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ONE
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AT THE PRECIPICE
On July 31, 1979, Ronald Reagan walked through a pair of twenty-five-ton blast doors at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command. Behind the doors were four and a half acres of chambers and tunnels surrounded by granite two thousand feet thick to shield it from an atomic bomb. Constructed of carbon steel plates, the fifteen buildings inside rested on 1,319 giant springs, each weighing approximately one thousand pounds, to cushion against shock. Built in the early 1960s, the complex was the nerve center of a system of satellites and radar for monitoring against a nuclear attack.1
Reagan, who sought the Republican nomination in 1976 but lost to Gerald Ford, was preparing to run for president again. He had flown from Los Angeles for briefings about nuclear weapons. Martin Anderson, a policy adviser to the campaign, accompanied Reagan that day, along with Douglas Morrow, a screenwriter and producer who had known Reagan in his Hollywood days and suggested that Reagan see the facility.2 From the outside of the mountain, at the North Portal, entering a one-third-mile-long tunnel, Anderson recalled they didn’t think the complex looked very impressive. But once deep inside the mountain, standing in front of the huge blast doors, they began to sense the enormous scope. They were given briefings on the relative nuclear capabilities of the United States and the Soviet Union, and shown the command center, a room with a giant electronic map of North America. Anderson asked Air Force General James Hill, the commander, what would happen if a Soviet SS-18 missile were to hit within a few hundred yards of the command center. The Soviets had already deployed the SS-18 and an upgraded version was in flight tests. “It would blow us away,” Hill replied. When he heard this, “a look of disbelief came over Reagan’s face,” Anderson recalled. “The discussion continued, and we pressed the issue of what would really happen if the Soviets were to fire just one nuclear missile at a U.S. city.”
Hill replied that “we would pick it up right after it was launched, but by the time the officials of the city could be alerted that a nuclear bomb would hit them, there would be only ten or fifteen minutes left. That’s all we can do. We can’t stop it.”
On the flight back to Los Angeles, Reagan was deeply concerned. “He couldn’t believe the United States had no defense against Soviet missiles,” Anderson recalled. Reagan slowly shook his head and said, “We have spent all that money and have all that equipment, and there is nothing we can do to prevent a nuclear missile from hitting us.” At the end of the flight, Reagan reflected on the dilemma that might confront a U.S. president if faced with a nuclear attack. “The only options he would have,” Reagan said, “would be to press the button or do nothing. They’re both bad. We should have some way of defending ourselves against nuclear missiles.”3
Reagan was a staunch anti-Communist and defense hard-liner. In the summer of 1979 he was speaking out in his syndicated radio address against the new SALT II treaty, saying it favored the Soviet Union.4 But on the threshold of a new campaign, his advisers felt there was a real chance that Reagan would frighten voters if he spoke openly about nuclear weapons and war. This risk was acknowledged in a memorandum that Anderson wrote in early August, a few weeks after Cheyenne Mountain. At this point, Reagan’s campaign had several part-time defense and foreign policy experts, but the only permanent policy adviser was Anderson, a conservative economist on leave from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Anderson had earlier written memos on the economy and energy. In the ten-page Policy Memorandum No. 3, “Foreign Policy and National Security,” he grappled with a way for Reagan to talk about nuclear strategy without alarming voters.
Anderson acknowledged that Reagan’s strong views on national defense were regarded as a political liability, that people worried he was somewhat inexperienced and might plunge the country into “Vietnamlike wars” abroad. But, Anderson added, “The situation has now changed significantly.” The reason was that growing Soviet military power “has been increasingly perceived as a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.” Anderson cautioned that Reagan could not tackle this theme directly. He had to find a way to take advantage of the mood without frightening voters with an “overly aggressive stance that would be counterproductive.”
Under the heading “National Defense,” Anderson sketched out three options for the campaign. One would be to continue the course the United States was on, relying on SALT II, and “try to appease and ingratiate ourselves with the Soviets.” Anderson dismissed this as “dangerous folly.” Another option would be for Reagan to argue the United States must “match the Soviet buildup,” sharply increasingly defense spending. But this has “serious problems,” he acknowledged, because it could alienate voters. “Substantial increases in the attack missile capability of the United States would be a powerful, emotional issue to deal with politically—especially by Reagan,” he cautioned. Then Anderson offered a third way, suggesting Reagan propose development of what he called a “Protective Missile System.” Anderson acknowledged missile defenses were outlawed by the 1972 Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty, but “perhaps it is now time to reconsider the concept.” Anderson argued that missile defense would be “far more appealing to the American people” than just nuclear retaliation and revenge.5
Despite the recommendation of Policy Memorandum No. 3, in the campaign that unfolded in the next fifteen months, Reagan did not talk about missile defense. The subject was just too delicate. A statement on the topic was put into the Republican Party platform, but it was not part of Reagan’s campaign stump speech nor did it figure in his major campaign addresses on foreign policy.
Nonetheless, Reagan held radical notions about nuclear weapons: he dreamed of abolishing them. Personally, he recoiled from the concept of mutual assured destruction, or MAD.6 Reagan also intensely disliked the idea that he, as president, would have to make decisions about nuclear weapons in the event of a sudden crisis. He worried that a nuclear explosion would lead to the end of the Earth and expressed belief in the biblical story of Armageddon. “I swear I believe Armageddon is near,” he wrote in his diary on the day Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.7 In his desk drawer, Reagan kept a collection of 3 × 5 cards. One carried a quotation from President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” address to the United Nations in 1953, in which Eisenhower pledged the United States would help solve “the fearful atomic dilemma—to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”8
Alongside these views, other powerful convictions and experiences guided Reagan’s thinking. In his 1940 movie Murder in the Air, he starred as Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft, who stops a spy and saves a top-secret death-ray invention that can shoot down airplanes.9 It was fantasy, but Reagan put great faith in the power of American technology to solve problems, going back to his many years selling General Electric with the slogan “Progress is our most important product.” Reagan also distrusted treaties with the Soviet Union, influenced by a book written by a friend, Laurence W. Beilenson, a lawyer and founder of the Screen Actors Guild. The book argued that nations follow treaties only as long as it is in their interest to do so.10 From his experience in the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan was confident in his personal skills as a negotiator—a belief that if he could appeal to the human side of Soviet leaders, he could persuade them.
All these ideas lived in peaceful coexistence in Reagan’s mind. He had a remarkable ability to hold many differing notions at the same time, deploying them as needed and concealing them if required. The stereotype of Reagan as a rigid ideologue does not explain these twists and turns, this untroubled shifting of gears, so central to his character. In 1980, he waged a campaign for the presidency on the grounds that the nation needed a large military expansion, including modernization of missiles, bombers and
submarines that carried nuclear weapons. But he kept silent about his own notions that nuclear weapons should be abolished. The Great Communicator did not communicate his dreams about a world without the atomic bomb. His campaign advisers weren’t sure what to make of it when Reagan talked privately about abolishing nuclear weapons. “Nobody on the campaign staff raised any serious objections to his idea of reducing the stockpiles of nuclear weapons,” Anderson recalled, “but on the other hand, and it’s difficult as a former campaign staffer to admit this, nobody believed there was the slightest possibility it could ever happen. And when Reagan began to talk privately of a dream he had when someday we might live in a world free of all nuclear missiles, well, we just smiled.”
For reasons of political tactics, Reagan in 1980 kept his focus on two topics that could be raised in campaign speeches without as much political risk: opposing the SALT II treaty and warning that the Soviets were driving toward military superiority.11 He voiced the alarms of Nitze, Wohlstetter, Pipes and others that the Soviets were posing a “window of vulnerability” for the United States. In a foreign policy address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention on August 18, 1980, in Chicago, Reagan quoted approvingly Nitze’s remark that Kremlin leaders “do not want war; they want the world.” Reagan added, “For that reason, they have put much of their military effort into strategic nuclear programs. Here the balance has been moving against us and will continue to do so if we follow the course set by this administration. The Soviets want peace and victory. We must understand this and what it means to us. They seek a superiority in military strength that, in the event of a confrontation, would leave us with an unacceptable choice between submission or conflict.”12
With his silky voice, slightly cocked head, crinkly smile, old-fashioned suits and gauzy nostalgia for an era of American leadership in the 1950s, Reagan projected a sense of purpose and unbridled optimism, and he conveyed it at a time of troubling doubts for Americans. On November 4, 1979, nine days before Reagan formally announced his candidacy for president, Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took Americans hostage. In December, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Voters were fatigued from Vietnam, Watergate, high inflation and energy shortages. From President Carter they had heard about the need for sacrifice and discipline; Reagan, by contrast, offered them a sky-is-the-limit vision that days of plenty could be returned to American life.13
This optimism also ran through Reagan’s ambitions for competition with the Soviet Union. He believed that communism and socialism would ultimately give way to a victory of the American way. While others saw the Soviet Union as an unfortunate yet permanent bastion of global power, Reagan envisioned relentless competition aimed at overturning the status quo. “The great dynamic success of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism—money,” Reagan later recalled. “The Russians could never win the arms race; we could outspend them forever.”14 He declared in his 1980 campaign speech that he wanted to “show by example the greatness of our system and the strength of American ideals.” He added,
The truth is we would like nothing better than to see the Russian people living in freedom and dignity instead of being trapped in a backwash of history as they are. The greatest fallacy of the Lenin-Marxist philosophy is that it is the “wave of the future.” Everything about it is primitive: compulsion in place of free initiative; coercion in place of law; militarism in place of trade; and empire-building in place of self-determination; and luxury for a chosen few at the expense of the many. We have seen nothing like it since the Age of Feudalism.
Reagan’s description of the Soviet system as backward and restrictive was a penetrating insight. But there was also a hidden contradiction in this argument. How could the Soviet Union be threatening militarily while also “primitive” and rotting from within? How could it sustain a global arms race abroad while people stood in lines at home? The answer offered by many at the time was that the Soviet military had first claim on the country’s resources, and therefore the defense sector could fatten itself while the rest of the country suffered. This was true; hypermilitarization of the Soviet state did siphon off a huge portion of the country’s resources. But it was also true that, in many instances, the internal rot sapped military power. The Soviet defense machine was undermined by the very weaknesses Reagan spotted elsewhere in the system. A reckoning was coming for the Soviet Union. And even if he did not see every detail clearly, Reagan seemed to understand the big picture very well: the system as a whole was tottering and vulnerable.
Soviet leaders had not trusted Carter, but they reacted with anger and paranoia to Reagan. At his first press conference as president, Reagan was asked if the Kremlin was still “bent on world domination that might lead to a continuation of the Cold War” or whether “under other circumstances détente is possible.” Reagan responded that détente had been a “one way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims,” and added that Soviet leaders “have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that, and that is moral, not immoral, and we operate on a different set of standards. I think when you do business with them, even at a détente, you keep that in mind.”
In Moscow, the aging leadership wanted most of all to preserve the strategic parity they felt they had achieved in the late 1970s, recalled Anatoly Dobrynin, former ambassador to Washington. “For all their revolutionary rhetoric,” he said, “they hated change….” They wanted some kind of military détente, even if political cooperation was out of the question, but the era of détente was over. Reagan didn’t believe in it. “In retrospect, I realize that it had been quite impossible for me at that moment to imagine anything much worse than Carter,” Dobrynin said. “But it soon became clear that in ideology and propaganda Reagan turned out to be far worse and far more threatening.”15
Nonetheless, the Soviet Union was not at the top of Reagan’s agenda in his first year, which was devoted to driving Congress to approve lower taxes, budget cuts and defense rearmament. Reagan believed that before serious attention could be given to dealing with the Soviets, the United States had to first embark on a demonstrable military buildup. Reagan resumed building the B-1 bomber Carter had canceled, pushed ahead with a new basing mode for a new land-based missile, the MX, and with construction of a new Trident II D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missile with more accuracy and range. Reagan also secretly approved more aggressive U.S. naval and air maneuvers aimed at the Soviet Union. His CIA director, William Casey, expanded covert actions around the globe aimed at hemming in the Soviets. But Reagan did not rush to advance superpower diplomacy. He did not meet or talk to Soviet leaders.
After surviving an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981, when he was shot by John Hinckley Jr. outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, Reagan began to think about what he could do to end the arms race. “Perhaps having come so close to death made me feel I should do whatever I could in the years God had given me to reduce the threat of nuclear war; perhaps there was a reason I had been spared,” he recalled later. In the first week after leaving the hospital, he took out a yellow legal pad and wrote a personal letter to Brezhnev, by hand. Still in his bathrobe and pajamas, Reagan passed it around to aides at a meeting April 13. The State Department didn’t like it and rewrote it into a stiff message. Reagan didn’t like the rewrite, and in the end, Brezhnev got two letters, one formal and one in Reagan’s hand.16 James A. Baker III, who was Reagan’s chief of staff, recalled that the letter was “Reagan 101: a sermon that basically said the Soviets had it wrong on economics, politics, and international relations, and that the United States had it right. It’s as if the president thought maybe Brezhnev didn’t know this stuff and that if he just heard it, he’d come to his senses.”17 Brezhnev replied in “the standard polemical form, stressing their differences,” without any effort to be personal,
recalled Dobrynin. Reagan remembered “an icy reply from Brezhnev.”18
At a private moment at an economic summit in Ottawa on July 19, 1981, French President François Mitterrand gave Reagan some stunning news. The French had recruited a defector in place in Moscow, whom the French had code-named “Farewell,” and he had provided a huge treasure trove of intelligence. Colonel Vladimir Vetrov was an engineer whose job was to evaluate the intelligence collected by the KGB’s technology directorate—Directorate T—responsible for finding and stealing the latest in Western high technology. A special arm of the KGB, known as Line X, carried out the thefts. Motivated to help the West, Vetrov had secretly photographed four thousand KGB documents on the program. After Mitterrand spoke to Reagan, the materials were passed to Vice President George H. W. Bush, and then to the CIA in August.
The dossier “immediately caused a storm,” recalled Thomas C. Reed, a former Pentagon official who later worked on the National Security Council staff under Reagan. “The files were incredibly explicit. They set forth the extent of Soviet penetration into U.S. and other Western laboratories, factories and government agencies.”19
Vetrov revealed the names of more than two hundred Line X officers in ten KGB stations in the West. “Reading the material caused my worst nightmares to come true,” said Gus Weiss, a White House official. “Since 1970, Line X had obtained thousands of documents and sample products in such quantity that it appeared the Soviet military and civilian sectors were in large measure running their research on that of the West, particularly the United States. Our science was supporting their national defense.”20
The Dead Hand Page 4