The Dead Hand

simulate evacuating the president on Jan. 28, 1977, went awry. Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Advisor, 1977–1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1983), pp. 14–15. Brzezinski asked William E. Odom, then a colonel general on the White House National Security Council staff, to study the chain of command and control of nuclear weapons. The study revealed weaknesses in the system. The two presidential directives were an outgrowth of the study. Odom interview, Feb. 3, 2006; Odom, “The Origins and Design of Presidential Decision-59: A Memoir,” in Henry D. Sokolski, ed., Getting Mad: Nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction, Its Origins and Practice (Carlisle, Pa.: U.S. Army War College, 2004). On targeting the Soviet leadership, see Hines, vol. 2, p. 118. Andrew W. Marshall, the director of the Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, told Hines that “PD-59 was developed to reinforce deterrence by making it clear to the Soviet leadership that they would not escape destruction in any exchange. The objective was to clarify and personalize somewhat the danger of warfare and nuclear use to Soviet decision- makers.”

CHAPTER 1: AT THE PRECIPICE

1 See www.cheyennemountain.af.mil.

2 Morrow later promoted NASA programs. See Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson and Martin Anderson, eds., Reagan: A Life in Letters (New York: Free Press, 2003), p. 107.

3 Martin Anderson, Revolution: The Reagan Legacy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), pp. 80–83.

4 Reagan radio address, May 29, 1979, “Miscellaneous 1,” reproduced in Reagan in His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America, Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, Martin Anderson, eds. (New York: Free Press, 2001), p. 104. The treaty was signed by Carter and Brezhnev in Vienna on June 18.

5 Draft copy, “Policy Memorandum No. 3,” August 1979, author’s possession. Anderson knew Reagan had in earlier years disagreed with President Nixon’s decision to limit missile defenses in the 1972 ABM treaty. “We bargained that away in exchange for nothing,” Reagan had said. See “Defense IV,” Sept. 11, 1979, Reagan in His Own Hand. Anderson interview, Sept. 10, 2008.

6 In his memoir, Reagan wrote: “Nothing was more important to mankind than assuring its survival and the survival of our planet. Yet for forty years nuclear weapons had kept the world under a shadow of terror. Our dealings with the Soviets—and theirs with us—had been based on a policy known as ‘mutual assured destruction’— the ‘MAD’ policy, and madness it was. It was the craziest thing I had ever heard of: Simply put, it called for each side to keep enough nuclear weapons at the ready to obliterate each other, so that if one attacked, the second had enough bombs left to annihilate its adversary in a matter of minutes. We were a button push away from oblivion.” Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 13.

7 Ronald Reagan, The Reagan Diaries (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), June 7, 1981.

8 Martin Anderson, presentation, Oct. 11, 2006, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, “Implications of the Reykjavik Summit on Its Twentieth Anniversary.” Also, communication with author, Sept. 10, 2008.

9 Tony Thomas, The Films of Ronald Reagan (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1980), pp. 98–99.

10 Laurence W. Beilenson, The Treaty Trap: A History of the Performance of Political Treaties by the United States and European Nations (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1969), pp. 212, 219–221.

11 The author covered the Reagan campaign as a reporter for Knight-Ridder newspapers, and never picked up on Reagan’s nuclear abolitionist views. Yet his thinking was expressed in earlier years. See Reagan’s 1963 speech text, “Are Liberals Really Liberal?” in Reagan in His Own Hand, and Reagan’s address to the 1976 Republican National Convention, Anderson, pp. 69–71.

12 Reagan, “Peace: Restoring the Margin of Safety,” address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, Chicago, August 18, 1980.

13 David Hoffman, “Reagan’s Lure Is His Optimism,” Detroit Free Press, Summer 1980.

14 Reagan, An American Life, p. 267.

15 Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (New York: Times Books, 1995), p. 484.

16 Lou Cannon, Ronald Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), pp. 299–301. Reagan’s diary for April 23 includes one version of what he calls a “script” of a letter written by hand. This is a short letter. In An American Life, pp. 272–273, Reagan reprints a broader version of the handwritten letter, apparently reflecting revisions by the State Department and others.

17 James A. Baker III, “Work Hard, Study…And Keep Out of Politics!” (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2006), p. 163.

18 Reagan, An American Life, p. 273.

19 Thomas C. Reed, At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), pp. 266–270.

20 Gus Weiss, “The Farewell Dossier,” Studies in Intelligence, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, vol. 39, no. 5, 1996.

21 Pelton volunteered information about the program as early as his first contact with the Soviets on Jan. 15, 1980, and received $20,000 from them in October. He received another $15,000 in 1983. Pelton was arrested in 1985 and convicted of spying in 1986. See United States of America v. Ronald William Pelton, Indictment, U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Dec. 20, 1985, case no. HM- 850621.

22 Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (New York: PublicAffairs, 1998), p. 230.

23 Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), p. 583.

24 Thomas C. Reed communication with author, Nov. 21, 2006.

25 Richard Halloran, “Pentagon Draws Up First Strategy for Fighting a Long Nuclear War,” New York Times, May 30, 1982, p. 1.

26 Charles Mohr, “Preserving U.S. Command After Nuclear Attack,” New York Times, June 28, 1982, p. 18.

27 Thomas C. Reed, interview, Dec. 4, 2004.

28 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 354.

29 Reed, p. 236.

30 Gaddis, p. 354.

31 Reagan diary, March 26, 1982.

32 NSDD 32 is dated May 20, 1982. But the next presidential directive, NSDD 33, is dated a week earlier, May 14. Reed said Clark put it into the system the day before he was to deliver a public speech, on May 21, describing the new approach.

33 Reagan admitted having trouble. “Some of the journalists who write so easily as to why we don’t sit down and start talking with the Soviets should know just how complicated it is,” he wrote. Reagan diary, April 21, 1982.

34 Reagan, An American Life, p. 553. See Dobrynin, pp. 502–503. In November 1981, Reagan had unveiled another arms control proposal, for intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe. This was his “zero option,” proposing that the United States would forgo deployment of the Pershing IIs and GLCMs if