A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (154 page)

Reagan also made a serious error by inserting peacekeeping troops in Lebanon. This was an expensive mistake, which he quickly repented. In 1983 he had dispatched American marines to Beirut to separate warring militias there. A suicide bomber drove a truck full of explosives through sentry checkpoints and blew up the marine barracks at the Beirut airport, killing 241 marines and wounding more than 100. Lebanon caused the president to rethink the key requirements for any future U.S. action. Military forces, he determined, should be committed only under the following conditions: (1) if the cause is “vital to our national interest,” (2) if the commitment is made with “clear intent and support needed to win the conflict,” (3) if there is “reasonable assurance” that the cause “will have the support of the American people and Congress,” and (4) as a last resort, when no other choices remain.
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Between 1988 and 2002, three U.S. presidents committed American forces (only two sent ground troops) to three major engagements—the Gulf War, the Bosnia/Kosovo conflict, and the war on terror in Afghanistan. In two of the three, Reagan’s conditions were met, and both engagements proved militarily successful, receiving full backing of the public and Congress. However, in the third (Bosnia/Kosovo), where only U.S. air units were involved, the record was mixed: there was no vital interest, other options were not exhausted, and the public was far from united.

Later, in his dealings with the USSR, Reagan added yet one more strategic objective, known as the Reagan doctrine. Rather than contain the Soviet Union, the United States should actively attempt to roll it back. Freedom, he observed, “is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings….” He predicted that “Marxism-Leninism would be tossed on the ash heap of history like all other forms of tyranny that preceded it.”
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Microprocessors and Missiles

It was at that point that the new computer/information sector converged with Reagan’s steadfast goal of defeating Soviet communism to produce one of the most amazing wonder weapons of all time. Perhaps the most amazing thing about it—the weapon was a space-based defense shield called Star Wars—was that it was not built and still has not been deployed (although parts of the technology are in use). Understanding the phenomenal impact of the computer on national security in the cold war, however, requires a cursory review of America’s computer industry.

The rise of computers dates from Charles Babbage’s nineteenth-century punch cards to the ENIAC computer of World War II. A key breakthrough occurred in 1952, when Texas Instruments researchers discovered that silicon, which could sustain temperatures of 1,200 degrees Celsius, was the perfect sealant for a transistor. In 1971 another company, Intel, managed to put an entire computer on a single chip called a microprocessor.

Virtually every other machine in human history had gotten more powerful by getting larger. This fact was epitomized by the internal combustion engines in use in Detroit’s “muscle cars” at the very time the personal computer (PC) was invented. Obversely, computers promised to become more powerful the
smaller
they got, and to work faster the hotter they became. Chips, whose central element was silicon (available from ordinary sand), thus portended to offer a limitless resource, overthrowing the tyranny of physical materiality to a great extent. Finally, computers reinforced the pattern in American history that the most significant technological breakthroughs never come from leaders in the field but from total unknowns—many of them completely outside the field of their great success.

Within five years of the microprocessor’s invention, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, two California college dropouts, founded the personal computer industry with Apple Computers, Inc., in the Jobs family garage. Selling each Apple for $666, Jobs and Wozniak gained reputations as geniuses, and their company joined the Fortune 500 in less time than any company in history.
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Apple was quickly eclipsed by other computer companies, but Jobs and Wozniak had “taken a technology of government and big business…and humanized it, putting power in the hands of the people in the most immediate sense of the term.”
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Starting from a time of essentially no computers in homes, the U.S. computer “population” had swelled to one computer for every 2.6 people by 1990. This amounted to the most rapid proliferation of a product in human history: the PC took only sixteen years to reach one fourth of all Americans compared to radio’s twenty-two years, electricity’s forty-six years, and television’s twenty-six years.
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Computer technology alone did not ensure the success of the PC, however. An equally important breakthrough came from a Seattle-born Harvard dropout named Bill Gates, who, along with partner Paul Allen, cracked the language problem of programming computers, introducing BASIC in 1975, and founded Microsoft. Gates eventually refined and popularized the DOS system, used by virtually all computers by the 1990s. Solving the language problem was the equivalent of putting all of the trains of the 1850s on the same gauge rails. Gates reached his apex with the introduction of Windows, which used a point-and-click “mouse” controller to give the computer commands. In the process, he became the richest American in history, with a personal wealth exceeding that of Carnegie or Rockefeller in dollar equivalents.
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Jobs, Gates, and the “boys of Silicon Valley” had not only transformed the information industry, but had touched off a revolution as profound as the industrial revolution, redefining every activity in terms of measurement, improvement, or facilitation through the application of computers. More important, as they did so, the prices of computers (especially microprocessors) plummeted, making them almost literally dirt cheap.
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All that remained was to find a way for computers to “talk” to each other or, to stay with the railroad metaphor, to hook all the train tracks together.

In 1969, under a Pentagon contract, four universities connected their computers, and three years later e-mail was developed. By 1980, some online news and discussion groups had appeared. Although the World Wide Web was not formally inaugurated until 1991, and the early Internet was still complex and highly limited to select users, it was nevertheless hurtling full speed toward the business and civilian sectors. Government was involved in the original Pentagon hookups, but true intercomputer communication did not occur until the free market found ways to exploit its commercial potential.

This promise was seen in the burst of patent activity. (The total number of patents in the United States actually fell until the Reagan tax cuts.) High-temperature superconductors appeared early in the decade, which set in motion a torrent of patents—just under 150,000 by 1998, or triple what the number had been in 1980. This was the most rapid patent expansion in American history, eclipsing the period 1945–75, which had seen the introduction of the transistor, the polio vaccine, and the microprocessor.
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Computer technologies played a critical role in ending the cold war but only when they were placed in the policy “hands” of a leader who had the insight to use them to the fullest advantage. That leader was Ronald Reagan. In his first press conference, the president announced his opposition to the SALT II treaty, which the Senate had not passed in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Announcing his intention to rectify the imbalance in forces between the United States and the USSR, Reagan signaled to the communist leadership that he would never allow the Soviet Union to attain military superiority. It was a message that terrified the entrenched Soviet leadership. In one of Yuri Andropov’s final decrees before stepping down from his fifteen-year term as chairman of the KGB, he stated that the most pressing objective of all Soviet spies, whatever their rank or specialty, was to ensure that Reagan was not reelected.
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Soviet resistance only convinced Reagan all the more. In short order, Reagan had authorized the construction of one hundred B-1 bombers, continued funding of the controversial B-2 Stealth bomber, commissioned a speedy review of the MX missile to determine the most survivable deployment disposition, and ordered the armed forces to deploy cruise missiles (some of them with nuclear warheads) on all available platforms. At the same time that he ditched SALT II, Reagan offered genuine reductions under the new Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), but movement from the Soviet side occurred only after the Reagan buildup. Moreover, the powerful Trident submarines went on station concurrent with Reagan’s inauguration, and so, in a heartbeat of time, the window of vulnerability slammed shut.
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To anyone capable of evaluating the strength of the U.S. and Soviet economies, Reagan’s defense budget illustrated another reality: he intended to spend the Soviets into the ground. The United States could continue to grow its defense sector severalfold without severe economic disruption. Soviet leaders knew that, and they knew they could not. Perhaps even more obvious, there was an innovation gap between the communist and capitalist systems that translated into nonmarket sectors like the military. A top-down structure like Soviet Russia adopted new technologies reluctantly and eyed with suspicion anything that threatened to overturn the existing military hierarchy.
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The vise had been set. On March 8, 1983, Reagan gave it another twist.

Speaking to the American Association of Evangelicals, Reagan told the assembled clergy that “appeasement…is folly,” for they could not ignore the “aggressive impulses of an evil empire.”
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Intellectuals and the media were angered and dumbfounded by the speech, which was received quite differently behind the Iron Curtain. Two former Soviet historians later reminded westerners, “The Soviet Union finds life-giving energy only in expansionism and an aggressive foreign policy.”
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The “evil empire” speech paved the way for one of the most momentous events of the post–World War II era. On March 23, 1983, in a television address, after revealing previously classified photographs of new Soviet weapons and installations in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada, and reviewing the Soviet advantage in heavy missiles, Reagan surprised even many of his supporters by calling for a massive national commitment to build a defense against ballistic missiles. He urged scientists and engineers to use any and all new technologies, including (but not limited to) laser-beam weapons in space.

A hostile press immediately disparaged the program, calling it Star Wars after the 1977 George Lucas film, but unwittingly the media and critics had only underscored the moral superiority of the system. In the film
Star Wars
everyone knew that Luke was the good guy and the evil emperor was a decrepit and corrupt dictator, much like the Soviet tyrants. Reagan’s concept baffled reporters and Washington liberal elites who secretly viewed it as lacking sufficient intellectual weight. Stu Spencer, a political strategist, explained why Reagan was at once so popular with the public and so despised by the chattering classes: “Reagan’s solutions to problems were always the same as the guy in the bar.”
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The Gipper had always viewed MAD as an insane policy. He told Lou Cannon, “It’s like you and me sitting here in a discussion where we are each pointing a loaded gun at each other, and if you say anything wrong or I say anything wrong, we’re going to pull the trigger.”
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As early as 1967 he had been asking scientists and engineers about the technology of defeating ICBMs with antimissiles. He found support from Admiral James Watkins, the chief of naval operations, a devout Catholic who hated MAD and who was outraged by a pastoral letter from the U.S. Catholic bishops condemning the nuclear arms race without ever implicating the USSR as its cause. Watkins and army general John Vessey were encouraged to get beyond the narrow MAD thinking that had shackled the United States for twenty years.

Kremlin insiders were terrified about the proposed program, largely because they knew it would work. Since the early 1970s, Soviet scientists and engineers had conducted a dedicated program of testing for ruby quartz lasers and charged-particle beam weapons. When confronted by the massive cost of such weapons, however, especially when having to acquire technology commonplace in the United States, the Soviet Union gave up on lasers in favor of blunt instruments like the single warhead silo-buster missiles.

Several realities of Star Wars were irrelevant. It would not be ready for years. It might violate existing arms control treaties (but not the proposed START). Even when deployed, it could not be 100 percent effective against incoming warheads. And there were other complaints about Reagan’s proposal. America’s allies, except for the staunch supporter Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of England, were ill at ease with anything that would give either side a distinct edge, a stance that had evolved from the fear of provoking the Soviets into an invasion the Europeans could not withstand. The Soviets railed against it. But all of these criticisms of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), as the program was formally called, were completely irrelevant to its intended result: to render obsolete, once and for all, much of the USSR’s advantage in nuclear missiles.
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Reagan had been briefed on the concept in 1982. He and his national security adviser, Robert S. McFarlane, both despised the MAD strategy, believing it was both immoral and destabilizing. It locked the country into a position of barely staying even with the Soviets instead of permitting opportunities to seek superiority. Once he and McFarlane agreed on SDI, it took only a year to flesh out and propose in a national policy initiative. Star Wars “was an example of Reagan’s ability to grasp a big new idea, simplify it, and sell it to the American people with consummate skill.”
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He wanted reductions, not limitations, but he knew that the Soviets would never negotiate while they held all the cards. Star Wars changed all that, literally in the space of an hour.