The Dead Hand

by David Hoffman

  If Akhromeyev heard the discussion, he must have been personally torn. He hated to think they were wasting what they had built at such cost. But he was committed to Gorbachev, and perhaps even more important, Akhromeyev understood the folly of the original decision to deploy the Pioneers aimed at Western Europe. Chernyaev concluded, “As a military professional, he realized the danger Pershing II missiles posed to us, and he had always disapproved of the policy of targeting SS-20s on the U.S.’s NATO allies. A ‘local nuclear war’ was by definition impossible.”22 Other military leaders were not so farsighted. “Gorbachev had to go through a difficult struggle with his own generals,” Chernyaev said. “It took a long time to convince them to get rid of the SS-20s in Europe.”

  When Thatcher came to Moscow, March 23 to April 1, 1987, she told Gorbachev that it was folly to eliminate nuclear weapons. Sitting across the table from each other in Saint Catherine’s Hall, they had a vigorous argument, not unlike their first one at Chequers. “You, Madam Thatcher, with your stance on nuclear weapons, hamper the negotiations and hinder efforts to start a process of genuine disarmament,” Gorbachev said. “When you solemnly declare that nuclear weapons are beneficial, it’s clear that you are an ardent supporter of them—prepared to accept the risk of war.”

  Thatcher “got very tense, blushed, and her expression hardened,” Chernyaev recalled. “She reached out and, touching Gorbachev’s sleeve, began to talk without letting him get in a word.” She insisted that nuclear weapons had kept the peace. “She became so excited that the discussion got completely out of hand. They started to interrupt each other, repeat themselves, assure each other of their best intentions.” When Thatcher flew home, she described it as the most fascinating and important overseas visit she had ever taken; she realized “the ground was shifting underneath the communist system.”23

  Gorbachev revealed his deep frustrations to Shultz on April 14. At a Kremlin meeting, he complained the Reagan administration was behaving as if nothing was going on in the Soviet Union, when in fact it had a better opportunity to improve relations than any U.S. administration in decades. “Where do we go from here?” he wondered.24 They immediately began to wrestle over details of how to eliminate the Pioneer and Pershing II missiles. The negotiations to eliminate intermediate-range missiles were to cover those with a range of between approximately 300 and 3,500 miles. The Pershing IIs had a maximum range of 1,100 miles, and Pioneers about 3,100 miles. The Soviet Union had also deployed a relatively new short-range missile, the SS-23, named after the Oka, a Russian river. The single-stage, solid-fueled Oka was easily moved around on trucklike launchers, which could erect and fire it. The Soviet military calculated the range of the SS-23 as only 250 miles, and thus felt it should not be included in negotiations on intermediate-range missiles. American experts guessed it might have greater range, given the size of the projectile.25 The missile was prized by the Soviet military because of its mobility, and it was capable of carrying either nuclear or conventional warheads. Earlier, Gorbachev had offered to freeze the level of these missiles, and he went still further and proposed negotiating deep cuts, and ultimately elimination.

  But in the Kremlin meeting, Shultz suggested the United States first wanted to build up its arsenal of short-range systems to match Soviet levels, after which they could negotiate.

  Gorbachev unexpectedly offered, on the spot, to eliminate the Oka missiles altogether, if the United States would agree to a “global zero,” or none on either side.

  When Gorbachev made the offer, Akhromeyev, the chief of the General Staff, was not in the room. He was scheduled to arrive only later, after a break.

  Shultz replied to the offer by saying he would consult with the NATO alliance.

  “Why can’t you make a decision?” Gorbachev insisted.

  Shevardnadze interjected, “I am amazed that the United States is objecting to unilateral Soviet elimination of operational short-range missiles.”

  Gorbachev had just made an extremely sensitive concession. By the time Akhromeyev entered the hall later for a discussion of strategic weapons, Gorbachev had abandoned a whole weapons system. Akhromeyev only found out the next day, when he saw his name was on the list of attendees at the meeting, put there because Gorbachev wanted to show he had approved. Akhromeyev later said the concession was a “miscalculation” that infuriated the generals. “The military leadership was indignant at the incident with the Oka,” Akhromeyev recalled. “The Foreign Ministry didn’t give any appropriate explanation of the one-sided deal. The first serious split appeared between the military and Shevardnadze.” The generals tried to fight back in the months that followed, but were reprimanded. Gorbachev had maneuvered skillfully to get his way against his own military, but he still lacked any tangible result from the Americans. Appearing before the Politburo days later, Gorbachev sputtered in frustration that Shultz could not make a decision on the spot. The conversation was good, he said, but “essentially empty—we did not move anywhere.”26

  “We have to recapture the initiative,” said Shevardnadze.

  From his office at the Central Committee, Katayev, the precise and careful staffer, slowly came to a profound conclusion: the leadership of the country—hierarchical, centrally planned, rigid and hidebound by long practice—simply had no process for deciding how to abandon and destroy the weapons it had built at such enormous cost, even if disarmament had been a propaganda line for decades. The previous strategic arms control treaties from the Nixon and Carter era had only limited the growth of weapons, and destroyed none of them. The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention had outlawed an entire class of weapons and the Soviet Union secretly built them anyway. There was no road map for retreat. Katayev recalled it was an enormous psychological barrier, as well as a practical roadblock to decisions.

  Katayev, who understood the excesses, quietly set about changing the way defense decisions were handled in the Kremlin. In the Brezhnev years, designers and builders filled the power vacuum. Once Gorbachev came into office, specialists like Katayev and others gained a greater voice. For the most part, in their private discussions, Katayev found the specialists favored disarmament, and were cognizant of the Soviet overkill. At the top, a group of powerful decision-makers remained from earlier times. They were known as the “Big Five”: the Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry, KGB, the Military Industrial Commission, and the Central Committee. Katayev elevated the role of technical experts like himself as a “working group” serving the Big Five. It marked a shift in the way arms control was handled in the Kremlin, giving the technocrats and specialists more input, although few knew about it outside. All the documents describing the change were stamped “Top Secret.” On May 6, 1987, members of the Big Five sent Gorbachev a recommendation to make Katayev’s arrangement permanent. Gorbachev signed it.27

  Another shoot of fresh thinking about how to brake the arms race came to the surface at the military’s General Staff headquarters in Moscow. Valery Yarynich had been assigned to work at the headquarters of an internal think tank, the Center for Operational-Strategic Research, established just as Gorbachev took power. Yarynich, the communications expert who had once witnessed the Cuban missile crisis panic, arrived at the center in 1985 after finishing with Perimeter, the semiautomatic nuclear missile retaliatory system. As glasnost blossomed, Yarynich enjoyed a freedom to raise issues with relative openness inside the heart of the Soviet military, and he devoted himself to analyzing the risks of nuclear war. “We had a chance to think and say what we thought without fear of punishment,” he said. The research center was given a difficult task—to find the theoretical justification to support lower levels of nuclear weapons. It was a forward-thinking idea born of Gorbachev’s new era. He was assigned to run a research project called Kupol. The project used mathematical models to study scenarios of a possible first-strike nuclear attack from the United States.

  Yarynich and his coworkers on Kupol found a very important insight in the mathematical models. When consideri
ng a possible nuclear attack, it was not enough to just measure the number of warheads that would probably reach their targets, or the number that could retaliate. The Soviet command and control systems, which were reliable and split-second, also had to be figured into the calculation. If one took command and control into account, then mathematical models showed the goal of deterrence could be guaranteed with a drastic reduction of nuclear arsenals. This was because it was likely there would always be at least some retaliation for an attack. Even the smallest retaliation in a real nuclear war meant pretty massive destruction. The attacker always faced this uncertainty. Thus, Yarynich concluded, the massive overkill of the arms race was unnecessary.

  Yarynich was seized with an idea—what if the two superpowers could open up and share such mathematical models? What if the leaders could see what he and his coworkers had discovered in Kupol? But the reaction from Soviet military leaders was not very encouraging. They could not imagine exchanging top-secret command and control data with the United States. “The old thinking prevailed over the new,” Yarynich recalled.

  At the same time, he saw on the streets that the “new thinking” and glasnost of Gorbachev were spreading. Barriers were collapsing everywhere. One day, the experts, including Yarynich, got a translated copy of a book published in the United States in 1985. The book, The Button: America’s Nuclear Warning System—Does It Work? by Daniel Ford, questioned whether command and control was the weak link in the American nuclear deterrence. Yarynich said the Russian experts were “astounded by the degree of openness, detail and healthy criticism which the author used to describe the American system. And it dealt no harm to America whatsoever!” Yarynich suggested that his staff prepare a similar work. Once again, his suggestion went nowhere.28

  By summer 1987, nearly two years had passed since the space designers and rocket builders had put on Gorbachev’s desk their blueprints for a sprawling Soviet version of the Strategic Defense Initiative. To see their handiwork, Gorbachev flew to the Soviet cosmodrome at Baikonur, in Kazakhstan, on May 11. The next day, he toured the launch pad for the giant two-stage, four-engine heavy space booster, Energia. Wearing a hard hat and in a business suit, Gorbachev walked in a broad circle clockwise around the enormous white booster, which stood 190 feet tall and weighed 2,400 tons fully fueled. It was full at that moment. For weeks, the launcher had been kept in two-day readiness for takeoff. The Energia had never flown before and was built to carry the Soviet space shuttle, the Buran, but the shuttle was not ready, so designers planned instead to use the first launch of the Energia to carry aloft a mysterious black cylinder. On the black vehicle was painted the name Polyus, or Pole, in white letters on the outside, but inside it carried the Skif-DM, the demonstration model of the space laser weapon, the most tangible result so far of the drive to build a Soviet Star Wars. The Skif-DM was among those projects that had been touted to Gorbachev by the space designers in 1985, shortly after he took office. Since then, work had been rushed. In fact, there was no laser inside; the Skif-DM was a mock-up, a placeholder for a possible future weapon. The Soviet builders had not mastered the technology.

  Gorbachev had spent the last two years warning the United States against weapons in space—precisely the purpose of Skif-DM. As Gorbachev was briefed, walking around the huge booster on May 12, with other Politburo members trailing behind, examining the white rocket and black cylinder, he abruptly told the designers: “The Politburo is not going to allow you to launch this rocket.” Gorbachev had said many times he did not want an arms race in space—and he meant it.

  Boris Gubanov, the chief designer, was dumbfounded, but tried to carry on. He explained to Gorbachev details of the heavy launcher: fuel, tremendous pressures and temperatures at launch. In the next hour or so, Gorbachev softened. He asked if they could wait a few months. Gubanov said it was impossible: the rocket was ready, it was fueled, people worked around the clock, they could not sustain such a pace. At lunchtime, Gubanov recalled, the word came back: permission to launch. The next day, Gorbachev praised the workers at Baikonur. And he reminded them, as he had done so often before, “We are categorically against moving the arms race into space.”

  Gorbachev left the cosmodrome on May 14. At 9:30 P.M. the next day, the Energia roared into the night sky with the Skif-DM payload inside the mysterious black container, Polyus.

  The Energia booster performed flawlessly. Four hundred and sixty seconds after launch, the Polyus separated from the Energia.

  Then something went wrong. The Polyus was supposed to turn 180 degrees and fire engines to push itself into higher orbit. Instead, it kept turning all the way to 360 degrees, so when the engines fired, it was in the wrong direction. It shot itself back down toward Earth. The Polyus flew straight for the Pacific Ocean.

  The black Polyus cylinder fell into the sea. All work on the Skif project came to a halt.

  Gorbachev did not attempt to revive the Skif. He did nothing—another step toward his goal of slowing the arms race.29

  The most devastating defeat for the Soviet military in 1987 came not directly from Gorbachev, but he exploited it. It came at the hands of a dreamy nineteen-year-old youth who lived in Hamburg, Germany. Mathias Rust was deeply disappointed by the failure of Reagan and Gorbachev to make a deal at Reykjavik. He decided to make a personal protest. He rented a single-engine Cessna 172P, a sports airplane, and told his family he was going to tour Scandinavia. He flew it to the Faroe Islands on May 13, and the next day to Keflavik, Iceland, the airfield from which Reagan and Gorbachev had departed after the summit.

  After further travel, on May 28, he took off from Helsinki, having filed a flight plan for Stockholm. Twenty minutes into the flight, he switched off his communications gear and turned east. Finnish air traffic controllers feared he had crashed and launched a rescue effort. Rust disappeared into the clouds.

  It was a holiday in the Soviet Union: “Border Guards Day.”30 At 2:25 P.M., the Cessna, with a small German flag on the tail, flying low, crossed a beach into Estonia and Soviet airspace. Thirty-one minutes later, Rust passed near the town of Kohtla-Yarve, at approximately three thousand feet. He set a course for Moscow. The Soviet air defense system picked up the plane, alerted the antiaircraft batteries and scrambled a fighter jet. The Soviet jet pilot zoomed past the small Cessna—flying seven times the speed of the small craft—and reported that it was a light plane, white, with a blue stripe, at under three thousand feet. Rust saw the Soviet jet, recognized the red star, and could spot the oxygen mask and coveralls of the pilot. He feared he would be shot down. “My heart fell into my pants,” he recalled. But then nothing happened, the fighter disappeared and Rust flew on toward Moscow.

  On the ground, Soviet air and ground defenses, built up over decades to warn of American bomber fleets bearing nuclear weapons, went limp. Radar operators made no effort to determine the type of airplane that had just invaded their space. They made no immediate report to the headquarters of the Air Defense Forces. The rapidly changing weather and a certain blurriness on the radar screen caused the operators to doubt whether it was a plane at all; they thought it might be a flock of birds.31The fighter jet had only forty minutes of fuel at low altitudes, and could not remain aloft longer to search. Another group of jets were scrambled; one spotted Rust, but they did nothing. Then the radar operators lost track of Rust altogether at 3:58 P.M. No further action was taken. At 6:38 P.M., the Moscow regional air defenses switched to “routine watch duty.”

  At exactly that moment, Rust was approaching Moscow, confused by its sprawling size. He spotted the cubelike Rossiya Hotel, and near it, Red Square. He approached for a landing, but there were people in the square, and he feared casualties, so Rust pulled up and circled again, and again.

  On the third approach, Rust spotted a wide, open road bridge, and landed on it at 6:45 P.M., taxiing the plane toward Red Square and St. Basil’s Cathedral. A crowd gathered around as Rust, with oversized aviator eyeglasses and an orange jacket, climbed out and announced h
e was on a mission of peace. He was arrested by the KGB and taken away.

  Rust’s solo flight riveted the attention of the country and the world. Jokes were told in Moscow in the days that followed: a group of citizens gathered in Red Square with their luggage. When a policeman asked why they were there, they answered, “We are waiting for the flight to Hamburg.” But Rust’s daring stunt was no joke for the military. It came at the dawn of the age of low-flying, radar-evading cruise missiles. If he could make it all the way to Moscow and be mistaken for a flock of birds, then what of the country’s defenses against cruise missiles? The Soviet military was red faced. The rules after the Korean Air Lines disaster in 1983 were not to shoot at civilian intruders, but to force them to land. They had not even tried.

  Gorbachev was in Berlin meeting with Warsaw Pact leaders—telling them of the new Soviet military doctrine—when he got word. He told the Soviet allies that Rust’s stunt “was no reason to doubt the efficiency of our technology or the reliability of our defense,” but in private, he was floored. “I was utterly shaken and completely at a loss as to how this could have happened,” he recalled.32 As Gorbachev stepped off the plane back in Moscow, Chernyaev recalled, his eyes were “flashing with anger.” Chernyaev wrote Gorbachev a note before a Politburo meeting the next day. “A great military power was reduced to a joke in the space of a minute,” he said. “What happened forces us to reflect again on the state of the army. Our equipment wasn’t at fault. To spot such a tiny aircraft, 1930s-era technology would suffice. Rather it was a broader carelessness and lack of responsibility that was to blame, not an episodic problem but something endemic that reflects a much more serious illness in the armed forces.” Chernyaev pleaded with Gorbachev to consider undertaking a reform of the military and to fire the defense minister, Sokolov. “Maybe I’m blinded by anger and emotion over this shameful incident, which, in one moment, devalued not only our air defenses but our entire military structure. But I believe that perestroika and new thinking cannot be successful without a reform of the army.”33