by Craig Nelson
A University of South Carolina team investigating cobalt-headed barn swallows has found brains 5 percent smaller than usual, and vestigial albinism in 13 percent instead of the normal 4 percent. Yet, a colony of white mice seem to be developing a resistance to radiation that is passed on to their descendants, which could be of great benefit to humans. And from inside the still-burning Reactor #4 itself, one robot emerged covered in a black goo—radiographic fungus, growing ecstatically on the unit’s very walls.
15
Hitting a Bullet with a Bullet
AFTER his speeches as a presidential candidate repudiated the live-and-let-live détente of Nixon, Ford, and Carter in favor of hawkish Cold Warrior aggression, Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the Oval Office in 1981 alarmed the Kremlin. Then in the first days of his administration, CIA director William Casey reprised LeMay’s bear-baiting by throwing bombers over the pole into Soviet airspace until Russian radar took notice. Similarly, NATO fighter jets crossed over the empire’s Eurasian border every week, performed a variety of erratic maneuvers, and then vanished . . . until starting up all over again.
In May of 1981, after Reagan had been president for five months, KGB chief Yuri Andropov told his superiors he had information from the highest sources that the United States was preparing a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. After becoming premier, he ordered Soviet spy agencies KGB and GRU to work overtime for two years to uncover the details of this forthcoming assault. Instructed to look for alarming evidence, Soviet operatives found just that, only further terrifying an already frightened Kremlin. Tensions were so extreme that, when South Korea’s Flight 007 touched into Soviet airspace by accident on September 1, 1983, Moscow had it attacked, killing all 269 people on board.
After John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate him in the spring of 1981, Reagan said, “[Cheating death] made me feel I should do whatever I could in the years God has given me to reduce the threat of nuclear war.” He would regularly discuss eliminating atomic bombs in private, but no one in his administration supported this, and the president did nothing about it in practice, either militarily or diplomatically. When he met with his political comrade-in-arms Margaret Thatcher at Camp David on December 22, 1984, and told her about this goal, she was “horrified.” Thatcher was one of many who had come to believe that nuclear arms were what kept the Cold War cold, telling Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev three years later, “Both our countries know from bitter experience that conventional weapons do not deter war in Europe whereas nuclear weapons have done so over forty years.”
On March 1, 1982, President Reagan watched the National Military Command Center rehearse a nuclear attack. A screen displayed a map of the United States, and as the missiles arrived, and the warheads fell, red dots bloomed, over and over, growing together into a bloody cloud—in a mere thirty minutes, America was no more. A book on the bestseller lists that year was Jonathan Schell’s Fate of the Earth, which foretold, “In the first moment of a 10,000 megaton attack on the United States, flashes of white light would suddenly illuminate large areas of the country as thousands of suns, each one brighter than the sun itself, blossomed over cities, suburbs, and towns. . . . The thermal pulses could subject more than 600,000 square miles, or one-sixth of the total land mass of the nation, to . . . a level of heat that chars human beings. Tens of millions of people would go up in smoke. . . . In the ten seconds or so after each bomb hit, as blast waves swept outward from thousands of ground zeros, the physical plant of the United States would be swept away like leaves in a gust of wind. . . . virtually all the inhabitants, places of work, and other man-made things there—substantially the whole human construct of the United States—would be vaporized, blasted, or otherwise pulverized out of existence. Then, as clouds of dust rose from the earth, and mushroom clouds spread overhead, often linking to form vast canopies, day would turn to night. . . . Shortly after, fires . . . would simply burn down the United States. . . . Then comes radioactive fallout, ultraviolet radiation, destruction of the ozone layer, extinction of species.”
From November 2 to 11, 1983, NATO conducted a coordinated multinational nuclear exercise: Able Archer. The Soviets knew NATO’s plan of launching a nuclear first strike disguised as an exercise, and when Soviet intelligence reported an unusual amount of civilian leadership involved in Able Archer, Andropov believed nuclear attack was imminent, triggering a crisis nearly as dangerous as Cuba. These “war games” were so realistic that they included the drafting of a speech for Queen Elizabeth to read to the nation as atomic missiles fell on England’s mountain green: “I have never forgotten the sorrow and the pride I felt as my sister and I huddled around the nursery wireless set listening to my father’s inspiring words on that fateful day in 1939. Not for a single moment did I imagine that this solemn and awful duty would one day fall to me. We all know that the dangers facing us today are greater by far than at any time in our long history. The enemy is not the soldier with his rifle nor even the airman prowling the skies above our cities and towns but the deadly power of abused technology.”
In his diaries, Ronald Reagan’s sole mention of feeling sad occurs on October 10, 1983, after watching a preview of a TV movie on nuclear horror, The Day After: “It’s powerfully done, all $7 mil. worth. It’s very effective and left me greatly depressed. So far they haven’t sold any of the 25 spot ads scheduled & I can see why. . . . My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war.” Nearly 40 million US homes—half the nation—watched The Day After, including journalist Alexander Zaitchik: “It finally settled my internal debate about what to do in the thirty minutes between test pattern and first impact. For months, I had debated whether to try and run and hide, or climb the nearest roof. The movie decided it for the roof. It answered Nurse Brower’s question, asked in the raw cut Reagan saw, but removed from the final edit, of whether it was the living that envied the dead.”
On November 11, 1983, Reagan gave a speech to Japan’s Diet that reprised the history of US and USSR leaders’ pronouncements: “I believe there can be only one policy for preserving our precious civilization in this modern age. A nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought. The only value in possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they can’t be used, ever. I know I speak for people everywhere when I say our dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the earth” (if only Reagan, and all the presidents and premiers before him who gave speeches saying the exact same thing, were in positions to do something to help solve this terrible problem). At the time of that speech, the Pentagon’s SIOP listed five thousand foreign targets for decapitation alongside forty-five thousand military, industrial, and economic targets needing destruction in the case of war. After Reagan was briefed on it he wrote, “In several ways, the sequence of events described in the briefings paralleled those in the ABC movie. Yet there were still some people at the Pentagon who claimed a nuclear war was ‘winnable.’ I thought they were crazy. Worse, it appeared there were also Soviet generals who thought in terms of winning a nuclear war.”
Someone else was speaking similarly. In December 1984, the USSR’s parlimentary delegate Mikhail Gorbachev said to Britain’s legislature: “Whatever is dividing us, we live on the same planet and Europe is our common home—a home, not a theater of military operations. . . . The Soviet Union is prepared . . . to advance towards the complete prohibition and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.” On January 15, 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev directly proposed to Ronald Reagan “a concrete program, calculated for a precisely determined period of time, for the complete liquidation of nuclear weapons throughout the world . . . within the next fifteen years, before the end of the present century. . . . Over a period of five to eight years the Soviet Union and the United States will halve the nuclear arms which can reach each other’s territory.” Reagan told his secretary of state, George Shultz, that this was “a hell of a good idea.” Then in July, G
orbachev announced that the USSR was unilaterally halting all nuclear tests and asked Reagan to follow suit. After all his public and private declamations on ending nuclear arms, though, the American president wouldn’t do it. On September 27, the general secretary suggested both sides cut their long-range stockpile by half and agree to a ban on weapons in space. Reagan wouldn’t do that, either. While this may seem one more instance of a superpower leader’s being all hat and no cattle, Reagan’s intransigence had a secret reason, and his name was Edward Teller. Teller had convinced Reagan he could create a technology that would forever protect the United States of America from nuclear attack—the Strategic Defense Initiative—Star Wars. Inspired by Teller, Ronald Reagan’s SDI fantasies would keep the United States and the USSR from reaching the great dream that so many have had since Hiroshima . . . of zero nuclear arms.
Isidor Rabi had sent President Eisenhower an October 28, 1957, memo explaining that, as the arc of a ballistic missile was a mathematical signature, the location of its origin could be identified. If so, incoming rockets could be destroyed by atomic bombs in outer space before ever reaching American soil, creating a force field, a shield. Eisenhower did nothing with this idea, but Edward Teller, having used Fermi’s comment to launch a career in fusion, would use Rabi’s concept to launch another in missile defense.
As governor of California, Reagan visited the Lawrence Livermore labs in 1967, where the facility’s director, Teller, briefed him on the difficulties of keeping Americans safe in their homes under onerous test ban treaties that kept physicists from freely studying nuclear science. As president, Reagan visited NORAD—North American Aerospace Defense Command, fifteen buildings of carbon steel plate on 1,319 thousand-pound shock-absorbing springs accessed by five-ton, blast-proof doors and protected by two thousand feet of granite in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, that monitors incoming missile attacks—where he was told that the Soviets had just developed a new missile, the SS-18, against which NORAD was defenseless. Reagan became obsessed that America was nakedly vulnerable to ICBMs, and that as president he must do something about it. Whenever he discussed this fear with anyone else in Washington, however, apparently no one explained that the United States was far from defenseless, that in fact a missile attack on American soil would be met with an epic nuclear retaliation beyond the ken of Hollywood’s biggest budgets.
Even as chief of Livermore, Edward Teller was still scorned by many of his professional colleagues, at the same time that antiwar protesters made it increasingly difficult for him to lecture. He was still a piece of work, having, for decades, promoted experiments that revealed flies living longer after being mildly irradiated, claiming this proved radiation was beneficial for living things. Leo Szilard accused him of knowing the truth, that the real reason was that the radiation killed a parasite infecting the flies, but Teller kept publicly making this argument without mentioning the underlying parasites.
When Teller had an Oval Office meeting with Reagan on September 14, 1982, followed by a White House dinner six months later, he described to the commander in chief how he had worked on the first two generations of nuclear science—fission and fusion—but that a third generation was yet to come, one that would use atomic propulsion to create enormous lasers and microwave beams. A giant X-ray satellite, floating in space, could do what Rabi had told Eisenhower decades before—intercept and destroy incoming missiles before they could kill American citizens. Instead of Mutual Assured Destruction, with Teller’s help the president could offer the nation Mutual Assured Survival with an atmospheric shield so powerful it would render all nuclear weapons obsolete. It is unclear to this day whether Teller explained to Reagan that all of this was based on enormous nuclear weapons floating continuously overhead in low-earth orbit.
Just as Eisenhower had great hopes with Atoms for Peace, Reagan became enthralled with the Strategic Defense Initiative. But in many quarters, the news was not well received. After hearing the president announce his new program in a televised speech, Gorbachev met with the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy’s deputy director, Yevgeny Velikhov, who told him that Russian physicists had tried for decades to create exactly the weapons Teller and Reagan were talking about, including the same space laser cannon, as well as antimissile rockets fired from satellites. They didn’t work. No matter what intercept method was used, launching an assault with a cloud of metallic chaff and dummy missiles overran any so-called shield’s capacity, and SDI—Star Wars—would never succeed. Even so, Gorbachev knew that the Soviet military would insist on having their own outer-space technology to match Washington’s, and that the Soviet economy couldn’t afford a whole new avenue of arms race. They already had nuclear weapons in the oceans with submarines, on the land with ICBMs, and in the air with bombers; now they would need billions of dollars and rubles spent on weapons in orbit? He also believed that, if Velikhov was wrong and Teller’s SDI was a success, a MAD-free America might launch a nuclear first strike. To Reagan, SDI was the greatest of dreams, and to Moscow, the worst of threats.
As Teller’s SDI group proceeded, they followed almost exactly the technological footsteps that the Soviets had trod. First they experimented with a nuclear-fired X-ray laser; by 1986, it was clear this would not work. The Pentagon spent $11 billion testing a vast array of satellites that would fire antimissile rockets—the notorious Brilliant Pebbles—which failed as much for Teller as they had for the Soviets. But Reagan could not let go of his wonderful dream; in his 1985 inaugural address, the president explained all over again that Star Wars “wouldn’t kill people. It would destroy weapons. It wouldn’t militarize space, it would help demilitarize the arsenals of the earth. It would render nuclear weapons obsolete.”
On January 15, 1986, Gorbachev offered to stop all atomic testing for five to eight years; to limit warheads to six thousand apiece; to remove all medium-range missiles from Europe; to enact a ban on space-strike weapons; for China, France, Britain, the United States, and the USSR to ban tactical nuclear weapons and reduce their arsenals over a five-to-seven-year period; and finally, to ban all nuclear weapons over fourteen years. After hearing of this, Reagan wrote in his diary: “We’d be hard put to explain how we could turn it down.” Yet, as Moscow halted testing for ninety days to try to shame the United States into following suit, on March 22, the AEC detonated a twenty-nine-kiloton bomb at the Nevada Test Site.
Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan—one instantly recognizable from his ocher birthmark peninsula; the other from his shiny black macassar helmet—then met on October 11, 1986, at Reykjavík, Iceland, where the first secretary raised his January offer to now include the two superpowers’ eliminating all offensive nuclear arms—the triad of ICBMs, bombers, and sub-launched cruise missiles. Gorbachev: “So let me precisely, firmly, and clearly declare, we are in favor of finding a solution that would lead eventually to a complete liquidation of nuclear arms. Along the way to that goal, at every stage, there should be equality and equal security for the USA and the Soviet Union. Anything less would be incomprehensible, unrealistic, and unacceptable.” Reagan agreed to everything, but then, when he was told which aspects would interfere with Star Wars, he refused to accept those elements, and instead he offered to share Teller’s space weapons technology with the Kremlin. Gorbachev’s voice rose: “Excuse me, Mr. President, but I do not take your idea of sharing SDI seriously. You’re not willing to share with us oil well equipment, digitally guided machine tools, or even milking machines. Sharing SDI would provoke a second American Revolution! And revolutions don’t occur all that often. Let’s be realistic and pragmatic.”
Reagan: “Let me ask, do we mean by the end of the two five-year periods all nuclear explosive devices will be eliminated, including bombs, battlefield weapons, cruise missiles, sub-launched, everything? It would be fine with me if we got rid of them all.”
Gorbachev: “We can do that. We can eliminate them all.”
American secretary of state George Shultz: “Let’s do it!”
/> Reagan: “If we agree that by the end of the ten-year period, all nuclear weapons would be eliminated, we can send that agreement to Geneva. Our team can put together a treaty and you could sign it when you come to Washington.”
Gorbachev then offered a compromise of limiting SDI to the laboratory, meaning no nuclear testing. Reagan asked his adviser Richard Perle about it, and Perle, who had fought nuclear arms reduction and control during the whole of his political career, said that agreeing to those limits would destroy the program. So Reagan, still dreaming of Star Wars, turned down Gorbachev.
The historic agreement to end all nuclear weapons, which would have been their immense historic legacies as president and first secretary, was dead.
But the conversation had been started and it, somewhat, continued. On September 27, 1991, Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, completed both the START treaty instigated by Gorbachev and Reagan as well as START II, the biggest arms reduction in history, topping the arsenal for each superpower to thirty-five hundred warheads apiece. Bush then unilaterally eliminated both US chemical and tactical (battleground) nuclear weapons—artillery shells, naval torpedoes, ground-missile warheads. On October 5, Gorbachev did the same.