Reagan—unafraid to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and to trumpet “we win, they lose” as his Cold War philosophy—supported stringent high-technology embargoes, and even sabotage, against the Soviet Union. In 1982, with the help of “Farewell,” a rare high-level mole placed by the French inside the top Soviet leader circle, the U.S. arranged for defective computer chips to be sent to Russia for use in its biggest natural gas pipeline. The malicious software in the defective chips caused system malfunctions that led to a massive conventional explosion—at three kilotons, more powerful than small nuclear devices—that destroyed key parts of the pipeline and set Moscow back years.
Reagan formed his view of the Soviets in the early years of the Cold War, which Brezhnev reinforced with a memorable speech in 1973 at a major Communist party conclave in Prague. The Soviet leader predicted:
We are achieving with détente what our predecessors have been unable to achieve using the mailed fist…. Trust us comrades, for by 1985, as a consequence of what we are now achieving with détente, we will have achieved most of our objectives in Western Europe…. A decisive shift in the correlation of forces will be such that come 1985, we will be able to extend our will wherever we need to.
By 1985 the Soviets came to see things differently, with the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev to the position of general secretary of the Communist Party in March. Facing a resurgent America and a president reelected by a landslide, Gorbachev decided to try to reform the Soviet system, which was mired in terminal catatonia.
Even before Gorbachev rose to General Secretary, in late 1984 he gave Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher the first plausible indication that the Soviets might be willing to bargain seriously. Thatcher recalled in her memoir, The Downing Street Years, that before meeting Gorbachev she had heard “modestly encouraging” things, but she remained wary.
On December 16 Gorbachev visited Lady Thatcher at the prime minister’s country residence, Chequers. The two discussed the risk of accidental war, with Gorbachev quoting a Russian proverb: “[O]nce a year even an unloaded gun can go off.” Thatcher ascertained that the Soviets were petrified of Reagan’s missile defense ideas. The Soviets knew they could not match America’s technological prowess and feared a comprehensive U.S. missile defense system might succeed. (Despite their claim that Reagan’s SDI would “militarize space,” the Soviets, notes Paul Nitze, had put more military satellites in orbit than the U.S. had and had the world’s only operational anti-satellite systems.)[14] Thatcher found Gorbachev’s dream of abolishing missile defense as unrealistic as Reagan’s belief that nuclear weapons could be abolished but told the press after the meeting she thought the West could “do business” with Gorbachev.
Reagan and Gorbachev first met at Geneva in November 1985. Reagan found someone he could indeed “do business” with. As for Gorbachev, he learned the truth of what his note taker had written after watching Reagan at the first meeting: “When you touch raw nerve, Reagan’s flare will fill the room. He feel something close to his heart, he is like lion!” The two leaders issued a joint statement on November 21, 1985: “[A] nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought.” Russia was in the midst of a five-year spree during which it deployed 15,000 new nuclear weapons, bringing its arsenal to its 1986 peak of 45,000; it added 5,803 alone between the 1985 Geneva Summit and the Reykjavik Summit 11 months later. This was more than the total U.S. stockpile of 5,133 when President Obama took the oath of office.
In Reykjavik in October 1986, Ronald Reagan committed the biggest blunder of his presidency—only to find himself saved from its consequences by an even bigger blunder made by Gorbachev. Seized by a long-held idealistic impulse to push for abolition of nuclear weapons, Reagan accepted Gorbachev’s offer to phase out all offensive nuclear weapons by 2000. (Lady Thatcher later wrote: “My own reaction when I heard how far the Americans had been prepared to go was as if there had been an earthquake beneath my feet.”) The deal died when Reagan insisted that there be no restrictions on his cherished missile defense program—he wanted an exception to the 1972 ABM Treaty, allowing for a defense against a surprise attack. He offered to wait 10 years before withdrawing from that restrictive treaty and to share missile defense technology, but Gorbachev refused. Ironically, had Gorbachev accepted Reagan’s offer, SDI would surely have been killed in the euphoria of the post-Cold War, “peace dividend” 1990s.
Nuclear zero would have given the Russians a grand opportunity, one related to what Herman Kahn called “the problem of the clandestine cache”: When each side has thousands of weapons, a few hundred hidden weapons count for little. But if both sides supposedly go to zero, the strategic value of a few hundred hidden weapons would be supreme—aces of trumps in geopolitics. Detection methods are sophisticated, but hardly foolproof. Hiding weapons in a country the size of Russia is, as Herman Kahn put it, child’s play. It is far easier than concealing WMD facilities inside Iraq. President Reagan grasped this verification limitation, and it drove his insistence on missile defense as insurance.
Just over a year after that double blunder in Reykjavik, the two leaders met in Washington to sign the Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (known as the INF Treaty), which eliminated missiles with ranges between roughly 300 and 3,500 miles). This treaty of late 1987 was the culmination of something Reagan had been proposing since 1981—if the Soviets dismantled their ballistic and cruise missiles aimed at Europe, then the U.S. would cancel the 464 cruise missiles and 108 Pershing II ballistic missiles it planned to deploy there. The Russians were petrified of the 1,000-mile range Pershing II, which could have hit Moscow with 100-foot accuracy within eight minutes of launch from West Germany. In late 1983 they walked out of arms talks to protest the initial NATO “Euromissile” deployments. Despite intense pressure to remove the missiles and suspend deployment, not only from Democrats, but also from much of the media and even some prominent Republicans, Reagan stood fast. Eight months after Gorbachev became General Secretary, the Soviets returned to the table, ending a two-year arms talk hiatus. So Reagan’s arms-control legacy, the INF Treaty—under which the U.S. destroyed 846 nuclear weapons and Russia 1,846—became the first nuclear arms accord to eliminate an entire class of weapons.[15]
Scaling Back Massive Arsenals: Arms Talks after the Cold War
THE NOVEMBER after Reagan left office, the Berlin Wall fell. Before George H. W. Bush’s presidential term ended, the Soviet Union exited the world stage. In 1992, President Bush Sr.’s last year, the country passed three arms-control milestones. Firstly, the United States unilaterally ended nuclear warhead modernization, a step even our allies did not follow, let alone our adversaries. (Modernized warheads can be made both safer and more reliable.) Secondly, Senators Sam Nunn (DGA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) created the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program to secure from theft loose nuclear materials at hundreds of sites inside Russia and find work for thousands of Russian nuclear scientists. Nunn-Lugar is nearing the end, with the close of 2013 set for completion of its myriad monumental tasks.
Nunn came to the view early in his career that nuclear material must be stored far more securely than it typically was. As a 24-year-old congressional intern he visited NATO’s massive Ramstein Air Base (in what then was West Germany) during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was told by an air force general that in event of a Soviet attack he had one minute to get his planes aloft so they could escape destruction. Visiting NATO sites in 1974 as a freshman senator, Nunn was stunned to learn that ground commanders facing Warsaw Pact forces far larger than their own envisioned early recourse to nuclear weapons, to prevent the Soviet Union’s huge army from overrunning Western Europe. On that same visit one base security officer told Nunn that a team of terrorists could conceivably storm the base and make off with a nuclear weapon; three or four terrorists might not succeed, but a team of 10 possibly could. Safety procedures were subsequently stepped up. By the end of 1976 all tactical nuclear weapons were equipped with trigger locks known as Permissive Action Links (PALs), which made unauthorized detonation of a U.S. nuclear weapon virtually impossible.
14
The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, between the U.S., UK, and USSR, barred offensive weapons and weapons of mass destruction in space.
15
The INF Treaty has not worked perfectly. Reportedly Russia shipped two rocket motor models—the RD-214 and RD-216 motors, stripped from scrapped INF Treaty–covered missiles (SS-4 and SS-5) and sent them to Iran for testing.