russian people are no different from Americans,’ he would tell me. ‘Hell, they’re victims of their own government. Why should millions of them have to die, along with millions of our people, because leaders on both sides couldn’t work things out?’ ” Reagan hoped that one day leaders would work things out and eliminate nuclear weapons; until then, strategic defense held the best hope of averting disaster.

  The president’s military advisers were willing to oblige his quest for an escape from MAD, albeit with various motives. Caspar Weinberger shared Reagan’s philosophical dissatisfaction with existing strategy, and he especially scorned the experts who had made it the touchstone of their professional lives. “To those who traipse from resort to resort reading each other’s papers on security and strategy,” Weinberger said, “the idea that any country might try to defend itself against the nuclear missiles of any other country was not only revolutionary; it was sacrilegious.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed to pursue alternatives to MAD after assuring themselves that for the foreseeable future strategic defense would complement, rather than replace, strategic offense. Almost never during the Cold War had America’s generals and admirals rejected new spending on the military, and Reagan’s chiefs didn’t reject it now.

  The consensus within the administration informed a National Security Decision Directive signed by the president in May 1982. The directive ordered continued research and development of the MX and added, “R&D on Ballistic Missile Defense will also continue to hedge against Soviet ABM breakout, to assist us in evaluating Soviet BMD activity, and to provide an option for increasing M-X survivability.”

  The turgid language of the decision directive left much to be desired in terms of mobilizing public opinion. Admiral James Watkins, the chief of naval operations, gave the president the formula he was looking for. “Would it not be better,” Watkins asked the president rhetorically, “if we could develop a system that would protect, rather than avenge, our people?” Reagan nodded emphatically. “Exactly,” he said.

  REAGAN DEVOTED MORE effort to the wording of his SDI speech than he gave to almost any other address. “Much of it was to change bureaucratic talk into people talk,” he remarked to himself as he finished the draft. He invited a special group of diplomats, scientists, military officers, and national security experts to the White House to hear him deliver the speech. He met with them afterward. “I guess it was O.K.,” he wrote later that evening. “They all praised it to the sky and seemed to think it would be the source of debate for some time to come.”

  The president’s guests were right in predicting that his strategic defense proposal would produce debate. Critics immediately labeled it “Star Wars,” after the George Lucas film franchise, and contended that it was no more realistic than that cosmic fantasy. Pentagon-phobes perceived an excuse for astronomical new spending at a time when the administration was trying to cut nearly everything else. Serious students of nuclear strategy predicted that Soviet countermeasures—chiefly more offensive missiles—would be less expensive than the American defenses, with the result that the United States would have spent a great deal of money to no lasting avail. The specialists also cited the destabilizing aspects of defensive deployments, at least in the transition period between MAD and SDI. Margaret Thatcher echoed this concern, telling Reagan, “Ron, it will make you look like you are going to launch a first strike.”

  Reagan rarely let criticism deflect him from goals he believed in. He refused to let the criticism deflect him now. Instead, he listened to the praise served up by the White House staff. “The reports are in on last night’s speech,” he wrote in his diary the day after the SDI unveiling. “The biggest return—phone calls, wires, etc., on any speech so far and running heavily in my favor.”

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  REAGAN WAS PERFECTLY serious about strategic defense, as events would prove. But he was also quite aware that it would get the attention of the Soviet leadership at a time when that leadership was in flux. Leonid Brezhnev had died four months earlier, in November 1982. The longtime Soviet leader had been ill for months, preventing any progress on arms control, and Reagan hoped his death might move matters forward. The president and his national security team debated whether he should attend Brezhnev’s funeral and meet his successor, whoever that might be. They ultimately decided against, unsure what he would be getting himself in for. Reagan sent George Bush and George Shultz in his place. After the ceremony the vice president and the secretary of state met Yuri Andropov, the Kremlin’s new chief and formerly head of the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB. Bush joked that the two had something in common, each having been their country’s top spy. Andropov didn’t laugh. Shultz judged Andropov a figure to contend with. “He looked more like a cadaver than did the just-interred Brezhnev, but his mental powers filled the room,” Shultz recalled. “He reminded me of Sherlock Holmes’s deadly enemy, Professor Moriarty, all brain in a disregarded body.” Andropov’s background, if nothing else, suggested toughness. “I knew that Andropov, as head of the KGB for so long, must have a capacity for brutality as well as for skill in propaganda,” Shultz said. “I put him down as a formidable adversary.”

  Reagan soon seconded Shultz’s view. The president tried to forge a personal connection with Andropov. He invited Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to the White House and said he wanted a direct line of communication to Andropov: “No bureaucracy involved.” Dobrynin was impressed. “This could be an historic moment,” he said.

  Reagan followed up with a handwritten note to Andropov. “We both share an enormous responsibility for the preservation of stability in the world,” he said. “I believe we can fulfill that mandate, but in order to do so, it will require a more active level of exchange than we have heretofore been able to establish.” The president repeated his wish to bypass normal channels. “Our predecessors have made better progress when they communicated privately and candidly.”

  Andropov thanked Reagan for the note. “I have considered its contents with all seriousness,” he said. But the American government needed to demonstrate its good intentions if it sincerely sought an arms agreement. A starting point would be the cancellation of American plans to install intermediate-range missiles in Europe. “So long as the United States has not begun deploying its missiles in Europe, an agreement is still possible,” Andropov said. Once deployment began, a deal would be out of the question. Reagan had suggested discussing the affairs of Central America and Eastern Europe. “What is there to be said?” Andropov responded. Soviet policy would be guided, as it always had, by the principle of sovereignty: “Every people, every country, wherever they may be located, should be masters of th
eir fate.”

  Reagan realized he wouldn’t get far if Andropov insisted on statements like this. Sovereignty of Poland? Yet he pressed on. He sent a reply defending his policy on the intermediate-range missiles. “Their only function would be to balance Soviet systems potentially threatening to Europe, and to ensure that no one in the future could doubt that the security of Western Europe and North America are one and the same,” he said. “Try to see our point of view. What would be the Soviet reaction if we deployed a new, highly threatening weapon against its allies, and then insisted that you should not balance this with something comparable?” He didn’t expect immediate agreement, but he reaffirmed his desire for direct communications. “I think that we must find a way either to discuss these problems frankly, or at the very least, to give greater weight to the attitudes of the other party when making fateful decisions.”

  SUCH SLIM HOPES as Reagan held for progress with Andropov suffered a grievous blow in September 1983. A Korean Air Lines flight, KAL 007, strayed off course on a journey from New York to Seoul via Anchorage. The plane mistakenly entered Soviet airspace over the Kamchatka Peninsula and again over Sakhalin Island. The pilot, crew, and passengers apparently never realized that they were off course or that they were flying near Soviet missile sites. They didn’t know that an American electronic surveillance plane had been in the area and had put Soviet air defense on hair-trigger alert. The coincidence of error, ignorance, and suspicion resulted in the shooting down of KAL 007 by a Soviet fighter plane, with the deaths of all 269 persons aboard. These included 62 Americans, among them a U.S. congressman, Larry McDonald of Georgia.

  Reagan responded with outrage. “I speak for all Americans and for the people everywhere who cherish civilized values in protesting the Soviet attack on an unarmed civilian passenger plane,” he declared. “Words can scarcely express our revulsion at this horrifying act of violence.”