by Oliver Stone
Although Reagan might have found such an idea inconceivable, he did note that “there were still some people at the Pentagon who claimed a nuclear war was ‘winnable.’ ” He concluded that they were “crazy,” but he was beginning to understand why the Soviets might take them seriously. In October, he suggested to Shultz that “maybe I should go see [Yuri] Andropov and propose eliminating all nuclear weapons.”69
The Soviet leaders not only feared the kind of decapitating first strike envisioned in Presidential Directive 59, drummed up by members of the Committee on the Present Danger, they took concrete steps to ensure the survivability of their nuclear deterrent—a form of subdelegation similar to that undertaken earlier by Eisenhower. Their fears were heightened by U.S. deployment of Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe in 1983, which meant that Soviet leaders would have even less time to launch a retaliatory strike. As David Hoffman details in his Pulitzer Prize–winning 2009 work, The Dead Hand, Soviet leaders contemplated constructing a fully automated system, the “Dead Hand,” in which computers would launch a nuclear counterstrike if leaders were incapacitated. Frightened by this Strangelovian prospect—“It was complete madness,” said Colonel Valery Yarynich of the Strategic Rocket Forces—they instead settled on a system in which a small number of duty officers in deep underground bunkers would authorize the launch. The system was tested in November 1984 and put into operation soon thereafter.70
Yarynich grappled with a profoundly troubling question that often plagued U.S. nuclear planners as well: he wondered if, knowing that their country was already destroyed, Soviet duty officers would actually decide to launch their weapons. He explained:
We have a young lieutenant colonel sitting there, communications are destroyed, and he hears “boom,” “boom,” everything is shaking—he might fail to launch. If he doesn’t begin the launching procedure there will be no retaliation. What’s the point of doing it if half the globe has already been wiped out? To destroy the second part? It makes no sense. Even at this point, this lieutenant colonel might say, “No, I won’t launch it.” No one will condemn him for it or put him before a firing squad. If I were in his place, I wouldn’t launch.
Yarynich understood that it was the unpredictability of the officer’s response that gave the system whatever limited deterrent effect it might have. He also thought it irrational that the Soviets were going out of their way to hide rather than broadcast the system’s existence.71
Reagan traced his commitment to eradicating nuclear weapons to his earliest presidential briefings about nuclear weapons:
One of the first statistics I saw as president was one of the most sober and startling I’ve ever heard. I’ll never forget it: The Pentagon said at least 150 million American lives would be lost in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union—even if we “won.” For Americans who survived such a war, I couldn’t imagine what life would be like. The planet would be so poisoned the “survivors” would have no place to live. Even if nuclear war did not mean the extinction of mankind, it would certainly mean the end of civilization as we knew it. No one could “win” a nuclear war.72
Despite his abhorrence of nuclear war, Reagan possessed a dark side that fantasized about using those weapons to defeat his enemies. Such thinking slipped out in shocking fashion when Reagan quipped during a sound check for a radio broadcast, “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes.” Reagan was unaware that the tapes were rolling as he spoke.73 The reaction at home and abroad was quick and unsparing. Colorado Senator Gary Hart thought that Reagan’s “poor judgment” might have been caused by the stress of his reelection campaign but worried that “more frighteningly, it’s in moments of that sort that his real feelings come out, which is the most dismaying and distressing possibility.”74 The New York Times reported that the story was front-page news across Europe. Paris’s Le Monde figured that psychologists would have to determine whether the comments were “an expression of repressed desire or the exorcism of a dreaded phantom.” West Germany’s Social Democrats dismissed Reagan—“The lord of life or combustion of all Western Europe”—as “an irresponsible old man . . . who probably can no longer distinguish whether he is making a horror movie or commanding a superpower,” while the Greens exclaimed that the “perverse joke makes the blood of every reasonable person run cold.”75 TASS, the Soviet news agency, quoted a Western leader who described Reagan as a man “who smiles at the possibility of the mass extermination of people” and decried “the hypocrisy of his peace rhetoric.” Izvestia called it a “monstrous statement.”76
At home, the controversy refused to go away. Commentators raised doubts about Reagan’s fitness for the job. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver’s admission that Reagan often napped during cabinet meetings didn’t help. John Oakes, a former senior New York Times editor, asked what kind of confidence the American people could have during a crisis in a man of such “shallow, rash, and superficial judgment?” He and others cited Reagan’s confusion over fundamental policy issues, including contradictory statements about tax policy, and found him unqualified for the job.77 Former MIT president Jerome Wiesner, who served as science advisor to both Kennedy and Johnson, described Reagan’s “gallows humor” as a “verbal Rorschach test” and questioned his competence to continue with his finger on the nuclear button.78 Some people even raised the question of the president’s mental acuity. Reporters were particularly troubled by a recent photo opportunity at his ranch at which Reagan was asked a basic question about arms control. Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Scheer described the scene: “No answer came, and for an embarrassing few moments, the President of the United States seemed lost, gesturing but not speaking. Then his wife, Nancy, at his side, apparently saved him with an answer, uttered while barely moving her lips. ‘Doing everything we can,’ she said. Reagan repeated, ‘We’re doing everything we can.’ ”79
Those around Reagan ran interference and protected him as best they could. George Shultz nurtured the side of Reagan that preferred negotiations over belligerency. Backed by Nancy Reagan and Michael Deaver, Shultz battled against the administration zealots. Reagan gave Shultz the green light to improve relations with the Soviets. In mid-1982, the United States and the Soviets began negotiating a new treaty to dramatically reduce strategic forces: the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START. But Reagan continued the Committee on the Present Danger’s campaign of bemoaning American weakness. “You often hear,” he stated in late 1982, “that the United States and the Soviet Union are in an arms race. The truth is that while the Soviet Union has raced, we have not. . . . Today, in virtually every measure of military power the Soviet Union enjoys a decided advantage.”80 Despite the scare talk, the United States still maintained a small advantage. In 1985, the U.S. arsenal contained 11,188 strategic warheads to the Soviets’ 9,907. In total warheads—strategic, intermediate-range, and tactical—the United States led 20,924 to 19,774. And global arsenals continued to grow, peaking in 1986 at more than 70,000 nuclear weapons with a total destructive capability equivalent to that of approximately 1.5 million Hiroshima bombs.81
Arms control gained renewed urgency when scientists calculated that even a small nuclear exchange would release enough smoke, dust, and ash into the atmosphere to block the sunlight, plunging the earth into a prolonged period of cooling that would kill off much of its plant life. Some predicted dire consequences, even the end of life on the planet, caused by the “nuclear winter” that would result from a nuclear war.
Tensions between the world’s two military superpowers were running precariously high when an extraordinary development in the Soviet Union changed the course of history. In March 1985, Konstantin Chernenko became the third Soviet leader to die in office in two and a half years. His successor, fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, brought new energy and vision to the job. As a young man, he had witnessed the horrors of war. Later, as a Communist Party
official, he had traveled widely in the West. As premier, he intended to realize his dream of revitalizing Soviet socialist democracy and improving the lives of the Soviet people. Like Khrushchev and other reformers before him, he knew that that could not be accomplished as long as military expenditures continued virtually unchecked.
He later described the situation he confronted: “Defense spending was bleeding the other branches of the economy dry.” Visits to defense plants and agricultural production complexes drove home the point. “The defense production workshop making modern tanks . . . had the newest equipment. The one working for agriculture was making obsolete models of tractors on old-time conveyor belts.” The cause of this disparity was obvious. “Over the previous five-year plans,” Gorbachev wrote, “military spending had been growing twice as fast as national income. This Moloch was devouring everything that hard labor and strain produced.” But even Gorbachev found it difficult to obtain the hard data needed to fully assess the situation. “What made matters worse,” he explained, “was the fact that it was impossible to analyze the problem. All the figures related to the military-industrial complex were classified. Even Politburo members didn’t have access to them.”82
Precise figures are still hard to come by. Central Committee staffer Vitaly Katayev may have kept the most detailed and accurate records. He estimated that in 1985 the Soviet defense sector accounted for 20 percent of the economy. It incorporated nine ministries, not all of whose functions could be identified by their titles. The ministry dealing with the Soviet Union’s nuclear programs, for example, was titled the “Ministry of Medium Machine Building.” Defense production consumed the efforts of more than fifty cities and, according to NSA Director William Odom, ate up some 20 to 40 percent of the Soviet budget.83
To realize his goals of revitalizing the nation, Gorbachev needed to end the arms race and redeploy resources to productive purposes. He also needed to end the war in Afghanistan, a conflict he had thought from the beginning was a “fatal error” and now believed was a “bleeding wound.”84 Achieving those goals would go a long way toward refurbishing the Soviet Union’s international image, which had been badly tarnished during the previous decade. One of his foreign policy advisors, Sergei Tarasenko, commented, “One of the first concerns of the Gorbachev administration was to repair this image so the Soviet Union wouldn’t be viewed as the ‘evil empire.’ ” Gorbachev braced for resistance from his own defense sector.85
Gorbachev wrote his first of several extraordinary letters to Reagan on March 24, 1985. It was a letter that might have been written by Henry Wallace forty years earlier:
Our countries are different by their social systems, by the ideologies in them. But we believe that this should not be a reason for animosity. Each social system has a right to life, and it should prove its advantages not by force, not by military means, but on the path of peaceful competition with the other system. And all people have the right to go the way they have chosen themselves, without anybody imposing his will on them from outside.
Gorbachev also echoed Kennedy’s American University commencement address when he wrote to Reagan in October that despite their differences, they must “proceed from the objective fact that we all live on the same planet and must learn to live together.”86
One big question was whether Gorbachev would have a partner in the U.S. president to meet him partway in realizing his vision for a peaceful and prosperous world. Reagan had never disavowed what he told Richard Allen, who would become his first national security advisor, prior to taking office: “My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: We win and they lose.”87 But Reagan’s initial response to Gorbachev was sufficiently positive to keep the doors open. He asked the Soviet leader to meet with a delegation of visiting Americans, including House Speaker Tip O’Neill.
Gorbachev sensed that winning the Cold War animated Reagan’s stubborn devotion to his Strategic Defense Initiative, which came to be known as “Star Wars.” The Soviet leader knew that such a system would do nothing to protect the United States if the Soviets launched thousands of missiles against it and reasoned that therefore its true purpose was to protect against a limited Soviet response after the United States had delivered a first strike. He also knew that the Soviets could render it even more ineffective by overwhelming it with additional missiles and warheads or by confusing it with undetectable decoys. And the cost of building more missiles and decoys was far less than the cost of SDI countermeasures. He wrote to Reagan that “the program of ‘star wars’ already seriously undermines stability. We urgently advise you to wind down this sharply destabilizing and dangerous program.” In October, Gorbachev decried SDI and overall U.S. militarism at a meeting of Warsaw Pact leaders: “They are planning to win over socialism through war or military blackmail. [SDI’s] militaristic nature is obvious. . . . Its purpose is to secure permanent technological superiority of the West, not only over the socialist community, but over [U.S.] allies as well.”88
Reagan delivers a national television address explaining his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Nicknamed “Star Wars,” the cockamamie scheme for a missile defense shield would prove a deal breaker in Reagan’s negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Despite their serious differences over SDI, human rights, military buildups, and third-world conflicts, Gorbachev and Reagan held a friendly summit in Geneva in November. They connected on a human level, if not on a political or ideological one. Over dinners, they toasted each other warmly. Gorbachev mentioned the biblical adage that there is “a time to throw stones, and . . . a time to gather them.” “Now is the time,” he proffered, “to gather stones which have been cast in the past.” Reagan noted that they were dining on the forty-third anniversary of the Soviet counterattack at the decisive Battle of Stalingrad and said he hoped that this summit would be “yet another turning point for all mankind—one that would make it possible to have a world of peace and freedom.”89
After the meeting, both sides remained hopeful, though wary. Soviet leaders were baffled by Reagan’s stubborn clinging to his Star Wars fantasy and feared that he might be lulling them into a dangerous complacency. Gorbachev feared that Reagan was just the mouthpiece of the U.S. military-industrial complex, as he had once been the mouthpiece for GE.
Reagan and Gorbachev shake hands at a plenary session during the 1985 Geneva summit.
Gorbachev and his supporters were sincere in their desire for disarmament, détente, and democratic reform. Anatoly Chernyaev, who was one of Gorbachev’s most trusted foreign policy advisors, later insisted that “détente was a sincere policy. We wanted détente, we wanted peace, we craved it. . . . Look at Central Committee Secretary Yegor Ligachev, he was a conservative, right? A reactionary, even, and yet he . . . would stand up, right in front of Gorbachev, and he would scream, ‘How long will our military-industrial complex keep devouring our economy, our agriculture and our consumer goods? How long are we going to take this ogre, how long are we going to throw into its mouth the food of our children?’ ”90
Gorbachev decided to push his “peace offensive” even more aggressively. In January 1986, he wrote to Reagan, boldly offering “a concrete program . . . for the complete liquidation of nuclear weapons throughout the world . . . before the end of the present century.”91 In the interim, he proposed removing all U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles from Europe, ending nuclear testing, sharply reducing strategic weapons, and changing the ABM treaty to allow the United States to continue research on SDI but banning deployment for fifteen years. He had already, the previous August, announced a unilateral nuclear testing moratorium.
The U.S. response reinforced Soviet doubts about Reagan’s real intentions. The United States announced plans for a new series of nuclear tests. It also increased its support for the Afghan mujahideen and undertook provocative actions on other fronts.
On April 26, 1986, the devastating accident at th
e Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine gave Gorbachev further impetus to push his antinuclear campaign. The accident was devastating in itself, leaving 8,000 dead and directly affecting 435,000 more. The government’s attempt to downplay its severity proved to be a huge international embarrassment as radioactive particles rained down across Western Europe and beyond. But most significantly, the accident drove home the danger posed by even a limited nuclear war. Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the head of the Soviet general staff, recalled that after Chernobyl, “a nuclear danger for our people ceased to be abstraction. It became a palpable reality.”92 Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh reflected on the fact that Chernobyl “was something like one-third of the smallest nuclear explosive. And if it caused such great damage to almost half of Europe, what would happen if we should use all those arsenals we now have in our hands?” Gorbachev told a Politburo meeting in July 1986, “Global nuclear war can no longer be the continuation of rational politics, as it would bring the end of all life, and therefore of all politics.”93
Chernobyl offered concrete proof that the Soviet Union was floundering. In May, Shultz suggested to Reagan a way to both exploit Soviet weakness and push Reagan’s nuclear arms control agenda. He told the president, “The Soviets, contrary to the Defense Department and the CIA line, are not an omnipotent, omnipresent power gaining ground and threatening to wipe us out. On the contrary, we are winning. In fact, we are miles ahead.” Shultz stressed that the Soviets were ahead in only one area: ballistic missiles. Therefore, reducing the numbers of ballistic missiles was very much in the United States’ interest.94
