Of course, the ensuing arms control negotiations, both nuclear and conventional, gave both sides ample opportunity to use strategic bargaining as a means to lock in the other side, to gain strategic information, and to use arms control as the continuation of warfare by other means. But still, the SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) agreements of the early 1970s were not useless, and the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) treaty of 1973 helped to give both sides a better understanding of strategy and politics and later on helped to create, develop and practise confidence and security-building measures of all kinds. Basically the two sides were united, as Raymond Aron was the first to observe, in a cartel of war avoidance, both conventional and nuclear. Moreover, both sides believed in progress and that their system would inherit the earth, though in a mutually exclusive version.
The arms control edifice, with its concomitant confidence- and security-building measures, became the strange and unexpected condition of strategic co-existence. But the correlation of forces was never stable. Both sides tried to put new officers on the global chessboard, using various technologies to gain advantage, the Soviets through MIRVing their missiles (Multiple Independent Re-Entry Vehicles). The Americans put the neutron bomb on the chessboard, only to retract it when it became clear that it would upset every future arms control equation.
The oil curse
In fact the Soviets gained strategic advantage when the price of oil shot up as a result of the Arab oil boycott, producing less and earning higher prices in 1974. But what looked like a blessing, the abundance of Siberian oil and gas, turned out, after more than a decade, to contain the seeds of a curse. For well over ten years the petrodollars allowed the Kremlin leaders not only to fill the gaping holes in their domestic economy with imported goods, including high-tech expertise from Germany such as high seas fishing equipment, or even the Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow, a straight copy of Düsseldorf airport. However, the billions of dollars in the Kremlin’s accounts also encouraged Soviet leaders to engage in foreign expansion, Syria (where Russia still today keeps and expands bases) to Egypt and Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique, where Cuban troops, well trained and Soviet-equipped, conducted low-level warfare against South Africa. But what to the outside world looked like war for ideological reasons was also meant to secure for the Soviet Union the rich mineral resources and port facilities of host countries.
The first oil crisis of 1973–4 and the windfall profits it brought had already seduced the Soviet leadership into an expansionist foreign policy. The second oil price hike in 1978, immediately following the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to his native Iran and the subsequent Mullah revolution, seemed to herald an age of ever-rising oil revenues. In fact this prospect must have encouraged the Kremlin leaders to give up their usual geriatric restraint and get themselves ever deeper into engagements beyond their control. The invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, at first successful in conquering the cities and establishing a communist regime, soon turned into a quagmire, costing blood and financial resources, shaking the Soviet consensus at home and revealing the weaknesses of the army. Technically, the Russian generals received a severe warning when the resistance, via Pakistan’s inter-services intelligence, was equipped by the CIA with Stinger missiles of the ‘fire and forget’ type. That gave the mujaheddin – among them a certain Saudi Arabian citizen by the name of Osama bin Laden – the capacity to deny the Russians control of the skies, the valleys and, finally, the entire rugged country.
If Afghanistan had offered a strategic warning, the 1982 Middle East war over Lebanon became a watershed. What happened was an unmitigated disaster, in fact a moment of truth for both the military leadership and the Moscow intelligence community. One summer morning no fewer than seventy Syrian-piloted MIGs were shot out of a sunny sky by the Israelis in their F-16Is – the I standing for the Israeli version, equipped with US-procured Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. This news must have been a tremendous shock to the defence ministry in Moscow. It appeared even worse because the Russian analysts assumed, in a mirror image, that the Americans, like the Russians with their satellite armies, would never give their allies first-rate equipment, but only second- or third-rate. Little did the Russian analysts understand that the Pentagon gave the Israelis cutting-edge technology to prevent them from thinking nuclear in time of crisis. This had been the lesson from the Yom Kippur war, when the Israelis, closely watched by US satellite intelligence, had displayed a willingness to go nuclear.
Strategic defeat
What had happened over the Bekaa Valley in that summer of 1982 was more than a tactical defeat. The terrible truth was that the Soviet Union lagged behind in the martial arts of the present and future, information technology and, more especially, miniaturized data processors. This was not just something the Soviets could easily obtain in the international marketplace or through well-established channels of espionage. What was needed was control over very complex production processes. There was no way to re-engineer the components, let alone entire C4I systems (‘command, control, communication and information’). From articles in top-secret Soviet military journals Western intelligence learnt that Russian leaders, including the KGB and the top brass of the military, notably the then chief of staff of the Warsaw Pact Marshal Ogarkov, were aware that nothing short of a revolution from above was needed if the Soviet system was to survive into the twenty-first century. This was when Secretary General of the CPSU Yuri Andropov hinted to Chancellor Kohl, in Moscow for the funeral of Leonid Brezhnev, that the man of the future, recently coopted by the Politburo, was a youngish party leader by the name of Mikhail Gorbachev.
The Soviet system was in crisis. It had to cross the threshold to the information age, and this could only be done if the secretive and suspicious system of control was opened up. But the information crisis was not the only ill that befell the Soviets in the 1980s. Shortly after the Red Army had marched into Afghanistan and into its defeat, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein sent his troops into war against Iran, believing that after the mass cleansing of the Shah’s officer’s corps Iran and especially the oil terminals at the northern tip of the Persian Gulf would be easy prey. What followed was butchery on a large scale, but also missile warfare against Iranian cities, especially Tehran. Unexpectedly, the Iranian Pasdaran, the elite corps of the revolution, put up fierce resistance, and the old Persian army remained loyal against the Arab invasion. To break the deadlock, the Tehran regime sent battalions of youngsters into Iraqi minefields, promising the young believers instant martyrdom and eternal pleasures in the other world. How could all of this seal the Soviet Union’s fate?
By 1985 it looked as if the Iraqis, in spite of being backed by the Saudis and the West, especially the US, were about to lose the war. But suddenly, against all reasonable expectation, oil prices began to drop; in fact they sank to a meagre $10 per barrel. What had happened? The Saudis, following strategic – and not unselfish – advice from America, had opened the taps and worked the refineries to full capacity. The result was that the Iranians lost their main source of hard currency and had to come to terms with their threatening neighbour. The contest in the Gulf, however, and the decline of oil prices were only the precursors of revolutionary changes all around the world but nowhere more so than throughout the Soviet Union. While keeping up with the West’s IT revolution could perhaps be done within a mildly reformed Soviet system, with Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika still compatible with traditional Soviet concepts, the sudden collapse of oil prices turned out to be cataclysmic, in fact the beginning of the end, and a lasting trauma for Kremlin leaders today and into the future. From now on, the reformers in the Kremlin were driven by events beyond their control, the reactor burnout in Chernobyl in May 1986 creating a terrible symbolism for the uncontrollable state of the ailing empire.