secure in the knowledge … that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies.”59 At the time, Reagan was both applauded as a hero and dismissed as a dunce. Nonetheless, his vision held a broad appeal for many Americans who were tiring under the intense strain of the decades-long nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union.
Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was initially dubbed “Star Wars” by its detractors, but despite this early ridicule, ballistic missile defenses have now survived as a key U.S. strategic goal for more than thirty years. The concept is unlikely ever to be abandoned by either U.S. political party, not least because there is now a bureaucracy dedicated to creating missile defenses, and bureaucracies rarely surrender their own existence willingly. But it is also undeniable that the idea is popular, now as it was then, with an American public that supports the reassuring promise of knocking down incoming nuclear missiles. This public support is understandable, as most people do not understand the costs or technical challenges associated with such defenses; indeed, a plurality of U.S. voters in the late 1990s supported missile defenses because they thought the United States already had them.60
Reagan’s blistering rhetoric, combined with his administration’s adoption of Carter’s nuclear strategy and the subsequent additional challenge of SDI, convinced some of the key figures in the Kremlin that the United States was determined to launch a nuclear first strike against the USSR. Even before Reagan came to office, Soviet intelligence stations worldwide were given instructions to note any possible signs of an American nuclear attack; later accounts suggest that this paranoia was heavily centered in the KGB rather than shared throughout the Soviet government, but within a few years it was a consuming fear among many of the hidebound older leaders in Moscow.61 In late 1983, a NATO nuclear exercise code-named “Able Archer” triggered a Soviet nuclear alert in Eastern Europe, surprising Reagan and his advisors and serving as one of several incidents that convinced Reagan that he had to ratchet down tensions with the USSR.62
U.S.-Soviet talks did not get far, not least because three successive Soviet leaders—Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko—all died in the five years of Reagan’s presidency. When the Soviet leadership chose the younger and more forward-looking Mikhail Gorbachev as their new chairman in 1985, both he and Reagan both moved quickly and jointly affirmed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” As Reagan’s second term drew to a close, the “abolitionist” was finally able to take steps to realize his dream, one he came to realize he shared with Gorbachev, and together they engaged in a significant step toward denuclearizing Europe. Both the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to remove their most threatening and destabilizing nuclear systems from the Continent in a landmark 1987 treaty, and both sides agreed to pursue further cuts in the future. Gorbachev, however, was soon consumed with trying to hold together the disintegrating USSR, and it would fall to Reagan’s successor, President George H. W. Bush, to complete the delicate task of helping to manage the peaceful collapse of a nuclear superpower.
The first President Bush acted with a speed and decisiveness that would rarely be seen again in the American nuclear establishment. Until 1990, nuclear reductions were difficult for the Americans to consider without progress on reductions in conventional forces, but once it was clear that Gorbachev was also going to remove a substantial part of the Soviet Army from Eastern Europe, Bush pressed ahead on nuclear arms and seized the brief window between the Soviet collapse in 1991 and the emergence of the new Russia in 1992 to start shedding Cold War nuclear weapons and practices.63
As journalist David Hoffman later described, Bush took dramatic steps during the Soviet interregnum to initiate changes to the U.S. nuclear deterrent.
[Bush] launched a significant pullback of U.S. nuclear weapons, both land and sea. He did it without drawn-out negotiations, without a treaty, without verification measures and without waiting for Soviet reciprocity.
Bush announced the United States would eliminate all of its ground-launched battlefield or tactical nuclear weapons worldwide, and withdraw all those on ships; stand down the strategic bombers from high-alert status; take off hair-trigger alert 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles; and cancel several nuclear weapon modernization programs. The announcement meant a pullback of 1,300 artillery-fired atomic projectiles, 850 Lance missile nuclear warheads, and 500 naval weapons.
In one stroke, Bush pulled back naval surface weapons that the United States had earlier refused to even discuss as part of strategic weapons negotiations.64
Bush also disbanded the institutional guardian of nuclear war planning, the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command, and replaced it in 1992 with the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which would thereafter be responsible for all U.S. strategic nuclear weapons. The Air Force and the Navy would continue the day-to-day maintenance and control of their respective nuclear systems, but ultimate authority in time of crisis and war would rest with this new command.
The first Bush administration has since entered the history books as a committee of level-headed realists, including Secretary of State James Baker, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, and others. In many subsequent depictions of the administration (including those of Bush and Scowcroft), these men and women formed a kind of college of foreign affairs cardinals whose policies rested primarily on cold calculations of U.S. national interest. In 1991, however, President Bush himself acted like anything but a realist. Reacting to the changing conditions of international politics, rather than to the distribution of power, he unilaterally discarded weapons and practices that had long ago ceased to serve any purpose.
George H. W. Bush was perhaps the most accomplished of all U.S. presidents in the field of foreign policy. Bush’s achievements were undeniable: he helped to reunify Germany, guided the final days of the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion, and organized the most successful United Nations coalition since the Korean War to eject the Iraqi army from Kuwait. But by 1992, his services were no longer required. Voting less than a year after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and in the midst of a recession, Americans turned aside his re-election bid. Fifty years of war were over, the North American heartland was safe once again, and it was time to enjoy the fruits of peace and prosperity. The U.S. electorate was ready to turn its attention away from foreign affairs in general and from the nuclear arms race in particular. It even seemed to many people that the world had reached, in scholar Francis Fukuyama’s often-misunderstood phrase, “the end of history.”65
History, as new U.S. President Bill Clinton would learn, had other plans.
The end of this “second” Cold War and the cessation of political hostilities finally halted the surreal arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, but it resolved almost nothing among American defense intellectuals, military planners, and policymakers about nuclear deterrence. The legacy of these intellectual divisions lives on in current arguments about nuclear weapons and deterrence. Is deterrence a condition that can be created independently, or is there a way it can be sized or tailored to fit each opponent? Is there a minimum level of nuclear force that guarantees safety? Do nuclear weapons really deter other states at all, and if deterrence fails, can they be used?
These questions, as will be seen, have remained central to a series of dedicated but ultimately frustrating attempts in Washington to make sense of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and its purpose into the twenty-first century.
Chapter 2
Nuclear Weapons After the Cold War: Promise and Failure
Over time, as arsenals multiplied on both sides and the rhetoric of mutual annihilation grew more heated, we were forced to think about the unthinkable, justify the unjustifiable, rationalize the irrational. Ultimately, we contrived a new and desperate theology to ease our moral anguish, and we called it deterrence.
—General George Butler, U.S. Air Force, 1997
We have been unable so far to do better than just sort of go on intellectual autopilot.
—General Butler, a year later
The Power of Inertia
The