his staff to come up with an announcement on missile defense even before the commission was finished. The president was to deliver a nationally televised address about the defense budget on March 23. Although McFarlane had reservations about moving so quickly, he began to draft an insert for the address that would launch a research effort toward strategic defense. McFarlane typed the first draft March 19. It was a major change from decades of American reliance on offensive forces. The president did not consult Congress, the allies, or even the cabinet until the last minute. Nor did he consult the commission on strategic forces, which was still hard at work. McFarlane said it was Reagan’s idea to keep it under wraps to keep his potential opponents off-guard.67
The idea had materialized largely outside the official policy-making channels. Just weeks before, Reagan signed a new directive on overall strategy toward the Soviet Union in the wake of Brezhnev’s death. The nine-page document covered all the key military, political and economic questions. Yet this key document, a foundation of American policy, included not a single word about missile defense.68 Likewise, by this point, Reagan had submitted four separate defense budget requests to Congress; none made a priority of missile defense.69 The joint chiefs were surprised; they had no idea that Reagan was going to act so quickly.70 Shultz heard of the proposal only two days before Reagan went on national television, and had grave doubts about it.71 Weinberger was opposed, and learned of it at the last minute, while traveling in Europe. Some of Reagan’s aides learned only on the day of the speech. Reagan’s diary shows that after Shultz objected on March 21, he rewrote the section on strategic defense; the next day he rewrote more of the speech—“much of it was to change bureaucratic into people talk.”72 Reagan said he was working on it “right down to deadline” on March 23. Among others, Teller had been invited as a guest to witness the broadcast, sitting on a folding chair in the East Room of the White House while Reagan spoke from the Oval Office.
In the address, Reagan described yet again the window of vulnerability. The Soviets, he said, “have enough accurate and powerful nuclear weapons to destroy virtually all of our missiles on the ground.” Reagan said deterrence had worked—so far. He promised to keep negotiating with Moscow. But then Reagan said he wanted to offer another way.
In words he had written by hand into the text, and which echoed what Watkins had said in their meeting, Reagan declared, “Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them?” Reagan said that in recent months, he and his advisers and the Joint Chiefs of Staff “have underscored the necessity to break out of a future that relies solely on offensive retaliation for our security.” Reagan added, “Over the course of these discussions, I have become more and more deeply convinced that the human spirit must be capable of rising above dealing with other nations and human beings by threatening their existence.”73
“Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive. Let us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base, and that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today.”
Reagan then asked: “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” He summoned “the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”
The president then announced that, as “an important first step,” he was ordering up “a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles.” He closed by saying, “My fellow Americans, tonight we’re launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history. There will be risks, and results take time. But I believe we can do it. As we cross this threshold, I ask for your prayers and your support. Thank you. Good night. And God bless you.”
Reagan’s invention, his vision, was no more than these words. He had spent only twenty-nine minutes on television. Nothing he described about missile defense was in existence, no one in his government had formally proposed it, and whether anything so ambitious could be built was in serious doubt. But he had performed. “I made no optimistic forecasts—said it might take 20 yrs. or more but we had to do it,” Reagan wrote in his diary after the address. “I felt good.”
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WAR GAMES
Four days after Reagan’s speech, Andropov lashed out. He accused the United States of preparing a first- strike attack on the Soviet Union, and asserted that Reagan was “inventing new plans on how to unleash a nuclear war in the best way, with the hope of winning it.” But Reagan’s hazy vision was not Andropov’s deepest fear. Rather, it was the looming deployment of the Pershing II missile in Europe, which the Kremlin thought could reach Moscow in six minutes. The Soviets felt events were turning against them.
Starting in the late 1970s, under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union had deployed the Pioneer missile, known in the West as the SS-20, with 243 missiles aimed at Western Europe and 108 targeted on Asia. The Pioneer had a maximum range of 3,100 miles, more than enough to hit Paris and London, but it was classified as medium or intermediate range, less than the big intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov said “astronomical amounts of money were spent” on the Pioneer. But, he added, “The short-sighted Soviet strategists had handed the Americans a knife with which to cut the Soviet throat.”1 In response to the Pioneer deployments, NATO decided in 1979 to station 108 single-warhead Pershing II and 464 ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe, in range of the Soviet Union, as a counterweight while seeking to negotiate. Reagan had proposed in 1981 to eliminate this entire class of medium-range missiles, but the Soviets refused and negotiations went nowhere.2
By 1983, Andropov was consumed with the threat of the approaching Pershing II missile deployment, expected in West Germany in December. The Pershing II was feared for its accuracy and speed—the missile could fly at nearly Mach 8, greater than six thousand miles per hour, and carried high-precision guidance systems. The ground-launched cruise missile could fly under radars. These were the weapons that the Soviet leaders feared could lead to decapitation. The Pershing IIs were so worrisome that builders of the Moscow antiballistic missile system were urged to alter it to detect and intercept them.3
Andropov and the Politburo met on May 31, the day after Reagan and leaders of the Western industrial democracies had concluded a summit in Williamsburg, Virginia. Although they quarreled privately over the missiles, the Western leaders issued a statement calling on the Soviet Union to “contribute constructively” to the arms control talks.
The statement triggered irritation in the Politburo. According to minutes of the meeting, the aging Soviet leaders wrestled with how to stop the Pershing IIs and ground-launched cruise missiles. Not one word was spoken in the meeting specifically about Reagan’s antimissile speech or his grand dream. The Politburo members sounded uncertain, without new ideas. Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov insisted, “Everything that we are doing in relation to defense we should continue doing. All of the missiles that we’ve planned should be delivered, all of the airplanes put in those places where we’ve designated.”4
Andropov’s fear of the Pershing II missiles ran through his instructions to the KGB to keep watch for signs of a nuclear attack. The February document that Gordievsky had leaked to the British described, in an attachment, how advance knowledge of a possible attack would give the Kremlin precious minutes to ready retaliation. The instructions said, “For instance, noting the launching of strategic missiles from the continental part of the USA and taking into account the time required for determining the direction of their flight in fact leaves roughly 20 minutes reaction time. This period will be considerably curtailed after deployment of the ‘Pershing 2’ missile in the FRG [Federal Republic of Germany], for which the flying time to reach long-range targets in the Soviet Union is calculated at 4–6 minutes.” The instructions added, “It is thus fully evident that the problem of uncovering the threat of RYAN must be dealt with without delay.”5
Gordievsky said the KGB agents in London were constantly being urged by Moscow to spread propaganda against the Pershing II missiles. “We discussed it quite a lot in the meetings in the morning with the military attache,” he recalled. “He said, ‘They fly from Britain to Moscow in eight minutes! And they penetrate underground bunkers.’ Apart from that, there were a number of telegrams.
