Despite the internal Soviet debate over SDI’s practicality, Gorbachev concluded that SDI was yet another contributing factor to the downward spiral of the arms race. The Kremlin worried that responding to SDI in this form would further bankrupt the USSR. Ambassador Oleg Grinevsky recalls the dread of being “sucked into” a competition over dueling SDIs.91 As MajorGeneral Vladimir Slipchenko confirmed, “SDI did harm us. Our military industrial complex was able to obtain some money and we created our own SDI [research program] for Moscow, which nobody needed.”92 In addition, Gorbachev and his comrades feared SDI could be transformed into an offensive system equipped with sophisticated space-based lasers, with SDI research generating spin-off benefits for the U.S. military—that is, an entire line of new, cutting-edge technologies.
In the end, the Soviets made counter investments in response to SDI. Roald Sagdayev, head of the Soviet Space Research Institute, said Moscow spent “tens of billions of dollars” reacting to SDI. He confirms that Soviet generals insisted on measures to counter the missile-defense project, including an all-out effort to upgrade the USSR’s land-based ICBMs. “This program became priority No. 1 after Mr. Reagan’s announcement of the ‘Star Wars’ in 1983,” said Sagdayev. Sagdayev said that this spending weakened the USSR and may have contributed to its demise.93
The importance of SDI was apparent throughout the Reagan-Gorbachev summits of 1985–86. Prior to the first summit in Geneva in November 1985, Reagan wrote a prophetic note to himself, predicting that if Gorbachev “really wants an arms control agreement, it will only be because he wants to reduce the burden of defense spending that is stagnating the Soviet economy.” Furthermore, Reagan estimated that the technological challenge posed by SDI “could contribute” to Gorbachev’s opposition to the program. The general secretary did not want “to face the cost of competing with us.” Reagan realized that, “Any new move on our part, such as SDI, forces them to revamp, and change their plan at great cost.”94
As recently declassified documents of conversations at the Geneva summit reveal, Reagan’s assumptions regarding Gorbachev’s negotiating tactics proved quite adept over the course of their meetings. In fact, during a conversation on November 20, Gorbachev even went so far as to insinuate that Reagan proceeded with SDI solely to hurt the USSR economically—the same thing he repeatedly told his Central Committee in tense sessions.95 According to minutes from the meeting, Gorbachev told Reagan that he had observed to a Soviet scientist that he could see “no reason” for Reagan’s commitment to SDI, but that the scientist had found the explanation: SDI would produce six hundred billion to a trillion dollars in new military expenditures. In other words, SDI would be a tool in Reagan’s economic war to bankrupt the USSR. “That was the reason” for SDI, said Gorbachev.96
At Geneva, Gorbachev urged that he and Reagan do everything possible to halt SDI and the arms race. So fearful was he of SDI that 90 percent of the official notes (declassified in 2000) from his second one-on-one encounter with Reagan at Geneva were consumed with jousting over SDI.97 Anatoly Dobrynin confirms that Gorbachev’s “principal goal” at Geneva was to stop SDI.98 Similar sentiments were echoed at the Reykjavik summit in October 1986, where Reagan’s Chief of Staff Don Regan said that Gorbachev was worried about SDI to the point of fixation.99 Gorbachev was so concerned about SDI at Reykjavik that he actually proposed to eliminate all nuclear missiles if Reagan simply gave up missile defense.
At each summit, Reagan saw the panic in Gorbachev’s eyes, and he liked what he saw.100 Each time, Gorbachev demanded that Reagan abolish or at least curtail SDI.101 So common were the Soviet general secretary’s diatribes that Reagan officials began casually referring to Gorbachev’s “usual tirade about SDI.”102 It was a tirade that was no doubt well-rehearsed: according to Reagan’s director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, three-quarters of the USSR’s propaganda budget from 1984 to 1986 was directed solely against SDI.103
Despite stern warnings from Gorbachev, who repeatedly threatened to terminate all progress on cutting nuclear arms until Reagan gave up the program, Reagan held firm on SDI, refusing to negotiate it away. He remained true to two core convictions: his desire to reduce nuclear weapons and to continue research on missile defense, without compromising either principle in the face of Gorbachev’s vigorous protests.
Reagan clearly understood SDI’s persuasive power. And yet, when asked if SDI was “not just a bargaining chip,” he responded flatly, “No. Oh, no…. No, no.”—a point he reiterated on other occasions.104 He wrote in his memoirs: “As the myths grew, one of them was that I had proposed the idea [of SDI] to produce a bargaining chip for use in getting the Soviets to reduce their weaponry. I’ve had to tell the Soviet leaders a hundred times that the SDI was not a bargaining chip.”105
At the same time, he recognized SDI’s leverage. “One thing is clear,” he concluded. “SDI truly serves the purposes of offensive weapons reductions.”106 To Reagan, SDI was “not a bargaining chip in that sense—of being willing to trade off the research and stop what we’re doing in order to get x number of missiles eliminated.”107 He pursued SDI on its own merits, as a missile-defense program intended to produce a missile-defense system, not as a bargaining chip to be negotiated away. Moreover, he told the press, if he suggested it might be a bargaining chip, it could indeed become one.108 On the other hand, the power of SDI to bring the Soviets to the table became crystal clear to him.
Moreover, Reagan realized that the mere pursuit of SDI, even if the system was never built, served to bring the Soviets to the table, making it worthwhile for that reason alone. On one occasion, he mentioned this to Ed Harper, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and professor at Rutgers, who was Reagan’s deputy director of OMB. “[I]n my role in the budget process,” said Harper, “I assured him that we couldn’t afford [SDI]. He responded, ‘It doesn’t make any difference. Out of whole cloth we are creating an important bargaining chip to deal with the Soviet Union in negotiating arms control. They don’t know whether we are going to have it or not; we don’t know whether we are going to have it or not. But it is something to negotiate with that we don’t have today, so I’m going to do it.’”109 This was a viewpoint that he mentioned frequently, sharing it with his first national security adviser, Richard Allen, his current national security adviser, John Poindexter, and Margaret Thatcher. To Thatcher, he stressed that SDI constituted an enormous economic burden on the USSR.110
At one point, Reagan’s team put forth an NSDD on SDI. Written primarily by Ambassador Paul Nitze and signed on January 1, 1985, in anticipation of the Shultz-Gromyko meeting in Geneva, the directive formalized (administration-wide) the president’s understanding of SDI’s influence. “Another important factor influencing Soviet behavior,” said NSDD-153, “especially in returning to nuclear arms reduction negotiations, is the Soviet desire to block our Strategic Defense Initiative.” An “overriding importance of SDI” was that it provided “new and compelling incentives to the Soviet Union for seriously negotiating reductions in existing nuclear arsenals.”111
And yet, it is important to understand the internal opposition that Reagan faced. By 1985–86, said one observer, nearly “every senior member” of the administration had recommended a “grand compromise” on SDI.112 Among them, George Shultz never gave up, constantly pushing Reagan to relent on SDI, and was especially adamant at Reykjavik.113 Along the same lines, Paul Nitze, a Reagan arms- control negotiator and respected, veteran figure of the Cold War, spoke of how his negotiating team was seeking a deal with the Soviets in which any movement toward deployment of SDI would be delayed at least ten years. All the Joint Chiefs of Staff were “wholly in agreement,” said Nitze, “so that it was really just Reagan against most of the rest of the administration on this.”114
Like the pipeline, SDI proved to be a scenario in which Reagan confronted the rest of the world, including his own advisors. It was an unrelenting resistence that came from his constant faith in the course he had chosen, and while the resistance would never subside, neither would Reagan.115
PUBLIC DENIAL, PRIVATE PURSUIT
While Reagan had long advocated an arms race as a means to weaken the USSR, he was considerably less forthcoming on the matter as president. During their November meeting in Geneva, he told Gorbachev, “our goal is not an arms race.”116 And yet, at the same summit, during their one-on-one “fireside chat” at the boathouse cottage, he told Gorbachev that the choice the two faced “was either an agreement to reduce arms or a continuation of the arms race, which,” he taunted the general secretary, “I think you know you can’t win.”117 On a separate occasion at Geneva, Gorbachev urged the president yet again: “I beg you to
