The Dead Hand

On June 12, 1987, in Berlin, Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate, a symbol of Europe’s division between East and West, and addressed Gorbachev directly. “We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness,” he said. “Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West or to strengthen the Soviet state without changing it?

“General Secretary Gorbachev,” Reagan declared, “if you seek peace—if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—if you seek liberalization, come here, to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

The speech was classic Reagan, infused with his powerful faith in freedom and prosperity and the link between the two. Reagan recalled in his memoir that when he saw the wall, he spoke with genuine anger in his voice. Gorbachev still did not entirely understand Reagan, nor his rhetoric, and called Chernyaev a few days later. “He is trying to provoke us, to make us snap, which would help them get the Soviet threat back. If, like Reagan, I was giving interviews every week, I would say that he hasn’t forgotten his previous occupation over these eight years.”³⁵

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Gorbachev’s retreat from the arms race led to confusion not only in the military but in the prestigious defense institutes and design bureaus. They needed to find new justifications for their programs. And Reagan’s missile defense dream still flummoxed some of them. Katayev recalled that in August, Alexander Nadiradze, the missile designer who created the Pioneer, sent a panicky letter to the Central Committee. Four years after Reagan had first announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, Nadiradze declared he had figured out the truth: it was a plan to use space to shoot a nuclear warhead back down to Earth! This was worse than first strike. He said the missile defense plan should be exposed as an “aggressive weapon that gives the USA a new possibility to deliver an instant nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.” He claimed his research showed “an undersized missile ‘Space-Earth’ will be capable of carrying a nuclear charge of 0.1–0.15 megaton, a solid-fueled rocket engine will allow it to accelerate toward Earth–at about 4–5 kilometers per second–in 30 seconds.” He added, “From the moment of the order to launch, the time of the rocket’s flight to Earth will be only 1–2 minutes.” Nadiradze said if Reagan’s program were deployed, then the Soviet Union should destroy American satellites in space. The Polyus and the Skif might be dead, but the hopes of the missile designers burned on.³⁶

In early September, Velikhov, the open-minded physicist, struck another hammer blow against Soviet military secrecy.

Thomas B. Cochran, the American scientist who had set up the seismic monitoring stations around Semipalatinsk, was traveling with three members of Congress, several aides and a New York Times journalist, showing them the equipment. On a stopover in Moscow, Velikhov telephoned Cochran at the Sovietskaya Hotel, about 6 P.M., and told him to get the delegation to the airport by midnight. Velikhov had won permission to take them to see the disputed Krasnoyarsk radar that the Reagan administration said was a treaty violation.

Velikhov was attempting exactly the kind of glasnost gamble the Central Committee had rejected in February. The group took off for Siberia at 4 A.M., reached the radar site in late afternoon and slowly circled the entire radar site by helicopter, looking down on two large concrete structures, one a transmitter and the other a receiver. The receiver, nearly thirty stories tall, had a long, sloping side, facing northeast. Both structures were unfinished; the receiver’s radar face appeared to be partially covered with corrugated metal sheets. At first the Soviets said the Americans could not go inside the structures. After a meal of roasted pig, fruit and vodka toasts in a large white tent, the Americans pleaded for a chance to go inside, and the Soviets relented. The Americans discovered the project was years from completion, just empty shells, empty rooms and no electronics. Judging by what they could see, the visitors concluded it would not be a battle management system, as the Reagan administration claimed. For one thing, a battle management system would be hardened against a nuclear blast; this structure was not. Nor did it look like it was dedicated to space-tracking, as the Soviets claimed.³⁷ Although they could not be sure, the visitors surmised it was probably an early warning radar, pointing in the wrong direction. It was not facing outward, as required by the ABM treaty. What was most remarkable was that the congressmen got an eyewitness look at a top-secret site. The team took over one thousand photographs and made an hour of video, and no one tried to interfere. Velikhov’s openness undercut both the American propaganda and the Soviet lie. “It’s the beginning of military glasnost,” said Representative Tom Downey, D-N.Y., who led the delegation. In their report, the congressmen said the chances that it was a battle management radar were “extremely low.” Yet even with such an extraordinary firsthand look, Downey and the others did not change the Reagan administration’s view.

In Moscow, the top level of the Soviet leadership was privately at a loss about what to do with Krasnoyarsk. They knew the radar was a violation of the treaty, but they had not admitted it. They also knew that their public explanation of its purpose (space-tracking), as well as Reagan’s claims (battle management), were both untrue. On October 23, Gorbachev told Shultz that there would be a one-year moratorium on construction. Shultz replied that the United States would accept nothing short of dismantlement. A month after that, on November 21, an internal memo from the Big Five ministers suggested that the Soviet Union should continue to attempt to pressure the United States for some concessions in exchange for giving up the radar. The prospect of dismantling the whole thing was already being discussed internally. But the memo did not suggest an admission that the radar was in violation of the treaty.³⁸

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When Shultz saw Gorbachev in Moscow in October, the Soviet leader seemed feisty, and there was more acrimony in their discussion than in the past. Shultz failed to secure agreement on a summit date to sign a treaty on intermediate-range weapons. Shultz wrote in his memoirs that Gorbachev appeared to have been through a tough period.³⁹ In the days before Shultz arrived, Gorbachev had suffered a major crisis, an outbreak of open criticism in the Politburo. On October 21, Yeltsin, in a rushed, short speech before a Central Committee plenum, complained that reform was moving too slowly, and that Gorbachev was starting to enjoy the adulation of a “cult of personality,” a reference to Stalin. Yeltsin resigned on the spot from the Politburo. His speech and resignation stunned the hall. Gorbachev found himself squeezed between Yeltsin’s demands for faster reform and Politburo member Yegor Ligachev, who resisted it.⁴⁰ Then, a few days after Shultz left Moscow, Gorbachev agreed to the summit dates. “The Soviets blinked,” Reagan wrote in his diary.

The yawning gulf of misunderstanding between Washington and Moscow had remained. Despite all that happened in 1987—the new military doctrine, the Rust affair and its aftermath, the abandonment of the Oka missile, the failure of the Soviet Star Wars, the achievement of eliminating the INF weapons–the Defense Intelligence Agency sent a report to Congress stating that “all evidence points to continuity in the Soviet Union’s military policy.”⁴¹

Two weeks before Gorbachev arrived in the United States, Gates, the deputy CIA director, wrote a memo to Reagan about the Soviet leader that failed to grasp the essence of Gorbachev’s attempts to reverse the arms race, and miscast his goals and motivations. There is a “continuing extraordinary scope and sweep of Soviet military modernization and weapons research and development,” Gates said, offering not even a brief acknowledgment of Gorbachev’s efforts to change course. “We still see no lessening of their weapons production. And, further, Soviet research on new, exotic weapons such as lasers and their own version of SDI continues apace.” In fact, the Soviet version of SDI was a shambles and would never be built. Gates concluded that despite “great changes underway” in the Soviet Union, “it is hard to detect fundamental changes, currently or in prospect, in the way the Soviets govern at home or in their principle objectives abroad.” Gates told the president, amid the summit excitement, that “a sober–even somber—reminder of the enduring features of the regime and the still long competition and struggle ahead will be needed.”⁴²

Still, the December summit in Washington was far from somber, and crackled with energy. Gorbachev spontaneously stopped his limousine on Connecticut Avenue and began shaking hands with thrilled passersby. Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty with a brisk exchange of pens and handshakes in a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. The treaty would eliminate 1,846 Soviet Pioneers and 846 American Pershing IIs, the first time in the nuclear age that an entire class of Soviet and U.S. weapons was wiped out, and under stringent verification provisions. It was not the end of nuclear danger, but it was the most