While many Soviet weapons scientists worked in secrecy and isolation, Velikhov benefited from much broader horizons. When Pope John Paul II called for an examination of the dangers of nuclear war by scientists from around the world, Velikhov was chosen by the authorities to represent the Soviet Union. At the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the autumn of 1982, Velikhov had extensive contacts with scientists in debates over nuclear war and weapons in space. The Vatican declaration called on global powers never to use nuclear weapons in war. “The catastrophe of nuclear war can and must be prevented,” the declaration said.45This was consistent with Soviet disarmament propaganda, but the experience in Rome and other meetings gave Velikhov a better understanding of the West that would help him guide Gorbachev. Also, in May 1983, two months after Reagan’s speech on missile defense, Velikhov was named head of a group of twenty-five Soviet scientists intended to warn of the dangers of nuclear war.46 Again, promoting Soviet disarmament propaganda may have been the intent, but Velikhov and the scientists steered their own course.
Velikhov was asked by the Kremlin in late 1983 to once again evaluate the Reagan missile defense proposal from a technical standpoint. The conclusion was that Reagan’s dream would not work. The Soviet scientists knew this from their own hard labor and failures. When Gorbachev came to power two years later, Velikhov dusted off the same document. He had accumulated all the knowledge and experience necessary to give an honest and cold-eyed appraisal of the reality of missile defense.47
He used that experience at a key turning point in the summer and early autumn of 1985. Velikhov urged Gorbachev not to build a Soviet version of Star Wars. He suggested they abandon the Cold War approach of toe-to-toe competition. Gorbachev was naturally open to this argument; he also wanted, in principle, to move away from the zero-sum game. But it was Velikhov who helped lead Gorbachev to something different.
The Soviet weapons designers wanted to match what Reagan was doing, a symmetrical response. By contrast, Velikhov argued for an “asymmetrical response,” one that would answer Reagan but not be the same. To stop ballistic missiles in flight, an American defense system would have to target and destroy a thousand speeding points in space almost perfectly and simultaneously. To counter it, one idea for “asymmetrical response” was to unleash so many speeding points—warheads, either real or fake—that the American defense system would be overwhelmed. Some of the Soviet missiles would penetrate and get through to their targets.
There were different ideas among Soviet experts about the hardware for “asymmetrical response.” According to Katayev’s records, Soviet engineers came up with technological tricks to fool the anti-missile system. For example, they could launch decoys or chaff, to imitate the warheads and deceive the defenses. They could spin and maneuver warheads to avoid detection, or blind the American satellites and command centers, knocking out the eyes of the defensive system.
Another method was more ominous: build more missiles and an avalanche of additional nuclear warheads. The Soviet Union was good at missiles, and it would be easier and cheaper to double or triple the missile warheads than to build an entirely new defense against them. This approach was hypothetical, but not entirely. Katayev recalled that the latest version of the SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missile carried ten warheads each. This was the biggest, most feared, multiple-warhead weapon in the Soviet arsenal. But if the missile’s range was shortened somewhat, and the warheads made smaller, he wrote, the SS-18 could actually be modified to carry “up to 40 nuclear warheads. And this one missile alone!” In a separate, more precise chart in his files, Katayev noted the modified SS-18 could carry thirty-eight warheads. At the time, the Soviet Union deployed 308 of these missiles. If they were modified, the fleet would go from 2,464 warheads to a total of 12,084. It would be much more difficult for American defenses to stop. This was only a concept that had been discussed in earlier years by missile designers, but it illustrated what could become a potent Soviet response to Reagan’s Star Wars.48
Gorbachev would most certainly not favor this version of “asymmetrical response.” He wanted to eliminate weapons, not propagate them. In his memoir, he avoided talking about the details of this option. When the author questioned Gorbachev in an interview in 2006, he was still uneasy about discussing it. “We did have a project,” he said. “There was one. It existed. But it is closed down. And destroyed. It’s only tens of billions” of rubles. “But it’s a horrible project, it’s a horrible response.” He added, “What is one missile, SS-18? It’s a hundred Chernobyls. In one missile.”49
More weapons were not the only answer. There was a third approach to “asymmetrical response.” Words were Gorbachev’s stock-in-trade, and his best weapon. He was a robust if long-winded orator. Could he simply say “no” to the Reagan dream, persuade Reagan of his folly and talk it into oblivion? Perhaps he could strike a deal to cancel a giant weapons machine that the United States did not yet possess, that the Soviet Union would have great trouble matching, and exchange it all for something they both wanted: deep reductions in existing nuclear weapons.
Gorbachev realized this was his best answer. If he could talk Reagan out of his dream of missile defense, it would prevent stiff competition on a field—high technology—where the Soviet Union lagged years behind. There was an important domestic component too. The military-industrial complex constantly pressed for more resources, saying the United States was a threat. If Gorbachev could persuade Reagan not to build “Star Wars,” he would find it easier to resist the generals and the missile designers at home. By slowing the arms race, Gorbachev might find time and resources to begin modernizing the country.
Yet in the summer of 1985, the military and defense industries were powerful forces. Velikhov saw Gorbachev was buffeted by crosscurrents. He was a man of the party who depended on the Central Committee bureaucracy; he had no choice but to listen to the generals, the ministers and the KGB; and the military establishment distrusted Velikhov, Yakovlev and other progressive thinkers around the general secretary. Gorbachev was personally wary of the military and defense industry, and surrounded himself with advisers who shared his caution, but he did not, and could not, move overtly or swiftly against them.50
Behind the scenes, however, Gorbachev was starting to lead the country in a radical new direction. A leader’s courage is often defined by building something, by positive action, but in this case, Gorbachev’s great contribution was in deciding what not to do. He would not build a Soviet Star Wars. He averted another massive weapons competition.
Gorbachev didn’t show his hand right away. The full dimensions of this change in direction took time to appear. If anything, Gorbachev was good at tactics.
In late July, he announced the Soviet Union, by itself, would stop nuclear testing, and invited the United States to follow suit. Reagan did not.
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To Velikhov’s confident assertion that the Strategic Defense Initiative would not work, his Soviet colleagues often posed a difficult question: if it was not possible to create an effective missile shield with America’s best technology, if Reagan was utterly dreaming when he talked about making nuclear weapons obsolete, then why was the United States devoting so much money to it, year after year? As Katayev recalled it, the Soviet analysts saw “a clear discrepancy between the goals and the means” of Reagan’s announced intentions. “What is it being done for?” the Soviet specialists asked themselves, according to Katayev. “In the name of what are the Americans, famous for their pragmatism, opening their wallet for the most grandiose project in the history of the United States when the technical and economic risks of a crash exceed all thinkable limits?”
“Or,” Katayev wrote, “is there still something different behind this curtain?” To the Soviet specialists on strategic weapons, Katayev said, Reagan’s zeal for his dream led them “from the very beginning to think about the possibility of political bluff and hoax.” They pondered whether it was a “Hollywood village of veneer and cardbo
ard.” The question went unanswered.
According to Katayev, a few Soviet experts—he doesn’t say exactly who—held an even darker view of Reagan’s goals. They concluded that the Americans were always distinguished by their systematic approach to problems, that they “do nothing in vain.” Rather than a hoax or bluff, they decided the Strategic Defense Initiative was a cover story for a gigantic, hidden effort to subsidize American defense contractors, save them from “bankruptcy” and produce a fresh surge of superior military high technology. Perhaps, Katayev said, this “was the major underwater part of the SDI iceberg.” This analysis was woefully misguided. While Reagan did fatten the defense contractors with record military budgets in the early 1980s, defense spending was a relatively small slice of the overall American economy. While there was a fresh surge of high technology, much of it was sprouting in the private sector, in the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley. And in the United States, defense contractors simply did not play the same role as the outsized military-industrial complex in the Soviet Union. The Soviet analysts were mistakenly applying their own experience—in which the military-industrial complex was at the center of decisions—to what they could not explain in the United States. Each side in the Cold War remained a mysterious black box to the other. The Americans could not see Gorbachev’s radical intentions. The Soviets could not understand Reagan’s dream.
In late August 1985, Gorbachev gave an interview to Time magazine, his rhetoric offering a refreshing change from the decades of Cold War confrontation. When asked about the Strategic Defense Initiative, Gorbachev said Soviet experts believed it was “sheer fantasy and a pipe dream.” His progressive brain trust had helped prepare his remarks.51Two weeks later, Reagan wrote in his diary, “I made a decision we would not trade away our program of research—S.D.I. for a promise of Soviet reduction in nuclear arms.”52 Arriving in Washington for the first time on September 27, Shevardnadze gave Reagan a letter from Gorbachev offering to cut long-range nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers by 50 percent in exchange for “a complete ban on space attack weapons.” The offer didn’t fly; Reagan could not accept the limits on Star Wars. But he was ready for deep cuts in existing nuclear arsenals.53
In Washington, both the Defense Department under Weinberger and the CIA under Casey and Gates were deeply skeptical of Gorbachev. The Pentagon published a glossy annual booklet, Soviet Military Power, a propaganda piece designed to help boost congressional support for Reagan’s military spending. The fourth edition, published in April 1985, contained the claim that the Soviets had “two ground-based lasers that are capable of attacking satellites in various orbits.”54 This was a gross exaggeration; neither the LE-1 nor the Terra-3 lasers could attack anything. An artist’s conception, a black-and-white pencil sketch, appeared across the top, showing what purported to be the Sary Shagan proving ground. A building with a dome on top was shown firing a white laser beam into the heavens. The caption said, “The directed-energy R&D site at the Sary Shagan proving ground includes ground-based lasers that could be used in an anti-satellite role today and possibly a BMD role in the future.” The key words were “could” and “possibly.” In fact, the long, expensive search to build laser weapons against targets in space had, up to this point, totally fizzled. The Soviets had not given up hope, but the glossy Pentagon booklet took old failures and hyped them into new threats.
In October, the State and Defense departments published a new report titled “Soviet Strategic Defensive Programs.” The pencil sketch of Sary Shagan appeared again. The text claimed that Soviet achievements in laser weapons “have been impressive.” It was true the Soviet scientists had scored advances in lasers, but they had not created an exotic weapon that worked. The text said that the Soviets “may also have the capability to develop the optical systems necessary for laser weapons to track and attack their targets.” In fact, they could track, but not attack.
Reagan picked up the theme in a radio speech October 12. “The Soviets have for a long time been doing advanced research on their version of SDI,” the president said. “They’re doing so well, our experts say they may be able to put an advanced technology defensive system in space by the end of the century.” One might dismiss this as just standard rhetoric, but Reagan’s words suggest that he never really grasped the impact on the military of the economic decay and stifling leadership in the Soviet system. Through superhuman striving, against all odds, the Soviet Union managed to reach superpower status, and yet there were massive internal stresses and agonizing fissures. The Soviet Union was not ready to put a missile defense system in space as Reagan claimed. They were not ready to knock out a satellite with lasers—and would never do so. It was a tragedy that a country that had spawned some of the great minds in mathematics and physics, that had produced chess champions and launched Sputnik, was by the 1980s behind in the computer revolution, sinking in economic backwardness and totally unprepared for the next century. But Reagan saw weakness only on the domestic side of the Soviet Union. He saw the military as ten feet tall.
In one of the more notable errors of judgment, the October report on Soviet strategic defenses accused leading Soviet scientists, including Velikhov, of being hypocrites. In one passage, the document noted that many of them had signed a letter published in the New York Times in opposition to Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. Velikhov was named and singled out with a photo. It was noted accurately that Velikhov had been head of the Institute of Atomic Energy at Troitsk, a branch of the Kurchatov Institute, located outside of Moscow, “where lasers for strategic and tactical applications are being developed.” The connotation was that Velikhov was a mindless propaganda puppet of the regime and a secret weaponeer. The Americans missed the point. While Velikhov had worked on laser weapons, that was precisely the reason he could tell Gorbachev the unvarnished truth about missile defense.
Reagan was eager to meet Gorbachev and try out his one-on-one persuasive powers as a November summit in Geneva drew near. No summit had been held since 1979; Reagan had only three years of his presidency remaining. He did not want to lose time. “Starting with Brezhnev, I’d dreamed of personally going one-on-one with a Soviet leader,” Reagan later wrote in his memoirs, saying he believed if the leaders agreed on something, all else would fall into place. Now, he was at last going to get his chance.
Reagan, who liked one-page briefing papers, was buried under a mountain of information in preparation for the summit. McFarlane and Matlock assembled two dozen briefing papers from the CIA and State Department, about eight to ten pages each, single spaced. McFarlane said Reagan received them eagerly, jotting notes in the margins.55 But Reagan privately complained, “I’m getting d–n sick of cramming like a school kid.”56 The experts told the president that Gorbachev represented a fresh style of Soviet leader, that dramatic changes were underway, but none threatening the system itself.57 Shultz recalled that “word from the intelligence community and other Soviet specialists around the government was that the Soviet Union would never, indeed could never, change no matter how bad their internal economic and social problems were.”58 The CIA briefing paper given to Reagan, titled “Gorbachev’s Personal Agenda for the November Meeting,” said Gorbachev had “little expectation of any major substantive breakthrough on arms control or regional issues.” Gates, a longtime Soviet specialist, who also briefed the president, predicted that Gorbachev wasn’t going to be pushed around. His conclusion: “Gorbachev simply intended to outwait Reagan.”59
For Reagan, one CIA briefing proved riveting, by specialist Kay Oliver, who had just drafted a National Intelligence Estimate titled “Domestic Stress on the Soviet System.” She told Reagan of the decay in everyday life in the Soviet Union—alcoholism, alienation, drug abuse, economic decline—and explained how the “ruling elite had become stagnant, cynical, outrageously corrupt and ineffective” in the 1970s and early 1980s.60 These themes reinforced Reagan’s lifelong assumptions. He wrote approvingly in his diary that Oliver “confi
rmed things I had heard from unconfirmed sources. The Soviet U. is an ec. basket case & among other things there is a rapidly spreading turn by the people to religion.”61
Reagan was attentive to Suzanne Massie, the author and Soviet culture expert, and read her book Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia. Massie recalled that when she met Reagan, he seemed hungry to learn more about the Russians as people than he was getting from the briefing papers. “He was an actor: actors like to absorb from feeling, and he just wasn’t getting that…kind of juice, if you want, that helped him make sense of affairs, from his official sources.” In her briefing, Massie tried to counter the Hollywood stereotypes of the Russians. She told him Gorbachev had been called to rule a country that was unruly and fractious, “not a whole lot of Communists marching in locked step, that it was far from that.” Massie also told Reagan not to worry about the contrasts being made between himself and the younger Gorbachev—that in fact Reagan was in a stronger position.62
Summing up his impressions, Reagan wrote by hand on a yellow pad a four-and-a-half page memo. The note, which was typed up and then corrected by Reagan in ballpoint pen, offers a valuable snapshot of his thinking before the meeting. Reagan accepted the cautious view that Gorbachev would not bring radical change.
“I believe,” he wrote, “Gorbachev is a highly intelligent leader totally dedicated to traditional Soviet goals.”
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