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 agriculture 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.”
On June 19, 1982, Reed got Reagan’s approval for a new effort.41 The result was a plan that, in the event of attack, would preserve the presidency as an institution, instead of the president himself. On September 14, Reagan signed a top-secret directive, titled “Enduring National Leadership.”42 Instead of running for the helicopter, the president would remain in the Oval Office, ready to make decisions, order retaliation or negotiate, while his potential successors would vanish to distant and safe locations. The overall effort was called “Continuity of Government,” and it became a massive secret government program. Reed said the plan was to give a designated successor “the world’s biggest laptop” from which he could continue to govern if the real president were killed. “You basically say, hmmm, things are getting dicey—vanish. The guy doesn’t go into the basement, he vanishes with a communications set, and a linkage to all the other arms of government so that he can be the president.” As Reed put it, “Our contribution was to survive the presidency, not the president.”
After World War II, large underground installations were built outside of the capital. One was Mount Weather in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, seventy miles from Washington, and another was at Raven Rock Mountain, six miles north of Camp David on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. Both could serve as military command posts in the event of war. But the Reagan planners realized that a president might not make it to these bunkers in time. They devised a plan to dispatch three teams from Washington to separate, secure locations around the United States. Each team had to be prepared to proclaim a new American “president” and assume command of the country, according to author James Mann. If the Soviet Union was able to hit one team with a nuclear weapon, the next one would be ready. “This was not some abstract textbook plan, but was practiced in concrete, thorough and elaborate detail,” Mann said. Each time a team left Washington, usually for several days of exercises, it brought one member of Reagan’s cabinet who would serve as the successor “president.” The entire program—intended to be carried out swiftly, under extreme stress and amid the potential chaos of impending nuclear war—was extra-legal and extra-constitutional. It established a process of presidential succession, Mann pointed out, that is nowhere in the Constitution or federal law. A secret agency, the National Program Office, spent hundreds of millions of dollars a year to keep the continuity-of-government program ready.43
On November 11, 1982, Reagan was awakened at 3:30 A.M. with word of Brezhnev’s death in Moscow. Two days later, he visited the Soviet Embassy to pay his respects, and wrote in the book of condolences, “I express my condolences to the family of President Brezhnev and the people of the Soviet Union. May both our peoples live jointly in peace on this planet. Ronald Reagan.” In Moscow, Yuri Andropov was elevated to be Brezhnev’s successor. His first comments reflected the dark mood of the Soviet leadership. “We know very well,” Andropov said, “that peace cannot be obtained from the imperialists by begging for it. It can be upheld only by relying on the invincible might of the Soviet armed forces.”44
When Reagan had warned of a “window of vulnerability” in 1980, the most worrisome threat came from Soviet land-based missiles, especially the new generation, the SS-17, SS-18 and SS-19. By 1982, the Soviet missile force had grown to fourteen hundred launchers carrying over five thousand warheads. The U.S. missile force had 1,047 launchers and about 2,150 warheads.45 The fear was that in a first strike, just a portion of the Soviet force could wipe out nearly all the American missiles still sitting in their silos. Reagan struggled—as had Presidents Ford and Carter—to respond to the Soviet buildup with the development of a new-generation American super weapon, the MX, or Missile Experimental. The 100-ton MX would be three times more accurate than the Minuteman III, and carry ten warheads, each independently targetable. Under the original plan to deploy two hundred MX missiles, the Soviets would face the prospect of two thousand warheads raining down on their silos. That would begin to ease concerns about the window of vulnerability.
But the MX ran into political opposition, especially over complex schemes to base the missile so it would not be vulnerable to a Soviet first strike. Reagan scrapped Carter’s idea of a vast racetrack. Reagan’s administration tried three different ideas, and in 1982 came up with “Dense Pack,” to base 100 MX missiles in super-hardened silos in a strip fourteen miles long and 1.5 miles wide in southwestern Wyoming. The thinking behind Dense Pack was that incoming Soviet missiles would commit “fratricide,” exploding so close to each other as to neutralize the impact and leaving much of the MX force intact. In an effort to build political support, Reagan delivered a nationally televised appeal for the MX missile on November 22, 1982, renaming it “Peacekeeper.” He acknowledged that people had become more fearful that the arms race was out of con
trol. “Americans have become frightened and, let me say, fear of the unknown is entirely understandable,” he said. Despite his appeal, on December 7, the House voted to reject funding for the MX, and the next day the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General John W. Vessey Jr., revealed in Senate testimony that three of the five joint chiefs opposed the Dense Pack basing plan. The MX was in deep trouble, and the political deadlock worried U.S. military leaders.46 The MX was their answer to preserving the land-based leg of the strategic triad, the land-sea-air combination at the backbone of deterrence. That summer, Admiral James D. Watkins, chief of naval operations, had concluded the United States was heading into a dangerous dead end, what he called a “strategic valley of death.”47 Robert Sims, a retired navy captain who was then a spokesman for the National Security Council, said the joint chiefs had concluded “this is probably the last missile this Congress is ever going to go for. They were frustrated. They weren’t certain they would get the MX and they knew they couldn’t get anything after MX. So they said, ‘We’ve got to look beyond MX.’”48
It was in this environment of political deadlock that Reagan began to look over the horizon. What happened next was a blend of old imaginings and fresh pragmatism, animated by Reagan’s faith in American high technology and a touch of science fiction. In the final months of 1982 and then early 1983, Reagan embraced a grand dream: to build a massive globe-straddling shield that would protect populations against ballistic missiles and make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” The missile defense was never constructed. It was nothing more than a ghost invention. But the concept preoccupied and puzzled the Soviet Union for years to come. To understand Reagan, it is important to understand the origins of the dream.
As a boy, Reagan read fiction voraciously, including the science fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs, among them Princess of Mars, a story with visions of polished domes over cities and impregnable walls. By the time he reached young adulthood, Reagan abhorred warfare. At twenty years old, he wrote a wrenching sketch of combat while at Eureka College in 1931. The piece was titled “Killed in Action” and described a World War I trench battle scene.49 Reagan was appalled at the power of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Appearing before a leftist audience in 1945, he gave a dramatic reading of a poem, “Set Your Clock at U235,” by Norman Corwin, which referred ominously to “skies aboil with interlocking fury.”50
To these ideas, Reagan added a philosophy of anti-communism, which he polished on the speaking circuit in the 1950s and 1960s. In one notable address, he outlined a strategy of pushing the Soviet economic system to collapse. It was the early 1960s, when Khrushchev and Kennedy were in power. Reagan fumed that Kennedy and the “liberal establishment of both parties” have been pursuing “a policy of accommodation with the Soviet Union.”
“The theory goes something like this,” Reagan said. “As time goes on the men in the Kremlin will come to realize that dogmatic communism is wrong. The Russian people will want a chicken in every pot, and decide some features of decadent capitalism make for more plentiful poultry, while their system hasn’t even provided a pot. By a strange paradox us decadent capitalists will have discovered in the meantime that we can do without a few freedoms in order to enjoy government by an intellectual elite which obviously knows what is best for us. Then on some future happy day Ivan looks at Joe Yank, Joe looks at Ivan, we make bridge lamps out of all those old rockets, and discover the cold war just up and went away …”
Reagan said disdainfully: “Our foreign policy today is motivated by fear of the bomb, and is based on pure conjecture that maybe communism will mellow and recognize that our way is better.” He wanted permanent competition with the Soviets, not “appeasement” and “accommodation.”
“If we truly believe that our way of life is best aren’t the Russians more likely to recognize that fact and modify their stand if we let their economy come unhinged so that contrast is apparent?” Reagan said. “Inhuman though it may sound, shouldn’t we throw the whole burden of feeding the satellites on their slave masters who are having trouble feeding themselves?”51
Reagan often tore out articles from Human Events, a far right-wing newspaper, and other sources, stuffing them into his pockets for later use in speeches. He frequently got facts wrong, as journalists liked to point out. But aside from his carelessness with details, there was a method. Reagan borrowed disparate ideas, radical as well as mainstream, and fastened them together.
So it was with his vision of missile defense. The visit to NORAD in 1979 had rekindled the idea. Another prompt came from Daniel O. Graham, a retired army lieutenant general, a hawkish former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger. Graham created a study group known as High Frontier, chaired by Karl R. Bendetsen, a former undersecretary of the army and retired chief executive of Champion International Corporation, a forest products company. Several of Reagan’s wealthy kitchen cabinet friends backed the effort and provided money to carry out the study. Reagan met at the White House for nineteen minutes with Bendetsen and two other members on January 8, 1982. Bendetsen handed the president a memo claiming the Soviets had already surpassed the United States in military offensive power, and urging Reagan to start a crash effort to research strategic defenses.52
Yet another prompt came from Edward Teller, the theoretical physicist who founded the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and played a key role in the development of the hydrogen bomb. As California governor, Reagan had visited Livermore for a two-hour briefing on missile defense in November 1967. Teller, a Hungarian who fled fascism in the 1930s, had long dreamed of a weapon that could shoot down ballistic missiles in flight. At the time Reagan visited Livermore, the Johnson administration had announced plans to build a very limited missile-defense system, Sentinel. Later, Nixon redirected it to a larger system called Safeguard, a two-layered defense built to protect 150 Minuteman missiles in North Dakota. Safeguard was taken down in 1976, having become essentially useless against a Soviet missile force carrying MIRVs, which enlarged the potential number of incoming warheads beyond the ability of Safeguard.
Nonetheless, Teller continued to nurse his dream of a weapon that could shoot down missiles. He claimed that nuclear weapons were about to make the leap to a “third generation,” the first generation being atomic bombs and the second the hydrogen bomb. The third generation, he said, would be nuclear-pumped X-ray lasers in space that could destroy ballistic missiles.
Teller met with Reagan in the Oval Office for a half hour on September 14, 1982. Teller, then seventy-four years old, shook hands with Reagan. “Mr. President,” he said. “Third generation, third generation.” Reagan looked momentarily confused, as if Teller were preparing to talk about his relatives.53 Then Teller explained his vision of an X-ray laser that he called Excalibur. An effective missile defense would turn mutual assured destruction on its head, Teller said—and lead to “assured survival” instead. Reagan asked him if an American antimissile system could really be made to work. “We have good evidence that it would,” Teller replied. In his memoirs, Teller recalled feeling afterward that the meeting was not very successful; a National Security Council staffer “injected so many questions and caveats that I felt discouraged about the conference.”54 But Reagan had been listening. “He’s pushing an exciting idea,” Reagan wrote in his diary that night, “that nuclear weapons can be used in connection with Lasers to be non-destructive except as used to intercept and destroy enemy missiles far above the earth.” Reagan may not have fully grasped that Teller was talking about setting off nuclear explosions in outer space.55
The MX political impasse weighed heavily on the Joint Chiefs of Staff when they filed into the White House Cabinet Room at 11 A.M. on December 22, 1982, to meet Reagan. At one point near the end of the meeting, Anderson said, Reagan asked the military leaders, “What if we began to move away from our total reliance on offense to deter a nuclear attack and moved toward a relatively greater
reliance on defense?” After the chiefs went back to the Pentagon, Anderson said, one of them telephoned Clark, the national security adviser, and asked, “Did we just get instructions to take a hard look at missile defense?”
“Yes,” Clark said, according to Anderson.56
Soon after, on January 3, 1983, the president announced creation of a bipartisan commission to review the entire strategic weapons program and to recommend alternative basing modes for the land-based missiles. This was an attempt to break the political stalemate.57
In the same weeks, Admiral James D. Watkins, the chief of naval operations, the top officer of the navy, accelerated his own search for answers. Watkins had no concrete suggestions for revising the structure of U.S. strategic forces, nor was he prepared to suggest a replacement for offensive nuclear deterrence, according to historian Donald R. Baucom.58 But Watkins and the other chiefs were notified they would meet with Reagan again soon. The joint chiefs were also looking for a way out of the political deadlock.
On January 20, 1983, Watkins had lunch with a group of high-level advisers that included Teller, who described his hopes for the nuclear-pumped X-ray laser. Watkins found Teller intensely excited about the idea, predicting it could be ready in the next twenty years. Watkins did not favor the nuclear explosions in space, but he directed his staff to help him come up with a short, five-minute presentation he could make “which would offer a vision of strategic defense as a way out of the MX debate.” On February 5, Watkins presented it to the other chiefs in Vessey’s office and was surprised: the other chiefs went along, weary of the gridlock with Congress. They agreed the chairman, Vessey, would present it to the president.
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