The Dead Hand

by David E. Hoffman

  When he was president, Reagan carried no wallet, no money, no driver’s license, “no keys in my pockets—only secret codes that were capable of bringing about the annihilation of much of the world as we knew it,” he said in his memoir. He carried a small, plastic-coated card in his coat which “listed the codes I would issue to the Pentagon confirming that it was actually the president of the United States who was ordering the unleashing of our nuclear weapons.” In an emergency, Reagan would have to choose options for responding to nuclear attack. “But everything would happen so fast that I wondered how much planning or reason could be applied in such a crisis,” he said. “The Russians sometimes kept submarines off our East Coast with nuclear missiles that could turn the White House into a pile of radioactive rubble within six or eight minutes. Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to release Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?”

  In early 1982, Reagan got a closer and more disturbing look at the options. His national security adviser in the first year, Richard Allen, had resigned, and Reagan turned to a trusted friend, William P. Clark, who had been his executive secretary in Sacramento and later a California Supreme Court justice. Reagan and Clark shared a love of horseback riding through the California hills. At the White House, Clark cut an imposing figure, in dark suits and expensive, hand-tooled black cowboy boots. Clark had served as deputy secretary of state in 1981, but otherwise had little national security experience. Most importantly, he enjoyed Reagan’s confidence and shared the president’s political and social conservatism, and his strong anti-communism.

  When he became national security adviser, Clark brought Thomas C. Reed into the White House with him. Reed once designed nuclear weapons at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. He served in Reagan’s gubernatorial offices during the first term in Sacramento, and ran Reagan’s 1970 reelection campaign. Reed also had experience in Washington; in 1973, he was the Pentagon director of telecommunications and command and control systems, where he worked on modernizing the nuclear communications systems. Later, he served as secretary of the air force under President Gerald Ford. He knew well the workings of global military communications linking NORAD and other military bases to the Pentagon war room.

  Reed saw a worrisome disconnect when he got to the White House. The network of communications with the president was a jumble of telephones, radios and hideouts dating from Eisenhower. When he examined the system to evacuate the president in the event of a nuclear attack, Reed was further alarmed; nuclear missiles could arrive before the president even got out of the White House in a helicopter. Carter’s directives in 1980 called for upgrades to the system of presidential command and control, and the creation of a steering group. Reed became chairman of the group, but found the Carter directive was mired in the bureaucracy, and the Defense Department was balking at taking any action.24 Reed said, “The system as I found it would have been headless within minutes of an attack.”

  This fear of decapitation of the leadership was just one sign of the immense tensions building at the time between Moscow and Washington. With rapid advances in weapons technology, a lightning strike could wipe out either party within minutes. The Americans worried about Soviet submarines carrying nuclear missiles off the East Coast, or surfacing in the Arctic. The Soviets were fearful of American missiles in Europe reaching the Kremlin. In the early summer of 1982, the Pentagon circulated a 125-page, five-year defense plan that called on U.S. forces to be ready to fight a protracted nuclear war, and to decapitate the Soviet leadership. The document asserted that American forces must be able to “render ineffective the total Soviet (and Soviet-allied) military and political power structure.”25

  The Soviets were especially worried about the Pershing II mediumrange missiles that the North Atlantic alliance was preparing to deploy in West Germany in 1983. The Kremlin feared these missiles had the range to reach Moscow, although the United States said they could not go that far.

  In February 1982, Reed learned that a regular high-level nuclear weapons exercise was planned for the coming weeks. The purpose was to test the ability of the National Military Command Center, the war room at the Pentagon that would receive first word from Cheyenne Mountain of a nuclear attack, to support the president and secretary of defense in a crisis. Reed seized on the exercise as a chance to get Reagan involved, and to force an overhaul of the antiquated system. On February 27, Reed, Clark and a few other White House staffers explained the basics to Reagan—how he would get information in a crisis, how he would be protected personally and how he would send messages out to the forces. “We described the ways in which the start of nuclear hostilities might appear,” Reed recalled, “the times available for response, and the forces at his disposal.”

  The formal exercise, code-named Ivy League, began on Monday March 1, 1982, in the White House Situation Room.26 Former Secretary of State William P. Rogers played the role of president. The reason for a stand-in was to make sure the real president didn’t tip his hand, revealing how he might react in an actual crisis. The exercise started with a threat briefing. Reed recalled, “An intelligence officer laid out the Soviet order of battle, then the warning systems began to report simulated missile launches and impact predictions. The minutes flew by until a screen in that cramped basement room began to show red dots on a map of the U.S.-simulated impacts. The first ones annihilated Washington, so this briefing was assumed to be taking place in some airborne command post over the central plains.”

  “Before the President could sip his coffee, the map was a sea of red,” Reed said. “All the urban centers and military installations in the U.S. were gone. And then, while he looked on in stunned disbelief, he learned that the Soviet air force and the second round of missile launches were on their way in. For the next half hour more red dots wiped out the survivors and filled in the few holes in the sea of red.”

  Rogers sat at the head of the table, and Reagan sat next to him. Rogers went through the plan, asking questions about how to respond, what options were available and how much time. Reagan was gripping his coffee mug, surprised at the suddenness of the destruction.27 “In less than an hour President Reagan had seen the United States of America disappear,” Reed recalled, adding: “I have no doubt that on that Monday in March, Ronald Reagan came to understand exactly what a Soviet nuclear attack on the U.S. would be like.”

  That evening, Reagan and his advisers and several senior Pentagon officials gathered once again in the Situation Room. This time, there was no stand-in president. Reagan was given a full and careful briefing on the Single Integrated Operational Plan, the secret nuclear war plan. The briefing was about the precise steps Reagan would have to take. According to Reed, Reagan didn’t know much about it, although he was first briefed on it after the 1980 election. “The SIOP briefing was as scary as the earlier presentation on the Soviet attack,” Reed said. “It made clear to Reagan that with but a nod of his head all the glories of imperial Russia, all the hopes and dreams of the peasants in Ukraine, and all the pioneering settlements in Kazakhstan would vanish. Tens of millions of women and children who had done nothing to harm American citizens would be burned to a crisp.”

  At a third meeting, attended only by Clark and Reed, the president rehearsed the procedures by which he would select options from the war plan and insert the authenticator code from the card in his pocket. Then the exercise ended. But, Reed said, “I have no doubt that in Reagan’s mind it was not over at all.” The exercise “was something that really had happened to him. It focused his mind on the need for protection from those red dots.”

  In early 1982, Reagan embarked on a radical plan to confront the Soviet Union from within. In the years of Cold War containment, no administration before had tried to exploit the Soviet Union’s internal tensions with a hope of toppling the regime or forcing it into dramatic change.28 On February 5 Reagan ordered a study of U.S. national security objectives and the Cold
War, the first of his presidency. Reed, who oversaw the interagency work that went into the study, said Reagan had decided to go beyond the assumptions of the past. Words like détente, containment and mutual assured destruction were “out,” he said, and “the Cold War was no longer to be viewed as some permanent condition, to be accepted with the inevitability of the sun’s rising and setting.”29 At the time, this was an audacious idea. John Lewis Gaddis, the Yale professor and Cold War historian, recalled that when Reagan took office, the Soviet Union seemed an unyielding presence. “It was not at all clear then that the Soviet economy was approaching bankruptcy, that Afghanistan would become Moscow’s Vietnam, that the appearance of a Polish labor union called Solidarity portended the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, or that the U.S.S.R. would disappear in just over a decade,” he said.30

  The study led to a top-secret order, National Security Decision Directive 32, which Reed drafted. Titled “U.S. National Security Strategy,” the directive incorporated the long-standing Cold War policy of containment. But the Reagan directive also went further, and raised a new, more ambitious goal: to force the Soviet Union “to bear the brunt of its economic shortcomings, and to encourage long-term liberalizing and nationalist tendencies within the Soviet Union and allied countries.” Reagan wrote in his diary after a briefing on the Soviet economy, “They are in very bad shape and if we can cut off their credit they’ll have to yell ‘Uncle’ or starve.”31

  The extreme delicacy of Reagan’s directive was evident in the way Clark handled the paperwork. Reagan took the draft directive home with him to review on the evening of May 4, 1982. On May 5, at 9:30 A.M., in the presence of Reed and Clark, he signed it. But it was so explosive that Clark did not put it into the White House filing and distribution system until May 20. Clark apparently feared there would be interference from others in the cabinet.32

  Reagan had struck a confrontational approach to the Soviet Union from the outset of his presidency, from his first words about lying and cheating, to his rearmament program, and with the CIA’s covert actions in Afghanistan and Central America. The new directive accelerated this drive and made it the official policy of the United States.

  On May 9, Reagan turned to nuclear arms control in a commencement address at his alma mater, Eureka College, marking the fiftieth anniversary of his own graduation. In one eloquent passage, Reagan talked about the horror of nuclear war and vowed to “ensure that the ultimate nightmare never occurs.” He also used the address to make his first major proposal since taking office for controlling long-range nuclear weapons—including the ballistic missiles that were so fearsome and fast. He called for both the United States and Soviet Union to reduce their ballistic missile warheads to “equal levels, equal ceilings at least a third below the current levels,” and then specified that “no more than half of those warheads be land-based.” These words sounded equitable, but they were not. The Soviets had a much larger share of their warheads on land-based missiles, while the U.S. weapons were predominantly at sea and in the air. Reagan was often ignorant of such details, and nearly a year later, he confessed that he did not realize that the Soviet strategic force was heavily concentrated in land-based missiles. The Eureka speech underscored his passive management style, often more focused on performing than the details of governing.33

  Brezhnev wrote back to Reagan that the Eureka College proposal “cannot but cause apprehension and even doubts as to the seriousness of the intentions of the U.S. side.”

  While reading Brezhnev’s letter, Reagan jotted down in the margin, “He has to be kidding.”

  When Brezhnev complained that Reagan’s proposals were one-sided, cutting deeper into Soviet weapons than American ones, Reagan wrote, “Because they have the most.”

  At the bottom of the letter, Reagan added, “He’s a barrel of laughs.”34

  ———

  Across the United States, the nuclear freeze movement gained ground in 1982, inspired by antinuclear protests in Western Europe. Churches, universities and city councils in the United States were organizing to protest the nuclear arms race. A march from the United Nations to New York’s Central Park on June 12 drew three-quarters of a million people. Jonathan Schell published The Fate of the Earth, a best seller which declared that nuclear weapons threatened human existence and called for their elimination. The American Catholic bishops drafted a Pastoral Letter on War and Peace expressing fear of the nuclear arms race. Reagan went to Europe in early June concerned that he was being depicted “as a shoot from the hip cowboy aching to pull out my nuclear six-shooter and bring on doomsday.” Reagan recalled later that “I wanted to demonstrate that I wasn’t flirting with doomsday.” But he also used the trip to advance his confrontation with Moscow. A few days before departure, he wrote in his diary that he was fed up with those who advised him to go easy on the Soviets, so as not to upset the allies. “I finally said to h–l with it. It’s time to tell them this is our chance to bring the Soviets into the real world and for them to take a stand with us—shut off credit, etc.”35

  One of the most secret but daring thrusts by Reagan came on June 7. He met Pope John Paul II for fifty minutes in the Vatican library. Both had survived assassination attempts the previous year. Their talk centered on Poland, the pope’s birthplace, where the Soviet-backed regime had imposed martial law and outlawed the Solidarity movement. The journalist Carl Bernstein reported in 1992 that Reagan and the pope agreed on a plan to support Solidarity underground, smuggling in tons of equipment, including fax machines, printing presses, transmitters, telephones, shortwave radios, video cameras, photocopiers, telex machines, computers and word processors. The goal was to destabilize General Wojciech Jaruzelski, a pointed and direct challenge to the Kremlin.36 The pope’s authorized biographer, George Weigel, recalled that both Reagan and John Paul “believed that Communism was a moral evil, not simply wrongheaded economics. They were both confident of the capacity of free people to meet the Communist challenge. Both were convinced that, in the contest with communism, victory, not mere accommodation, was possible.” Weigel recalled the pope later said the Vatican had maintained a distance from the U.S. covert campaign in Poland, but he confirms the close coordination on intelligence. Weigel quotes the pope saying that while Reagan decided the policy, “My position was that of a pastor, the Bishop of Rome, of one with responsibility for the Gospel, which certainly contains principles of the moral and social order and human rights… The Holy See’s position, even in regard to my homeland, was guided by moral principle.”37

  On the day after seeing the pope, Reagan traveled to London for an open declaration of his policy, delivered to the British Parliament. He spoke in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords, calling for a “crusade for freedom.” His speech overflowed with optimism about the demise of totalitarianism and the triumph of individual endeavor over collectivism, and described anew his abhorrence of nuclear war. There was not much applause for these statements at the time. Britain was still fighting in the Falklands, which dominated the headlines, and the speech did not get the attention it deserved as one of the most important Reagan ever delivered.

  The boldest part of the address was Reagan’s assertion that Soviet communism would expire. “It may not be easy to see,” Reagan declared, “but I believe we now live at a turning point.

  In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis—a crisis where the demands of the economic order are colliding directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union.

  It is the Soviet Union which runs against the tide of history by denying freedom and human dignity to its citizens. It is also in deep economic difficulty. The rate of growth in the Soviet gross national product has been steadily declining since the ’50s and is less than half of what it was then. The dimensions of this failure are astounding: a country which employs one fifth of its population in agric
ulture is unable to feed its own people… Overcentralized, with little or no incentives, year after year, the Soviet system pours its best resource into the making of instruments of destruction.

  Reagan closed the address with a prediction that the “march of freedom and democracy” would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”

  On a quick visit to Berlin two days later, Reagan drove to Checkpoint Charlie, the drab opening in the Berlin Wall. He stepped out of his limousine, surveying the thirteen-foot-high wall, stretching out in both directions, gray and pockmarked, East German guards looking back at him from their guardhouses. Of the wall, he said, “It’s as ugly as the idea behind it.”38

  On June 25, Reagan recruited George Shultz, the chairman of Bechtel, to be his new secretary of state, replacing Al Haig. Shultz had been in Europe and recalled thinking about the state of the world as he flew home for his first meeting with Reagan.

  “Relations between the superpowers were not simply bad,” he recalled, “they were virtually non-existent.”39

  At the same time, Reed, the National Security Council official, was growing more worried about the lack of a serious plan for the president’s command and control in the event of a nuclear alert. No one wanted to advertise it, but while the United States was spending billions to modernize strategic weapons, the means to command these forces was, in the words of one official, “the weakest link in the chain.”40 Furthermore, Reagan did not want to fly away in a helicopter if America was threatened with nuclear war. “I want to sit here in the office,” he told Reed. Referring to Vice President Bush, the president added, “Getting into the helicopter is George’s job.”