The Dead Hand

range, given the size of the projectile.²⁵ The missile was prized by the Soviet military because of its mobility, and it was capable of carrying either nuclear or conventional warheads. Earlier, Gorbachev had offered to freeze the level of these missiles, and he went still further and proposed negotiating deep cuts, and ultimately elimination.

But in the Kremlin meeting, Shultz suggested the United States first wanted to build up its arsenal of short- range systems to match Soviet levels, after which they could negotiate.

Gorbachev unexpectedly offered, on the spot, to eliminate the Oka missiles altogether, if the United States would agree to a “global zero,” or none on either side.

When Gorbachev made the offer, Akhromeyev, the chief of the General Staff, was not in the room. He was scheduled to arrive only later, after a break.

Shultz replied to the offer by saying he would consult with the NATO alliance.

“Why can’t you make a decision?” Gorbachev insisted.

Shevardnadze interjected, “I am amazed that the United States is objecting to unilateral Soviet elimination of operational short-range missiles.”

Gorbachev had just made an extremely sensitive concession. By the time Akhromeyev entered the hall later for a discussion of strategic weapons, Gorbachev had abandoned a whole weapons system. Akhromeyev only found out the next day, when he saw his name was on the list of attendees at the meeting, put there because Gorbachev wanted to show he had approved. Akhromeyev later said the concession was a “miscalculation” that infuriated the generals. “The military leadership was indignant at the incident with the Oka,” Akhromeyev recalled. “The Foreign Ministry didn’t give any appropriate explanation of the one-sided deal. The first serious split appeared between the military and Shevardnadze.” The generals tried to fight back in the months that followed, but were reprimanded. Gorbachev had maneuvered skillfully to get his way against his own military, but he still lacked any tangible result from the Americans. Appearing before the Politburo days later, Gorbachev sputtered in frustration that Shultz could not make a decision on the spot. The conversation was good, he said, but “essentially empty—we did not move anywhere.”²⁶

“We have to recapture the initiative,” said Shevardnadze.

From his office at the Central Committee, Katayev, the precise and careful staffer, slowly came to a profound conclusion: the leadership of the country—hierarchical, centrally planned, rigid and hidebound by long practice— simply had no process for deciding how to abandon and destroy the weapons it had built at such enormous cost, even if disarmament had been a propaganda line for decades. The previous strategic arms control treaties from the Nixon and Carter era had only limited the growth of weapons, and destroyed none of them. The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention had outlawed an entire class of weapons and the Soviet Union secretly built them anyway. There was no road map for retreat. Katayev recalled it was an enormous psychological barrier, as well as a practical roadblock to decisions.

Katayev, who understood the excesses, quietly set about changing the way defense decisions were handled in the Kremlin. In the Brezhnev years, designers and builders filled the power vacuum. Once Gorbachev came into office, specialists like Katayev and others gained a greater voice. For the most part, in their private discussions, Katayev found the specialists favored disarmament, and were cognizant of the Soviet overkill. At the top, a group of powerful decision-makers remained from earlier times. They were known as the “Big Five”: the Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry, KGB, the Military Industrial Commission, and the Central Committee. Katayev elevated the role of technical experts like himself as a “working group” serving the Big Five. It marked a shift in the way arms control was handled in the Kremlin, giving the technocrats and specialists more input, although few knew about it outside. All the documents describing the change were stamped “Top Secret.” On May 6, 1987, members of the Big Five sent Gorbachev a recommendation to make Katayev’s arrangement permanent. Gorbachev signed it.²⁷

Another shoot of fresh thinking about how to brake the arms race came to the surface at the military’s General Staff headquarters in Moscow. Valery Yarynich had been assigned to work at the headquarters of an internal think tank, the Center for Operational-Strategic Research, established just as Gorbachev took power. Yarynich, the communications expert who had once witnessed the Cuban missile crisis panic, arrived at the center in 1985 after finishing with Perimeter, the semiautomatic nuclear missile retaliatory system. As glasnost blossomed, Yarynich enjoyed a freedom to raise issues with relative openness inside the heart of the Soviet military, and he devoted himself to analyzing the risks of nuclear war. “We had a chance to think and say what we thought without fear of punishment,” he said. The research center was given a difficult task—to find the theoretical justification to support lower levels of nuclear weapons. It was a forward- thinking idea born of Gorbachev’s new era. He was assigned to run a research project called Kupol. The project used mathematical models to study scenarios of a possible first-strike nuclear attack from the United States.

Yarynich and his coworkers on Kupol found a very important insight in the mathematical models. When considering a possible nuclear attack, it was not enough to just measure the number of warheads that would probably reach their targets, or the number that could retaliate. The Soviet command and control systems, which were reliable and split-second, also had to be figured into the calculation. If one took command and control into account, then mathematical models showed the goal of deterrence could be guaranteed with a drastic reduction of nuclear arsenals. This was because it was likely there would always be at least some retaliation for an attack. Even the smallest retaliation in a real nuclear war meant pretty massive destruction. The attacker always faced this uncertainty. Thus, Yarynich concluded, the massive overkill of the arms race was unnecessary.

Yarynich was seized with an idea—what if the two superpowers could open up and share such mathematical models? What if the leaders could see what he and his coworkers had discovered in Kupol? But the reaction from Soviet military leaders was not very encouraging. They could not imagine exchanging top-secret command and control data with the United States. “The old thinking prevailed over the new,” Yarynich recalled.

At the same time, he saw on the streets that the “new thinking” and glasnost of Gorbachev were spreading. Barriers were collapsing everywhere. One day, the experts, including Yarynich, got a translated copy of a book published in the United States in 1985. The book, The Button: America’s Nuclear Warning System—Does It Work? by Daniel Ford, questioned whether command and control was the weak link in the American nuclear deterrence. Yarynich said the Russian experts were “astounded by the degree of openness, detail and healthy criticism which the author used to describe the American system. And it dealt no harm to America whatsoever!” Yarynich suggested that his staff prepare a similar work. Once again, his suggestion went nowhere.²⁸

By summer 1987, nearly two years had passed since the space designers and rocket builders had put on Gorbachev’s desk their blueprints for a sprawling Soviet version of the Strategic Defense Initiative. To see their handiwork, Gorbachev flew to the Soviet cosmodrome at Baikonur, in Kazakhstan, on May 11. The next day, he toured the launch pad for the giant two-stage, four-engine heavy space booster, Energia. Wearing a hard hat and in a business suit, Gorbachev walked in a broad circle clockwise around the enormous white booster, which stood 190 feet tall and weighed 2,400 tons fully fueled. It was full at that moment. For weeks, the launcher had been kept in two-day readiness for takeoff. The Energia had never flown before and was built to carry the Soviet space shuttle, the Buran, but the shuttle was not ready, so designers planned instead to use the first launch of the Energia to carry aloft a mysterious black cylinder. On the black vehicle was painted the name Polyus, or Pole, in white letters on the outside, but inside it carried the Skif-DM, the demonstration model of the space laser weapon, the most tangible result so far of the drive to build a Soviet Star Wars. The Skif-DM was among those projects that had been touted to Gorbachev by the space designers in 1985, shortly after he took office. Since then, work had been rushed. In fact, there was no laser inside; the Skif-DM was a mock-up, a placeholder for a possible future weapon. The Soviet builders had not mastered the technology.

Gorbachev had spent the last two years warning the United States against weapons in space—precisely the purpose of Skif-DM. As Gorbachev was briefed, walking around the huge booster on May 12, with other Politburo members trailing behind, examining the white rocket and black cylinder, he abruptly told the designers: “The Politburo is not going to allow you to launch this rocket.” Gorbachev had said many times he did not want an arms race in space—and he meant it.