fact that Reagan’s moves in Afghanistan constituted the closest the administration ever came to fighting a direct war with the Soviets. Though actual troops were absent, Reagan ensured that the rebels had everything else necessary that they would need to fight the war and prevent a Soviet victory. By soliciting the help of Afghanistan’s neighbors, Reagan had also made it easier for covert aid to flow, leaving fewer American fingerprints on the machinery of war.
But despite Reagan’s efforts to end things decisively as quickly as possible, the battles continued as Gorbachev adhered to his two-year commitment to victory. Lives were being lost on both sides, but it was clear that the war was having a severe, negative impact on the Soviet Union. Forced to reconcile this military commitment to the myriad of other problems that Reagan had created, the new general secretary and his followers struggled to keep their heads above water, and Reagan’s team searched for more means to make their lives miserable.
THE ROLE OF THE ARMS RACE
While Gorbachev hoped that victory might be possible in Afghanistan, he was not so convinced about the Soviet role in the arms race. For Mikhail Gorbachev, the Reagan arms challenge was the only issue that loomed larger than Afghanistan upon his arrival as general secretary, as he sought to stop what he called the “lethal,” “costly and dangerous arms race,” which he listed as his number one priority.48 The arms race was his fixation upon entering office and absorbed the bulk of his focus during 1985.
To Gorbachev, this was an issue that was tearing apart the Soviet economy like no other, and it did not take long for him to convince his colleagues of the fact. Soon after his arrival, it became passe to flip on Moscow TV and watch Georgi Arbatov screech that “the most important contribution to the cause of true freedom”— Arbatov’s “true freedom” was eternal totalitarian Communism—“would be the end of the arms race.”49
This was the reaction Reagan had long desired to see, as he believed that the Soviet system and economic philosophy had created severe internal problems that would rip the USSR apart. Pondering how his administration “could use these cracks in the Soviet system to accelerate the process of collapse,” he concluded that someone had to pry a crowbar between the cracks and twist. Communism had rotted the wood; the crowbar would tear it asunder.50 In order to form this crowbar, Reagan focused on the internal contradictions, employing his staff to search out the cracks hidden below the surface and to engage them. As his aides pursued this strategy, one of the more prominent fissures was the continuous, detrimental impact that the arms race was having on the Soviet economy. From early on in Gorbachev’s tenure, it became clear that his vehement opposition to the arms race stemmed in large part from his country’s inability to sustain it.
This reality demonstrated the effectiveness of Reagan’s arms policies over the previous several years. Despite appeals from Gorbachev abroad and Democrats at home, Reagan did not want to end an arms race that had proven to be one of his most effective weapons against the USSR. For every dollar the United States spent on a weapon, the Soviets increased spending by a corresponding amount. The Kremlin was struggling to get any bang for the ruble; an infusion of billions of U.S. dollars would markedly aggravate the task. The success of the arms race up until 1985 made the challenge at hand clear and the imperative immediate.
Despite the fact that many administration officials supported this interpretation of the arms race, the then Secretary of Defense, Cap Weinberger, interviewed nearly twenty years after the fact, said that he did not see his task as trying to spend Moscow into oblivion, and was never so instructed. “I actually did not hear [Reagan] talk about that at all,” said Weinberger in an October 2002 interview. “I must say that I didn’t see a deliberate attempt to bankrupt them.” Rather, “I saw him [Reagan] trying to gain military strength for its own sake, for security, to counteract them, to make up for our weaknesses.” According to Weinberger, Reagan desired military power “because not having it was dangerous for the United States.” It was Weinberger’s charge to lessen that danger by expanding the military.51
A month after the above interview, Weinberger was publicly asked pointedly if the Reagan administration pursued a military buildup to bankrupt the Soviet Union. “I don’t think it was a conscious attempt to bankrupt them,” he replied. “It was a conscious attempt to tell them they could never win or prevail in an arms race with us.” In saying this, Weinberger quickly acknowledged that there does not appear to be a big difference in his two statements, though he ensured there is a difference.52
In Weinberger’s judgment, the military had deteriorated to a “truly appalling” state under President Carter, an ill which he and Reagan believed they could remedy through a buildup that would bring the Soviets to the bargaining table. In his memoirs, Weinberger listed four goals for the buildup, none of which were to “bankrupt” the USSR. And yet, he believed the buildup had that effect. “Our military buildup had an economic impact [on the USSR],” wrote Weinberger. “What else, besides President Reagan’s determination to win the Cold War, won it? First: Our military buildup.”53 In Weinberger’s eyes, the arms race bankrupting the Soviets was an incidental effect of Reagan’s policy, and an indirect result of the stated administration policy.
But while Weinberger did not view himself as tasked to spend the Soviets into the grave, other key administration players (and the Soviets) believed this to be precisely Reagan’s goal for a military buildup. Richard Allen, the first national security adviser, and Reagan’s foreign-policy adviser throughout the decisive latter 1970s (when Weinberger was not), states that Reagan decided from the start of his presidency that the United States would be dedicated to a plan of “spending it [the USSR] into oblivion.”54 He said Reagan saw an arms race as a means of shoving the enemy off the plank.55
This view of the arms race was one that Reagan seems to have advocated long before he became president. In discussing U.S.–USSR relations in that previously cited early 1960s speech, he said, “the only sure way to avoid war is to surrender without fighting.” “The other way,” he asserted, “is based on the belief (supported so far by all evidence) that in an all-out race our system is stronger, and eventually the enemy gives up the race as a hopeless cause.”56 In the 1970s, he explicitly stated that this “race” was an arms race. Similarly, during the 1980 campaign he told the National Journal and Washington Post that an arms race was “the last thing” the Soviets wanted to see from their American counterpart: “They know that if we turned our full industrial might into an arms race, they cannot keep pace with us. Why haven’t we played that card?”57
Once in office, Reagan looked to play that card. He continued to reiterate the importance of engaging the Soviets in an arms race that forced them to spend money beyond their means. In an October 16, 1981 interview, Reagan said of the Soviets: “They cannot vastly increase their military productivity because they’ve already got their people on a starvation diet…. If we show them [we have] the will and determination to go forward with a military build-up…then they have to weigh, do they want to meet us realistically on a program of disarmament or do they want to face a legitimate arms race in which we’re racing?…[N]ow they’re going to be faced with [the fact] that we could go forward with an arms race and they can’t keep up.”58
During a January 20, 1983 press conference, Reagan said he was “hopeful and optimistic” that the Soviets “cannot go on down the road they’re going in a perpetual arms race.” “And so,” he hinted, “this is one of the things in connection with our own arms race.”59 The next day he said that “if we ever hope to get disarmament, we will only get it by indicating to them that if they’re going to keep on with that buildup, they’re going to have to be able to match us, because we’re going to build up.”60 He added this anecdote: “There was a cartoon that explained it all. Brezhnev, before he died, was supposed to be talking to a Russian general. And he said to the general, ‘I liked the arms race better when we were the only ones in it.’”61 Connecting the dots, Reagan summed up: “So, this is what we’re doing. We want peace.”62
Looking back, in his memoirs, Reagan said candidly, “we were going to spend whatever it took to stay ahead of [the Soviets] in the arms race.” He figured, “Someone in the Kremlin had to realize that in arming themselves to the teeth, they were aggravating the desperate economic problems in the Soviet Union, which were the greatest evidence of the failure of Communism.” He noted, with irony that would have made Lenin cringe, that “the great dynamic success of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism— money.” The Soviets, Reagan explained, “could never win the arms race; we could outspend them forever. Moreover… we had the capacity to maintain a technological edge over them forever.”63
