Most experts considered a comprehensive missile shield technologically unfeasible. Nonetheless, the surprise initiative raised the spectre of more limited defensive systems that could eventually render the prevailing structure of mutual deterrence null and void, thereby destabilizing the Soviet–American strategic balance. No less an expert than former Secretary of Defense McNamara observed that the Soviets could be forgiven for believing that with SDI the United States was seeking a first strike capability. That is precisely what some did believe. Yuri Andropov, who became the Soviet leader after the death of Brezhnev in November 1982, exclaimed that the Reagan administration was embarking on ‘an extremely dangerous path’. The former KGB chief condemned SDI as ‘a bid to disarm the Soviet Union in the face of the US nuclear threat’.
During the second half of 1983, US–Soviet relations reached a nadir. On 1 September 1983, Soviet air defences shot down a Korean civilian airliner en route from Anchorage, Alaska, that had inadvertently strayed into Russian airspace, killing all 269 passengers, including 61 Americans. The next day, Reagan went on national television to denounce what he termed the ‘Korean airline massacre’ as a completely unjustified ‘crime against humanity’. He called it ‘an act of barbarism, born of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights and the value of human life’. Unwarranted Soviet suspicions that the plane had been on an espionage mission and their failure to show much remorse for the tragic episode combined with the Reagan administration’s rhetorical overreaction to heighten tensions further. Andropov, in rapidly failing health at the time, complained about the ‘outrageous militarist psychosis’ prevalent in Washington. Then, in early November, NATO went ahead with a scheduled military exercise that so frightened Soviet intelligence specialists they suspected it might be a prelude to, and cover for, a full-scale nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The Kremlin ordered a military alert, and US intelligence learned that nuclear-capable aircraft had been placed on stand-by at East German air bases. Soviet leaders had truly come to believe the Reagan administration capable of undertaking a pre-emptive nuclear war. In December, Soviet representatives withdrew from the ongoing, if largely unproductive, arms control negotiations at Geneva. They were protesting the recent deployment of the initial batch of US Pershing II and Cruise missiles in Western Europe. For the first time in fifteen years, US and Soviet negotiators were no longer even talking to each other in any forum.
Yet for all its rhetorical and budgetary bluster, the Reagan administration took pains to avoid any direct military confrontation with the Soviet Union. The only major deployment of US armed forces against what was identified as a Soviet client state took place in tiny Grenada, in October 1983. The United States mounted a 7,000-man invasion force to topple an indigenous Marxist regime that had recently gained power in that Caribbean island via a bloody coup, and to save in the process several dozen supposedly endangered American medical students. US troops overwhelmed Grenada’s 600-man army and 636 Cuban construction workers—to clamorous public acclaim throughout the United States. More characteristic of Reagan’s approach, however, and of much greater significance to his Cold War strategy, was the stepped-up provision of assistance, often of a covert nature, to anti-communist guerrillas battling against Soviet-supported regimes throughout the Third World. In what came to be called the Reagan Doctrine, the United States vied to roll back Soviet power on the periphery through the use of indigenous, anti-leftist insurgents as proxy warriors—principally in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, and Cambodia (see Figure 9). In his January 1985 state-of-the-union address Reagan proclaimed: ‘We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua—to defy Soviet-supported aggression.’ Yet, grandiloquent rhetoric aside, one of the most telling aspects of the American effort to challenge Soviet-backed governments in the Third World was the administration’s reluctance in so doing to risk either the lives of regular US military personnel or the possibility of a direct clash with the Soviet Union.
9. Afghan mujaheddin rebels with captured Soviet weapons, near Matun, 1979.
Countervailing pressures
The Reagan administration’s aggressive approach to the Cold War met with opposition not just from an unnerved Soviet ruling circle but from within the West as well. Key NATO allies recoiled from what some saw as an overly belligerent, and excessively dangerous, American stance. ‘The first half of the 1980s saw a recurrent pattern,’ notes historian David Reynolds—‘the United States at odds with the Soviets and with its European allies as well.’ Public opinion within Western Europe, and within the United States itself, registered deep unease about the sure-to-be catastrophic consequences of a nuclear war that suddenly appeared less unthinkable than it had been for nearly a generation. Allied and public pressure exerted powerful countervailing pressures on the Reagan administration, pushing it back to the negotiating table by mid-decade, even before the advent of the Mikhail Gorbachev regime provided it with an eager and compliant negotiating partner.
Discord within the Atlantic alliance was nothing new, of course. Inter-allied disputes had racked NATO since its earliest days—over decolonization, Suez, Vietnam, defence-sharing, and numerous issues of broad Cold War strategy. Yet the intensity of the clashes between the United States and its European partners reached unprecedented proportions during Reagan’s first term in office. Poland served as one especially nettlesome source of conflict. In December 1981, the Soviet-backed government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law on its restive citizens, cracking down on the independent, non-communist labour union Solidarity. America’s European allies resisted Reagan’s vigorous push for broad-based sanctions against Moscow as punishment for unleashing ‘the forces of tyranny’ against Poland. They confined themselves to a modest ban on new credits to the Warsaw government. Hardliners in the Reagan administration fumed; they privately castigated the Europeans as unprincipled appeasers who were unwilling to take any action that might jeopardize lucrative trade links with the Eastern bloc. To force the issue, the administration used the Polish crackdown as a pretext for subverting a planned natural gas pipeline deal between the Soviet Union and several Western European countries, thereby precipitating a far more serious European–American clash of interests.
Following West Germany’s lead, several European countries had agreed to help construct a 3,500-mile pipeline that would connect Siberia’s vast natural gas fields to Western European markets. The mammoth $15 billion pipeline project would lessen European dependence on energy resources from the unstable Middle East while strengthening East–West trade links and providing needed jobs to a Europe mired in recession. Worried that the pipeline might lead some of its closest allies to become too reliant economically on the Soviet Union and hence vulnerable to a form of economic blackmail, Reagan announced a prohibition on the sale of US pipeline technology to the Soviet Union within weeks of Poland’s martial law proclamation; several months later he ordered that any European firms utilizing US-licensed technology or equipment must revoke all contracts for pipeline-related work. The French foreign minister angrily charged that the United States had declared ‘economic warfare on her allies’ and warned that this could be ‘the beginning of the end of the Atlantic Alliance’. Even UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, America’s most loyal ally and Europe’s most anti-Soviet political leader, was outraged by Reagan’s heavy-handedness. ‘The question is whether one very powerful nation can prevent existing contracts from being fulfilled,’ she observed. ‘I think it is wrong to do that.’
In the face of those vigorous protests, the Reagan administration backed off. In November 1982, after six months of testy negotiations, it jettisoned its policy of sanctions. The episode drove home to policy-makers in Washington the deep reluctance of Western Europeans to tear the fabric of the Euro-Soviet détente that had proven both popular and economically beneficial. Although Soviet–American détente had unravelled at the end of the 1970s, its European variant maintained its momen
tum. By the early 1980s, close to half a million West German jobs were tied to trade with the East; the pipeline deal, moreover, seemed a godsend to energy-dependent Western Europeans. Why renounce lucrative commercial transactions with the Soviet bloc, asked European diplomats, politicians, and businessmen, just to placate an ally that had itself recently resumed grain sales to the Soviet Union to honour a campaign promise made by Reagan to American farmers? US hypocrisy grated on European sensibilities nearly as much as US arrogance. European defence planners, moreover, did not see the Soviet threat in the same apocalyptic terms as did their colleagues across the Atlantic.
The deployment of a new generation of US intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe proved the most contentious transatlantic issue of all. It not only pitted the United States against certain European governments, but also pitted some of those same governments against their own people. The problem originated in 1977 with the Soviet deployment of its mobile, land-based SS-20s in European Russia, most of which were targeted at Germany. The Carter administration at first proposed countering the new Soviet deployment with an enhanced radiation weapon, termed the neutron bomb. When Carter decided, in 1978, not to deploy the controversial neutron bomb, he angered West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt who was already grumbling about American unreliability. NATO’s decision, just two weeks before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to dispatch 572 Pershing II and Cruise missiles to Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands grew out of the neutron bomb fiasco. Yet the decision was a contingent one since it was coupled with a commitment to press ahead simultaneously with new arms control talks with the Soviets aimed at achieving a stable balance of intermediate nuclear forces (INF) in Europe—the so-called ‘dual track’. But Reagan’s publicly expressed disdain for arms control agreements meant that the continuing talks would almost certainly go nowhere.
The prospect of new US nuclear weapons on European soil, in conjunction with the pronounced chill in Soviet–American relations and the overheated anti-communist rhetoric emanating from the White House, prompted the deepest level of public concern about the nuclear arms race in decades. The imminent introduction of the Pershing II and Cruise missiles, as a result, helped trigger a massive, broad-based peace movement throughout Western Europe (see Figure 10). In West Germany, the ‘Krefeld Appeal’ of November 1980, advanced by major religious and political groups, soon gained over 2.5 million signatures in support of its central plank: ‘atomic death threatens us all—no atomic weapons in Europe’. In October 1981, millions of Europeans joined mass protest rallies against American—and Soviet—missile deployments. Bonn, London, and Rome hosted rallies that each attracted over 250,000 demonstrators. The next month, 500,000 marched in Amsterdam in the biggest mass protest in Dutch history. Reagan had unwittingly added fuel to the fire when, just prior to the peace marches, he responded to a reporter’s question by commenting that a battlefield exchange of nuclear weapons could occur without ‘it bringing either one of the major powers to push the button’. The remark garnered sensational headlines in Europe—since Europe would of course be the ‘battlefield’ to which Reagan so casually alluded. When the American president visited France and West Germany in June 1982, he was greeted with more mass demonstrations, including a peaceful gathering of 350,000 anti-nuclear protestors along the banks of the Rhine River in Bonn and a boisterous crowd of over 100,000 in West Berlin. The latter assemblage gathered in defiance of a ban imposed against all demonstrations during the Reagan visit, touching off a major riot. In October 1983, several million more Europeans took to the streets of London, Rome, Bonn, Hamburg, Vienna, Brussels, The Hague, Stockholm, Paris, Dublin, Copenhagen, and other major cities in an impressive, albeit unsuccessful, final effort to block the INF deployments.
10. Anti-nuclear demonstration in Brussels, October 1981.
The European peace movement enjoyed broad support. From early 1983 onwards, the two leading opposition political parties in Great Britain and West Germany—Labour and the Social Democrats—came out against the Pershing II and Cruise missiles. Trade union, church, and student groups throughout Western Europe also gravitated to the anti-nuclear cause. According to a 1982 poll, approval of the peace movement in the major NATO countries ranged from a low of 55 per cent to a high of 81 per cent. After reviewing the poll data, chief US arms negotiator Paul Nitze admitted at a State Department meeting: ‘We have a political problem in Europe.’
The Reagan administration faced a political problem at home as well, where growing public consciousness about the danger of nuclear war gave rise to the largest peace coalition since the Vietnam War. As in Western Europe, the churches proved instrumental to the movement. The influential World Council of Churches advocated a halt to the nuclear arms race, as did the ordinarily apolitical Roman Catholic Bishops of the United States. In a 150-page pastoral letter of May 1983, the Catholic Bishops stressed: ‘We are the first generation since Genesis with the power to virtually destroy God’s creation.’ They also proclaimed, in a direct repudiation of administration policy, that ‘the quest for nuclear superiority must be rejected’. Medical and scientific voices joined the debate, emphasizing the calamitous human consequences of nuclear war. Some scientists talked of a ‘nuclear winter’ that would follow any major nuclear conflict, disastrously cooling the earth’s temperature to the extent that much plant and animal life would be extinguished. To illustrate the impact upon a typical American city, Physicians for Social Responsibility publicized what a one-megaton nuclear bomb hitting central Boston would mean: more than 2 million deaths, with the downtown area obliterated, and the surrounding suburbs reeling from the explosion and its accompanying radiation effects. The Detroit Free Press superimposed a target over Detroit in a Sunday magazine supplement, with a related story about the frightening levels of death and devastation that a nuclear attack would visit on that city. Jonathan Schell’s best-selling book The Fate of the Earth (1982) contained compendious, grisly details about the aftermath of nuclear war. And, most influential of all, ABC television broadcast The Day After, a show watched by 100 million Americans that vividly dramatized the aftermath of a nuclear attack in the city of Lawrence, Kansas. Reagan was sufficiently alarmed about the cultural impact of The Day After that he had Secretary of State George P. Shultz appear on ABC immediately afterwards in an effort to help modulate the public reaction.
The nuclear freeze movement, which peaked between 1982 and 1984, served as the chief political fruit of the growing anti-nuclear consciousness among the American populace. A 12 June 1982 demonstration in New York’s Central Park drew close to one million people in support of a freeze on each of the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals. It still ranks as the largest political demonstration in the nation’s history. The movement garnered strong support within Congress as well. On 4 May 1983, in fact, the House of Representatives approved a nuclear freeze resolution by the decisive vote of 278 to 149. Public opinion polls registered approval ratings of no less than 70 per cent for the nuclear freeze movement throughout these years. A Gallup poll of December 1983 reported that 47 per cent of Americans believed that the Reagan military build-up had brought the United States ‘closer to war’ rather than ‘closer to peace’, whereas only 28 per cent disagreed.
In response to those political realities, Reagan deliberately softened his rhetoric as 1984 began. Some of his closest political advisers had persuaded the president that foreign policy issues loomed as his greatest potential liability with American voters in that year’s presidential election and that a more conciliatory approach towards the Soviet Union would strengthen his bid for re-election. Secretary of State Shultz was also pushing strongly for re-engagement with the Russians. Consequently, in an important speech that January, Reagan offered an olive branch to Moscow, calling 1984 ‘a year of opportunities for peace’ and declaring a willingness to renew negotiations. In the peroration to that speech, drafted by Reagan himself, the president sketched a vivid portrait of two ordinary Ame
rican and Soviet couples—‘Jim and Sally’ and ‘Ivan and Anya’—who each longed for peace between their respective countries. On 24 September, in the midst of the election campaign (Box 8), Reagan proposed before the UN General Assembly that a new Soviet–American negotiating framework be established that would combine under one umbrella three different nuclear arms talks: on intermediate nuclear forces (INF), on strategic arms limitations (START), and on anti-satellite weapons (ASAT).
Box 8 Beware the bear
One of the most memorable television advertisements run by the Reagan campaign during the 1984 election featured a large, menacing brown bear. As the bear crashed through a forest, the narrator solemnly explained: ‘There is a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious, and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear—if there is a bear?’ The allegorical commercial was intended, quite obviously, to remind voters that Reagan remained unwilling to risk the nation’s security by dropping its guard at a time when the unpredictable Russian bear was still on the prowl.
Shortly after Reagan’s resounding re-election in November, Moscow agreed to participate in negotiations under that framework. Constantin Chernenko, who had ascended to the position of first secretary of the Communist Party in February 1984, after Andropov’s death, approved the commencement of the new talks. They began in March 1985, but quickly bogged down; the main obstacle to progress proved Reagan’s coveted missile defence programme, an initiative the Soviets still considered dangerously destabilizing. The opening of the talks happened to coincide with an internal Soviet development of far greater import for the future: the replacement of the sickly Chernenko, after just over one year in power, with a dramatically different type of Soviet leader.
The Cold War Page 17