The Dead Hand

Behind the scenes, however, Gorbachev was starting to lead the country in a radical new direction. A leader’s courage is often defined by building something, by positive action, but in this case, Gorbachev’s great contribution was in deciding what not to do. He would not build a Soviet Star Wars. He averted another massive weapons competition.

Gorbachev didn’t show his hand right away. The full dimensions of this change in direction took time to appear. If anything, Gorbachev was good at tactics.

In late July, he announced the Soviet Union, by itself, would stop nuclear testing, and invited the United States to follow suit. Reagan did not.

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To Velikhov’s confident assertion that the Strategic Defense Initiative would not work, his Soviet colleagues often posed a difficult question: if it was not possible to create an effective missile shield with America’s best technology, if Reagan was utterly dreaming when he talked about making nuclear weapons obsolete, then why was the United States devoting so much money to it, year after year? As Katayev recalled it, the Soviet analysts saw “a clear discrepancy between the goals and the means” of Reagan’s announced intentions. “What is it being done for?” the Soviet specialists asked themselves, according to Katayev. “In the name of what are the Americans, famous for their pragmatism, opening their wallet for the most grandiose project in the history of the United States when the technical and economic risks of a crash exceed all thinkable limits?”

“Or,” Katayev wrote, “is there still something different behind this curtain?” To the Soviet specialists on strategic weapons, Katayev said, Reagan’s zeal for his dream led them “from the very beginning to think about the possibility of political bluff and hoax.” They pondered whether it was a “Hollywood village of veneer and cardboard.” The question went unanswered.

According to Katayev, a few Soviet experts—he doesn’t say exactly who—held an even darker view of Reagan’s goals. They concluded that the Americans were always distinguished by their systematic approach to problems, that they “do nothing in vain.” Rather than a hoax or bluff, they decided the Strategic Defense Initiative was a cover story for a gigantic, hidden effort to subsidize American defense contractors, save them from “bankruptcy” and produce a fresh surge of superior military high technology. Perhaps, Katayev said, this “was the major underwater part of the SDI iceberg.” This analysis was woefully misguided. While Reagan did fatten the defense contractors with record military budgets in the early 1980s, defense spending was a relatively small slice of the overall American economy. While there was a fresh surge of high technology, much of it was sprouting in the private sector, in the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley. And in the United States, defense contractors simply did not play the same role as the outsized military-industrial complex in the Soviet Union. The Soviet analysts were mistakenly applying their own experience—in which the military-industrial complex was at the center of decisions— to what they could not explain in the United States. Each side in the Cold War remained a mysterious black box to the other. The Americans could not see Gorbachev’s radical intentions. The Soviets could not understand Reagan’s dream.

In late August 1985, Gorbachev gave an interview to Time magazine, his rhetoric offering a refreshing change from the decades of Cold War confrontation. When asked about the Strategic Defense Initiative, Gorbachev said Soviet experts believed it was “sheer fantasy and a pipe dream.” His progressive brain trust had helped prepare his remarks.⁵¹Two weeks later, Reagan wrote in his diary, “I made a decision we would not trade away our program of research—S.D.I. for a promise of Soviet reduction in nuclear arms.”⁵² Arriving in Washington for the first time on September 27, Shevardnadze gave Reagan a letter from Gorbachev offering to cut long-range nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers by 50 percent in exchange for “a complete ban on space attack weapons.” The offer didn’t fly; Reagan could not accept the limits on Star Wars. But he was ready for deep cuts in existing nuclear arsenals.⁵³

In Washington, both the Defense Department under Weinberger and the CIA under Casey and Gates were deeply skeptical of Gorbachev. The Pentagon published a glossy annual booklet, Soviet Military Power, a propaganda piece designed to help boost congressional support for Reagan’s military spending. The fourth edition, published in April 1985, contained the claim that the Soviets had “two ground-based lasers that are capable of attacking satellites in various orbits.”⁵⁴ This was a gross exaggeration; neither the LE-1 nor the Terra-3 lasers could attack anything. An artist’s conception, a black-and-white pencil sketch, appeared across the top, showing what purported to be the Sary Shagan proving ground. A building with a dome on top was shown firing a white laser beam into the heavens. The caption said, “The directed-energy R&D site at the Sary Shagan proving ground includes ground-based lasers that could be used in an anti- satellite role today and possibly a BMD role in the future.” The key words were “could” and “possibly.” In fact, the long, expensive search to build laser weapons against targets in space had, up to this point, totally fizzled. The Soviets had not given up hope, but the glossy Pentagon booklet took old failures and hyped them into new threats.

In October, the State and Defense departments published a new report titled “Soviet Strategic Defensive Programs.” The pencil sketch of Sary Shagan appeared again. The text claimed that Soviet achievements in laser weapons “have been impressive.” It was true the Soviet scientists had scored advances in lasers, but they had not created an exotic weapon that worked. The text said that the Soviets “may also have the capability to develop the optical systems necessary for laser weapons to track and attack their targets.” In fact, they could track, but not attack.

Reagan picked up the theme in a radio speech October 12. “The Soviets have for a long time been doing advanced research on their version of SDI,” the president said. “They’re doing so well, our experts say they may be able to put an advanced technology defensive system in space by the end of the century.” One might dismiss this as just standard rhetoric, but Reagan’s words suggest that he never really grasped the impact on the military of the economic decay and stifling leadership in the Soviet system. Through superhuman striving, against all odds, the Soviet Union managed to reach superpower status, and yet there were massive internal stresses and agonizing fissures. The Soviet Union was not ready to put a missile defense system in space as Reagan claimed. They were not ready to knock out a satellite with lasers—and would never do so. It was a tragedy that a country that had spawned some of the great minds in mathematics and physics, that had produced chess champions and launched Sputnik, was by the 1980s behind in the computer revolution, sinking in economic backwardness and totally unprepared for the next century. But Reagan saw weakness only on the domestic side of the Soviet Union. He saw the military as ten feet tall.

In one of the more notable errors of judgment, the October report on Soviet strategic defenses accused leading Soviet scientists, including Velikhov, of being hypocrites. In one passage, the document noted that many of them had signed a letter published in the New York Times in opposition to Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. Velikhov was named and singled out with a photo. It was noted accurately that Velikhov had been head of the Institute of Atomic Energy at Troitsk, a branch of the Kurchatov Institute, located outside of Moscow, “where lasers for strategic and tactical applications are being developed.” The connotation was that Velikhov was a mindless propaganda puppet of the regime and a secret weaponeer. The Americans missed the point. While Velikhov had worked on laser weapons, that was precisely the reason he could tell Gorbachev the unvarnished truth about missile defense.

Reagan was eager to meet Gorbachev and try out his one-on-one persuasive powers as a November summit in Geneva drew near. No summit had been held since 1979; Reagan had only three years of his presidency remaining. He did not want to lose time. “Starting with Brezhnev, I’d dreamed of personally going one-on-one with a Soviet leader,” Reagan later wrote in his memoirs, saying he believed if the leaders agreed on something, all else would fall into place. Now, he was at last going to get his chance.

Reagan, who liked one-page briefing papers, was buried under a mountain of information in preparation for the summit. McFarlane and Matlock assembled two dozen briefing papers from the CIA and State Department, about eight to ten pages each, single spaced. McFarlane said Reagan received them eagerly, jotting notes in the margins.⁵⁵ But Reagan privately complained, “I’m getting d–n sick of cramming like a school kid.”⁵⁶ The experts told the president that Gorbachev represented a fresh style of Soviet leader, that dramatic changes were underway, but none threatening the system itself.⁵⁷ Shultz recalled that “word from the intelligence community and other Soviet specialists around the government was that the Soviet