Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  “There was no program definition,” Vessey recalled later. “It was the idea that defense might enter the equation more than in the past. It was the idea that new technologies were more promising than they had been in the past.”14

  “I don’t think any of us had a clear vision of what form this strategic defense would take,” Meyer added. “The issue needed to be debated at the very highest levels by people concerned with policy and people concerned with technology.”15

  “Well,” the president concluded, “I would like very much to pursue this. I think we need to hear further from you on whether we shouldn’t reorient our priorities and put a lot more effort behind this.”

  The Chiefs left expecting that there would be more study and more talk with the President before a new policy was set.

  The Power Cocoon

  President Reagan was exhilarated by his meeting with the Joint Chiefs and eager to declare a brand new national strategy. The Joint Chiefs had talked of research to check possibilities for combining strategic defense with the existing strategy of deterrence through offensive nuclear weapons. But the president transformed that idea into a grand vision of a nuclear-weapons-free world. His national security aides found him suddenly talking about a Utopian plan to “render nuclear weapons obsolete.” Evidently drawing on his talks with Dr. Teller, as well as the tentative ideas of the Joint Chiefs, Reagan conveyed to his national security aides a desire to proclaim a radical shift of doctrine away from nuclear deterrence which had protected the country and its NATO allies for four decades.

  “Reagan’s view of the political payoff was sufficient rationale as far as he was concerned,” Bud McFarlane told me much later. “By that I mean, providing the American people with an appealing answer to their fears—the intrinsic value of being able to tell Americans, ‘For the first time in the nuclear age, I’m doing something to save your lives. I’m telling you that we can get rid of nuclear weapons.’

  “The president all of his adult life has operated in a universe which counts on happy endings, and I think if you count on happy endings and experience them enough, you begin to believe that’s what life is like and that the job of the hero is to be Frank Merriwell (a dime-novel success story). And it will turn out, because it always has—thirty-nine times! Every time he made a picture it turned out right. I never saw the president indicate the slightest hesitation [about strategic defense]. He was all the time, foursquare: ‘Let’s go to it.’ …

  “He was terribly excited about that. He wanted to get it out, and he was less worried about details—such as changing strategic doctrine or how it would affect the Allies. He didn’t worry about those things.”16

  Clark encouraged Reagan to move rapidly, but they needed McFarlane’s expertise—and he tried to restrain the president. Reagan’s MX commission was seeking bipartisan support in Congress, and McFarlane urged waiting for its report in April. With the MX campaign launched, McFarlane suggested, the president could make strategic defense the next bipartisan effort, with support from Speaker O’Neill and other congressional leaders. But Clark—eager to make strategic defense Reagan’s legacy—opposed McFarlane, and Reagan sided with Clark.

  Star Wars was developed secretly within a tiny power cocoon. To protect it from internal critics, Clark ordered McFarlane to have the NSC staff develop the idea on a “close-hold” basis—that is, in secret, without informing other agencies. Thus, with the Joint Chiefs unaware, McFarlane and three NSC staff aides, John Poindexter, Air Force Colonel Bob Linhard, and Ray Pollock, a civilian arms specialist, began developing options. Their work was complicated; they were not told whether to build up one specific program such as the Army’s existing ballistics missile defense, to plan for more ambitious research on technologies against all nuclear weapons, or to declare a massive new Manhattan Project for all defenses.

  By mid-March, strategic defense had become a crash project. Clark and Deaver felt the president needed an upbeat defense speech to revive congressional support for his military buildup. Regular White House speechwriters began to draft a major address; on his computer, McFarlane secretly wrote the “annex” to his speech—the surprise on SDI. The White House staff was kept in the dark. No contact was made with the Joint Chiefs or civilian arms experts at the Pentagon or the State Department. Secrecy insured NSC staff control of the policy.

  Eventually, McFarlane felt he could not proceed without scientific advice. On Saturday, March 19, just five days before Reagan’s scheduled speech, he called in Dr. George “Jay” Keyworth, the president’s science adviser, and asked broadly whether Keyworth could support stepped-up research on strategic defenses. Keyworth, a nuclear physicist and former head of experimental physics at Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico, was sympathetic to Edward Teller’s views. Teller had pushed Keyworth for the White House science post, and Keyworth told others Teller was his intellectual “father.”

  Coincidentally, the day before McFarlane called Keyworth, the White House Science Council had finished a meeting. Keyworth had routinely asked that group whether any technologies, offensive or defensive, held military promise over the next five years, and one participant told me the group had given a categorical no. But Keyworth himself and a smaller panel had seen long-term potential for defenses in one experiment that had bounced directed-energy beams off mirrors in space. So Keyworth told McFarlane he favored increased research on defense.

  With that, McFarlane handed him the SDI bombshell and asked for help. As Keyworth read it, he was numb at the dramatic shift Reagan was going to propose. McFarlane’s draft was sweeping; it declared a massive change in American nuclear strategy and proposed defense against all nuclear weapons.

  “Hey, wait a minute, give me time,” Keyworth gulped. “This is a monstrous step we are proposing to take. Basically, I’m frightened. I’ve never dealt with anything so encompassing in all my years of dealing with national security issues.”17

  “Bud,” he said, “there are so many considerations we have not thought through here. They go from technical feasibility to implications for the Atlantic Alliance, to implications for arms control, to what the Soviets are doing in these areas, to what the reactions will be in the scientific community.”

  Keyworth immediately recognized the vast, intricate undertaking implied in Reagan’s vision of “rendering nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” To others, that implied a leak-proof defensive umbrella, what former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger later ridiculed as an “astrodome” defense.

  It meant devising a multilayered defense that would destroy, either at launch or within their half-hour flight time, ten thousand or more Soviet nuclear warheads, as well as stopping other nuclear weapons such as bombers and cruise missiles. The ballistics warheads alone would require a complex system of satellites and sensors that could insure instantaneous detection of a Soviet missile launch, plus a command and control system that could in milliseconds begin firing particle or laser beams, operating at the speed of light, or high-speed kinetic pellets to destroy missile rocket boosters. To back that up, even more sophisticated sensors would be needed to distinguish in space between real nuclear warheads and decoys and then firing new beams at them. And to back that up, strategic defense required a terminal defensive layer that would shoot down all the surviving warheads as they plunged back into the earth’s atmosphere.

  The electronics were more complex than the entire American telephone communications network. The architecture and the computer programs to manage such a system had not been imagined, let alone invented or produced. It was a gigantic dream, and Keyworth knew many scientists would be dubious about it.

  But McFarlane drew Keyworth into his game. They had a heart-to-heart talk, McFarlane asking Keyworth what problems he saw, how he would change the draft. Within half an hour, Keyworth said, he was enlisted in the cause, and given an “eyes only” draft, meaning he should not share it with anyone. (Even so, he called in two science advisers.) Keyworth and McFarlane talked with the pr
esident, explaining complications. The NSC’s Bob Linhard also warned against exaggeration. Linhard argued that it was impossible to declare an immediate change in strategic doctrine—the defensive weapons were not at hand, and reliance on defense alone would cut the heart out of NATO’s war strategy, embodied in War Plan MC 14/3, which required offensive American nuclear weapons to protect Europe.

  Despite the cautions of his advisers, Reagan hewed to his line about rendering nuclear missiles obsolete. In private, McFarlane tried to talk Reagan out of this Utopian view, but McFarlane later defended it as “a license he [Reagan] takes”—acceptable hyperbole for a political leader.

  About twenty-four hours before Reagan’s scheduled speech, Richard DeLauer, the Pentagon’s top-ranking scientist with the title of Defense Undersecretary for Research and Engineering, saw Reagan’s speech and exploded in disbelief at Reagan’s grandiose dream.

  “That’s nonsense,” DeLauer told Keyworth. “That can’t be so.”

  DeLauer concluded that Reagan and other top policymakers did not understand what they were proposing. Reagan and Weinberger, for example, talked about a “nonnuclear defense,” but they included Teller’s pet X-ray laser, which was powered by a nuclear bomb. Weinberger, shown Reagan’s speech two days before delivery, did not seem to understand the concept well.

  Later, as Weinberger was heading off to brief a congressional committee, DeLauer told him bluntly that space defenses would not be nonnuclear if the X-ray laser were used. Weinberger looked crestfallen.

  “Is it a bomb?” he asked.

  “That’s how you’re going to get the X ray,” DeLauer replied in his raspy voice, teaching Weinberger the ABCs of strategic defense, after the new policy was announced. “You’re going to have to detonate a nuclear device in space.”

  “But it’s not a bomb, is it?” Weinberger repeated, looking for a semantic loophole.

  DeLauer, astonished at the high-level ignorance, offered Weinberger a euphemism. “No, it’s not a bomb,” he said with exasperation. “It would be a ‘nuclear event.’ ”

  Weinberger seemed somewhat relieved.18

  As other top experts were brought in belatedly, reactions were almost universally negative. The Joint Chiefs were shocked, both that Reagan was making this speech and at Reagan’s claims.

  “We weren’t ready to announce it yet—the necessary policy groundwork had not been laid,” complained Admiral Watkins, who had only thirty minutes to go over a speech draft at Andrews Air Force Base with General Vessey, who was flying to Portugal three days before the speech. “We were not expecting the speech. It was unfortunate he gave the speech.”19

  “Everybody was shocked,” added General Meyer. “I would have preferred six or seven months to study it internally. We could have started out in a more organized way. We could have outlined the technologies we wanted to go after and the benchmarks five and ten years out.”20

  General Vessey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, urged Weinberger to try to stop the defense portion of the speech and to undertake further study of strategic defense.

  “I said, ‘Hold off until we have a chance to examine it more,’ ” Vessey told me later. “We were surprised that it went that fast. It was clear that more study had to be done. But it wasn’t in the cards to stop the speech. The White House was full speed ahead.”21

  The Joint Chiefs were uneasy with Reagan’s promise of a nuclear-weapons-free world. “We had not suggested that,” Vessey said. “We’re not going to wish away nuclear power, fusion or fission, whether for weapons or for heat.”

  “Knowledgeable people knew the president had gone too far” with that promise, Meyer asserted, because nuclear weapons were vital to the defense of the West.

  Drafts of Reagan’s speech caused similar shock waves among the Pentagon’s top civilian hierarchy. Weinberger and such top aides as Richard Perle and Ronald Lehman were in Portugal for a NATO meeting when a speech draft was first cabled to them two days before delivery. Some reportedly threatened to quit because they had been bypassed on such an overarching defense issue.

  The speech draft arrived close to midnight in Lisbon and was brought to Perle in his room. Perle was stunned, he later told me, and he went down the hall to awaken Weinberger, who came to his door in a bathrobe.

  “Look what they’ve tacked onto the end of this speech!” Perle exclaimed. Weinberger read it and seemed equally surprised.

  “That’s no way to surface a new policy,” Perle protested.22

  With Weinberger’s approval, Perle said, he tried to delay the speech. He put in a transatlantic phone call to urge Jay Keyworth “to fall on your sword” to block Reagan from making the speech, according to one White House official. Perle wanted Keyworth to threaten to leak Reagan’s plan to the press in order to kill it, if he could not stop the speech by direct appeal. Keyworth refused.

  Pentagon objections did get the speech delayed for twenty-four hours as Perle in Lisbon and Fred Iklé in Washington pressed for revisions; in forty-eight hectic hours, twenty drafts and redrafts hummed across the Atlantic.

  Shultz was even more explosive on seeing his “eyes only” copy just forty-eight hours ahead of time. I was told he was livid at being blind-sided by the NSC’s Clark and McFarlane. Twice he met with the president and strongly opposed Reagan’s giving the speech, according to one official who was present.

  At State, Shultz told Richard Burt, his arms strategist, “The president has this idea of a world without nuclear weapons.”

  Burt shot back. “He can’t have a world without nuclear weapons. Doesn’t he understand the realities?”

  At one White House meeting, Shultz wheeled on Jay Keyworth for encouraging the president on his Utopian vision.

  “You’re a lunatic!” he bellowed at Keyworth.

  Shultz worried that shifting to a defensive doctrine would have a shattering effect on the Atlantic Alliance, because the Allies had depended for four decades on the American nuclear umbrella and the offensive nuclear standoff between Moscow and Washington. Now Reagan was moving away from that whole concept of Western security—without consulting the Allies.

  From across the Atlantic came unusual Pentagon echoes of Shultz. Iklé and Perle warned that SDI looked like Fortress America protecting itself, but not the rest of the Alliance.

  McFarlane urged the president to consult with Allied leaders before giving the speech, but Clark and Reagan refused. Then McFarlane inserted a passage to try to reassure the Allies. In it, the president promised that “no change in technology can or will alter” the link between American and European security. It was a verbal Band-Aid (One high Pentagon oficial told me that after the speech was given. Weinberger had to extend his stay in Portugal to telephone European defense ministers and apologize for having been forbidden to give them advance warning of Reagan’s sudden change of policy.)

  Shultz also feared that Reagan’s new tack would be provocative to the Soviets. If the United States were to get a strategic defense ahead of Moscow, it could theoretically launch an offensive first strike against the Soviet Union and then ward off a Soviet reprisal with a defensive system. Rather than let that happen, the Kremlin leaders might be tempted to attack the United States first. Shultz and Burt pressed McFarlane to insert some reassurance for Moscow: an acknowledgment by Reagan that if defensive systems were “paired with offensive systems, they can be viewed as fostering an aggressive policy, and no one wants that.” Again a Band-Aid; the issue haunted Reagan’s meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

  Perle, Keyworth, some of the Joint Chiefs, and the NSC’s strategic specialists warned that Reagan was promising too much: a defense against all nuclear weapons—ballistics missiles, cruise missiles, and long-range bombers. Perle argued that this would multiply the cost and complexity of an already staggering task, and urged that Reagan concentrate on defense against strategic ballistics missiles. In the end, Reagan trimmed back. He spoke only of destroying “strategic ballistics missiles before they reach our
own soil or that of our allies.”

  Senior Reagan aides admitted that in the chaotic haste several major issues did not get well examined: Whether strategic defenses could be tested and developed without violating the 1972 ABM Treaty, whether the X-ray laser would violate the treaty banning nuclear weapons in space, what the cost would be, how long the research effort would take, whether the United States would give up all its ballistics missiles or keep some, and how to manage the transition from nuclear deterrence to strategic defense.

  “What was wrong with the decision-making process was not that defense was a screwy idea,” said one senior presidential aide, “but that the key people involved, including the president, did not understand the range of reasons to be for it, or the reasons to be against it.”

  “The president shocked the system,” Admiral Watkins commented. “It’s unfortunate it was done so piecemeal with people ricocheting off the walls. But maybe that’s the only way to do it. If the president did it the logical way, he’d have been beaten by the bureaucrats. The problem in this town is you can’t study anything at length, because everyone studies it right along with you, and you get defeated before you start it.”

  Obviously that was Reagan’s instinct and Clark’s as well. They clearly concluded it was better to gain surprise and establish a fait accompli than undertake careful preparation and risk deadlock. McFarlane, despite misgivings, went along.

  In the short run, Reagan got his way but he paid a price for haste. SDI’s research was funded, though always at levels substantially below Reagan’s requests. The real political risk to Reagan from the conspiratorial policy game was that SDI has still not gotten firm bipartisan support to insure its implementation. Broader consensus building offered a better chance to achieve the necessary support. It is impossible to bypass the political checks and balances over the long run.

  Moreover, the short-circuit, NSC style of policy game put high premium on Reagan’s judgment and the quality of advice given him by a very small staff. That method not only cut against the grain of Reagan’s much-advertised preference for collegial decision making, but it handed great power to a small staff inclined to bow to Reagan’s impulses and to filter out dissent. That pattern set Reagan up for his more disastrous plunge into clandestine arms deals with Iran.