The Dead Hand

Shagan, near the eastern shores of Lake Balkhash in Kazakhstan. Scientists, designers and their military patrons dreamed of building powerful beams capable of striking satellites from space battle stations or stopping missiles in flight. They drew designs of lasers in space and on the ground, long before Reagan’s dream was unveiled. But they never knocked anything out of the sky.

One of the legendary Cold War designers was Vladimir Chelomei, architect of the SS-19 intercontinental ballistic missile, the Proton launcher, the Soviet cruise missile and the early anti-satellite weapon. In 1978, near the end of his career, he proposed to build and launch “baby” space shuttles carrying anti-satellite weapons. Velikhov, a rising star in a younger generation, served on a commission to examine Chelomei’s baby shuttle. The commission rejected it, and in the process Velikhov gained a much deeper appreciation of the difficulty of missile defense. “The Chelomei affair was killed,” Velikhov said. “And this was a very good inoculation for Russia against the Star Wars proposal by Reagan, because five years before, we had already had all these internal discussions, with a very detailed analysis on the technical engineering level.”

The challenges of stopping a missile in flight were a technical nightmare. Scientists and engineers in the Soviet Union struggled from 1962 to 1978 to build super-powerful lasers that could knock out satellites and missiles. The first major project, known as LE-1, was a ruby laser, built at Sary Shagan, that eventually proved capable of tracking airplanes about one hundred kilometers away, but not in space, and the laser was not capable of shooting down objects.⁴² A more advanced laser, code-named Terra-3, was also on the drawing boards for a decade, and the plan was to test it at Sary Shagan, where a structure was built for the power source and laser- beam-pointing system. Although Soviet scientists made advances in laser technology during Terra-3, it never worked as a weapon. The reentry vehicles that the system was supposed to shoot down are very difficult targets. The project was abandoned by 1978.⁴³ A follow-up called Terra-3K was also planned, with a goal of using a high-power laser to attack low-orbit satellites, but it never worked.⁴⁴

Despite the Herculean efforts, the designers ran into difficulty when they reached the limits of Soviet technology and innovation and the vexing physics of missile defense. Laser weapons demanded enormous energy sources, superb optics and precision targeting. The designers and scientists struggled with the tendency of a beam to dissipate as it shot into space. Velikhov, as a physicist and vice president of the academy, knew the designers and their troubles. In his own research, he had helped build a magneto hydrodynamic generator, which created huge amounts of electricity in a short burst, a potential laser power supply. Velikhov knew as well that an almost insurmountable roadblock for Soviet designers was the primitive state of their computers. Massive amounts of fast calculations would be necessary to hit a bullet shooting through space. Velikhov was in charge of the academy’s department for computer science. He knew the Soviet Union was a decade or more behind in computer technology.

While many Soviet weapons scientists worked in secrecy and isolation, Velikhov benefited from much broader horizons. When Pope John Paul II called for an examination of the dangers of nuclear war by scientists from around the world, Velikhov was chosen by the authorities to represent the Soviet Union. At the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the autumn of 1982, Velikhov had extensive contacts with scientists in debates over nuclear war and weapons in space. The Vatican declaration called on global powers never to use nuclear weapons in war. “The catastrophe of nuclear war can and must be prevented,” the declaration said.⁴⁵This was consistent with Soviet disarmament propaganda, but the experience in Rome and other meetings gave Velikhov a better understanding of the West that would help him guide Gorbachev. Also, in May 1983, two months after Reagan’s speech on missile defense, Velikhov was named head of a group of twenty-five Soviet scientists intended to warn of the dangers of nuclear war.⁴⁶ Again, promoting Soviet disarmament propaganda may have been the intent, but Velikhov and the scientists steered their own course.

Velikhov was asked by the Kremlin in late 1983 to once again evaluate the Reagan missile defense proposal from a technical standpoint. The conclusion was that Reagan’s dream would not work. The Soviet scientists knew this from their own hard labor and failures. When Gorbachev came to power two years later, Velikhov dusted off the same document. He had accumulated all the knowledge and experience necessary to give an honest and cold-eyed appraisal of the reality of missile defense.⁴⁷

He used that experience at a key turning point in the summer and early autumn of 1985. Velikhov urged Gorbachev not to build a Soviet version of Star Wars. He suggested they abandon the Cold War approach of toe-to-toe competition. Gorbachev was naturally open to this argument; he also wanted, in principle, to move away from the zero-sum game. But it was Velikhov who helped lead Gorbachev to something different.

The Soviet weapons designers wanted to match what Reagan was doing, a symmetrical response. By contrast, Velikhov argued for an “asymmetrical response,” one that would answer Reagan but not be the same. To stop ballistic missiles in flight, an American defense system would have to target and destroy a thousand speeding points in space almost perfectly and simultaneously. To counter it, one idea for “asymmetrical response” was to unleash so many speeding points—warheads, either real or fake—that the American defense system would be overwhelmed. Some of the Soviet missiles would penetrate and get through to their targets.

There were different ideas among Soviet experts about the hardware for “asymmetrical response.” According to Katayev’s records, Soviet engineers came up with technological tricks to fool the anti-missile system. For example, they could launch decoys or chaff, to imitate the warheads and deceive the defenses. They could spin and maneuver warheads to avoid detection, or blind the American satellites and command centers, knocking out the eyes of the defensive system.

Another method was more ominous: build more missiles and an avalanche of additional nuclear warheads. The Soviet Union was good at missiles, and it would be easier and cheaper to double or triple the missile warheads than to build an entirely new defense against them. This approach was hypothetical, but not entirely. Katayev recalled that the latest version of the SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missile carried ten warheads each. This was the biggest, most feared, multiple-warhead weapon in the Soviet arsenal. But if the missile’s range was shortened somewhat, and the warheads made smaller, he wrote, the SS-18 could actually be modified to carry “up to 40 nuclear warheads. And this one missile alone!” In a separate, more precise chart in his files, Katayev noted the modified SS-18 could carry thirty-eight warheads. At the time, the Soviet Union deployed 308 of these missiles. If they were modified, the fleet would go from 2,464 warheads to a total of 12,084. It would be much more difficult for American defenses to stop. This was only a concept that had been discussed in earlier years by missile designers, but it illustrated what could become a potent Soviet response to Reagan’s Star Wars.⁴⁸

Gorbachev would most certainly not favor this version of “asymmetrical response.” He wanted to eliminate weapons, not propagate them. In his memoir, he avoided talking about the details of this option. When the author questioned Gorbachev in an interview in 2006, he was still uneasy about discussing it. “We did have a project,” he said. “There was one. It existed. But it is closed down. And destroyed. It’s only tens of billions” of rubles. “But it’s a horrible project, it’s a horrible response.” He added, “What is one missile, SS-18? It’s a hundred Chernobyls. In one missile.”⁴⁹

More weapons were not the only answer. There was a third approach to “asymmetrical response.” Words were Gorbachev’s stock-in-trade, and his best weapon. He was a robust if long-winded orator. Could he simply say “no” to the Reagan dream, persuade Reagan of his folly and talk it into oblivion? Perhaps he could strike a deal to cancel a giant weapons machine that the United States did not yet possess, that the Soviet Union would have great trouble matching, and exchange it all for something they both wanted: deep reductions in existing nuclear weapons.

Gorbachev realized this was his best answer. If he could talk Reagan out of his dream of missile defense, it would prevent stiff competition on a field—high technology—where the Soviet Union lagged years behind. There was an important domestic component too. The military-industrial complex constantly pressed for more resources, saying the United States was a threat. If Gorbachev could persuade Reagan not to build “Star Wars,” he would find it easier to resist the generals and the missile designers at home. By slowing the arms race, Gorbachev might find time and resources to begin modernizing the country.

Yet in the summer of 1985, the military and defense industries were powerful forces. Velikhov saw Gorbachev was buffeted by crosscurrents. He was a man of the party who depended on the Central Committee bureaucracy; he had no choice but to listen to the generals, the ministers and the KGB; and the military establishment distrusted Velikhov, Yakovlev and other progressive thinkers around the general secretary. Gorbachev was personally wary of the military and defense industry, and surrounded himself with advisers who shared his caution, but he did not, and could not, move overtly or swiftly against them.⁵⁰