Reagan: The Life (64 page)

For these reasons, nuclear strategists pinned their hopes for deterrence on the concept of “mutual assured destruction,” acronymed as MAD. The MAD concept never made anyone very happy. It required constant rationality in those with their fingers on the nuclear triggers, and rationality had failed innumerable times in humanity’s past. It also required that Soviet leaders perceive crises in roughly the same terms American leaders did. The MAD approach invited nuclear bluffing—“
brinkmanship,” in the vernacular—with one side or the other hinting or openly threatening nuclear war. Dwight Eisenhower had rattled his nuclear saber during crises in East Asia in the 1950s; John Kennedy had pushed to the brink of nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962. The Soviets had declined to test the American resolve in these cases. But skeptics wondered whether this was simply dumb luck, and almost no one believed it was indefinitely repeatable.

The best that could be said of MAD was that it was the least bad of the feasible options. The worst that could be said of it was that it was morally bankrupt, holding billions of innocent people hostage to the failure of world leaders to find an alternative; that it blighted the lives of all who dwelled under the nuclear shadow; and that it was bound to fail eventually, humans being the imperfect and unpredictable creatures they are. Meanwhile, it compelled the two sides in the Cold War to accept the grotesque paradox that the most dangerous thing either side could do was to develop a defensive system. If Soviet leaders, for example, learned
that the United States was about to deploy a defensive shield that would repel Soviet
missiles, they would be tempted to attack before the system became operational. And they would feel this temptation even if their sentiments were otherwise peaceable, for they would have to allow that the Americans might soon experience the euphoria of invulnerability and act on their delirium.

Reagan was no student of nuclear strategy, and he had never immersed himself in the soul-warping arcana of the craft. But his instincts told him MAD was wrong, and he hated the position it put him in. Reagan’s son Ron recalled discussing the grim subject with his father. “
Several years earlier, prior to my father’s announcement of SDI, I had spoken with him about the possibility of some sort of umbrella defense against nuclear attack,” Ron said. “Dad’s greatest horror as president—and one hopes he’s not alone in this—was the thought that through misunderstanding, unforeseen circumstance, or some bizarre technical glitch, he would be compelled to launch our nuclear missiles on warning. ‘I have to believe the Russian people are no different from Americans,’ he would tell me. ‘Hell, they’re victims of their own government. Why should millions of them have to die, along with millions of our people, because leaders on both sides couldn’t work things out?’ ” Reagan hoped that one day leaders
would
work things out and eliminate nuclear weapons; until then, strategic defense held the best hope of averting disaster.

The president’s military advisers were willing to oblige his quest for an escape from MAD, albeit with various motives. Caspar Weinberger shared Reagan’s philosophical dissatisfaction with existing strategy, and he especially scorned the experts who had made it the touchstone of their professional lives. “
To those who traipse from resort to resort reading each other’s papers on security and strategy,” Weinberger said, “the idea that any country might try to defend itself against the nuclear missiles of any other country was not only revolutionary; it was sacrilegious.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed to pursue alternatives to MAD after assuring themselves that for the foreseeable future strategic defense would complement, rather than replace, strategic offense. Almost never during the Cold War had America’s generals and admirals rejected new spending on the military, and Reagan’s chiefs didn’t reject it now.

The consensus within the administration informed a National Security Decision Directive signed by the president in May 1982. The directive ordered continued research and development of the MX and added, “
R&D on Ballistic Missile Defense will also continue to hedge against
Soviet ABM breakout, to assist us in evaluating Soviet BMD activity, and to provide an option for increasing M-X survivability.”

The turgid language of the decision directive left much to be desired in terms of mobilizing public opinion. Admiral
James Watkins, the chief of naval operations, gave the president the formula he was looking for. “
Would it not be better,” Watkins asked the president rhetorically, “if we could develop a system that would protect, rather than avenge, our people?” Reagan nodded emphatically. “Exactly,” he said.

R
EAGAN DEVOTED MORE
effort to the wording of his SDI speech than he gave to almost any other address. “
Much of it was to change bureaucratic talk into people talk,” he remarked to himself as he finished the draft. He invited a special group of diplomats, scientists, military officers, and national security experts to the White House to hear him deliver the speech. He met with them afterward. “
I guess it was O.K.,” he wrote later that evening. “They all praised it to the sky and seemed to think it would be the source of debate for some time to come.”

The president’s guests were right in predicting that his strategic defense proposal would produce debate. Critics immediately labeled it “Star Wars,” after the George Lucas film franchise, and contended that it was no more realistic than that cosmic fantasy. Pentagon-phobes perceived an excuse for astronomical new spending at a time when the administration was trying to cut nearly everything else. Serious students of nuclear strategy predicted that Soviet countermeasures—chiefly more offensive missiles—would be less expensive than the American defenses, with the result that the United States would have spent a great deal of money to no lasting avail. The specialists also cited the destabilizing aspects of defensive deployments, at least in the transition period between MAD and SDI. Margaret Thatcher echoed this concern, telling Reagan, “
Ron, it will make you look like you are going to launch a first strike.”

Reagan rarely let criticism deflect him from goals he believed in. He refused to let the criticism deflect him now. Instead, he listened to the praise served up by the White House staff. “
The reports are in on last night’s speech,” he wrote in his diary the day after the SDI unveiling. “The biggest return—phone calls, wires, etc., on any speech so far and running heavily in my favor.”

R
EAGAN WAS PERFECTLY
serious about strategic defense, as events would prove. But he was also quite aware that it would get the attention of the Soviet leadership at a time when that leadership was in flux. Leonid Brezhnev had died four months earlier, in November 1982. The longtime Soviet leader had been ill for months, preventing any progress on arms control, and Reagan hoped his death might move matters forward. The president and his national security team debated whether he should attend Brezhnev’s funeral and meet his successor, whoever that might be. They ultimately decided against, unsure what he would be getting himself in for. Reagan sent George Bush and George Shultz in his place. After the ceremony the vice president and the secretary of state met
Yuri Andropov, the Kremlin’s new chief and formerly head of the Soviet intelligence agency, the
KGB. Bush joked that the two had something in common, each having been their country’s top spy. Andropov didn’t laugh. Shultz judged Andropov a figure to contend with. “
He looked more like a cadaver than did the just-interred Brezhnev, but his mental powers filled the room,” Shultz recalled. “He reminded me of Sherlock Holmes’s deadly enemy, Professor Moriarty, all brain in a disregarded body.” Andropov’s background, if nothing else, suggested toughness. “I knew that Andropov, as head of the KGB for so long, must have a capacity for brutality as well as for skill in propaganda,” Shultz said. “I put him down as a formidable adversary.”

Reagan soon seconded Shultz’s view. The president tried to forge a personal connection with Andropov. He invited Soviet ambassador
Anatoly Dobrynin to the White House and said he wanted a direct line of
communication to Andropov: “
No bureaucracy involved.” Dobrynin was impressed. “This could be an historic moment,” he said.

Reagan followed up with a handwritten note to Andropov. “
We both share an enormous responsibility for the preservation of stability in the world,” he said. “I believe we can fulfill that mandate, but in order to do so, it will require a more active level of exchange than we have heretofore been able to establish.” The president repeated his wish to bypass normal channels. “Our predecessors have made better progress when they communicated privately and candidly.”

Andropov thanked Reagan for the note. “
I have considered its contents with all seriousness,” he said. But the American government needed to demonstrate its good intentions if it sincerely sought an arms agreement. A starting point would be the cancellation of American plans to install
intermediate-range missiles in Europe. “So long as the United States has not begun deploying its missiles in Europe, an agreement is still possible,” Andropov said. Once deployment began, a deal would be out of the question. Reagan had suggested discussing the affairs of Central America and Eastern Europe. “What is there to be said?” Andropov responded. Soviet policy would be guided, as it always had, by the principle of sovereignty: “Every people, every country, wherever they may be located, should be masters of their fate.”

Reagan realized he wouldn’t get far if Andropov insisted on statements like this. Sovereignty of
Poland? Yet he pressed on. He sent a reply defending his policy on the intermediate-range missiles. “
Their only function would be to balance Soviet systems potentially threatening to Europe, and to ensure that no one in the future could doubt that the security of Western Europe and North America are one and the same,” he said. “Try to see our point of view. What would be the Soviet reaction if we deployed a new, highly threatening weapon against its allies, and then insisted that you should not balance this with something comparable?” He didn’t expect immediate agreement, but he reaffirmed his desire for direct communications. “I think that we must find a way either to discuss these problems frankly, or at the very least, to give greater weight to the attitudes of the other party when making fateful decisions.”

S
UCH SLIM HOPES
as Reagan held for progress with Andropov suffered a grievous blow in September 1983. A Korean Air Lines flight,
KAL 007, strayed off course on a journey from New York to Seoul via Anchorage.
The plane mistakenly entered Soviet airspace over the Kamchatka Peninsula and again over Sakhalin Island. The pilot, crew, and passengers apparently never realized that they were off course or that they were flying near Soviet missile sites. They didn’t know that an American electronic surveillance plane had been in the area and had put Soviet air defense on hair-trigger alert. The coincidence of error, ignorance, and suspicion resulted in the shooting down of KAL 007 by a Soviet fighter plane, with the deaths of all 269 persons aboard. These included 62 Americans, among them a U.S. congressman,
Larry McDonald of Georgia.

Reagan responded with outrage. “
I speak for all Americans and for the people everywhere who cherish civilized values in protesting the Soviet attack on an unarmed civilian passenger plane,” he declared. “Words can scarcely express our revulsion at this horrifying act of violence.”

In subsequent days Reagan elaborated on what the attack revealed about the Soviet system. “
Our first emotions are anger, disbelief and profound sadness,” he told reporters. The war in Afghanistan had shown the Kremlin’s continuing capacity for violence. “But this event shocks the sensibilities of people everywhere.” The despicable Soviet action made meaningful dialogue with Moscow nearly impossible. “What can we think of a regime that so broadly trumpets its vision of peace and global disarmament and yet so callously and quickly commits a terrorist act to sacrifice the lives of innocent human beings?”

Reagan’s outrage was genuine, but his response was calculated.
The CIA and military intelligence soon concluded that the shoot-down was probably a case of mistaken identity: the Soviets confusing the Korean airliner with the American spy plane. Yet the president continued to treat it as deliberate. He convened top members of the executive branch to formulate the American reaction. The State and Defense Departments were represented, naturally, and the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but so were the Treasury and Transportation Departments, the
United States Information Agency, and the Federal Aviation Administration. The deliberations resulted in a National Security Decision Directive signed by the president and crafted to maximize the damage to Soviet prestige and the corresponding benefit to the United States. “
This Soviet attack underscores once again the refusal of the USSR to abide by normal standards of civilized behavior and thus confirms the basis of our existing policy of realism and strength,” the directive declared. Three objectives were defined as paramount. “Seek justice” was the first. “We must consult with, and help to lead, the international community in calling for justice,”
the directive explained. “Civilized societies demand punishment and restitution to deter, and raise the costs of, future egregious acts.” The United States would lobby its allies and protégés to insist on a full accounting of what had happened, an official apology, and punishment of those responsible.

The second objective was to “demonstrate resistance to intimidation.” Here the aim was to “bolster the confidence of our Asian friends, and others, and demonstrate that Soviet intimidation will not achieve its intended end of discouraging our friends from cooperating with us, particularly on mutual security concerns.”

The third objective was to “advance understanding of the contrast between Soviet words and deeds.” The directive elaborated: “Soviet brutality in this incident presents an opportunity to reverse the false moral and political ‘peacemaker’ perception that their regime has been cultivating. This image has complicated the efforts of the Free World to illuminate the USSR’s true objectives.”