Relationships within and without the Arab world will be changed
by the Iraq War. We can speculate how they will change, but we
cannot know in advance. Twenty years ago yesterday, Ronald Reagan
made an announcement that changed the course of the Cold War, and
thus world history, but the precise outcome could not be known at
the time.
On March 23, 1983, Ronald Reagan, in a television address from
the Oval Office, announced that we would develop a national missile
defense system, the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Looking back over the Reagan years, a thread can now be seen
running through a list of statements and actions by the 40th
president that amounted to an overarching strategy to bring the
Cold War to an end.
Before his election he suspected (and afterward had confirmed in
intelligence briefings) that the Soviet Union was stretching its
economy almost to the limit in order to build its arsenal at an
increasing rate. He reasoned that if we pushed them to the brink,
and forced them to choose between economic collapse and social
chaos or sitting down with us to negotiate arms reduction, they
would choose the latter. It took nearly five years to get to that
point, but it happened when Mikhail Gorbachev met with him in
Geneva in November 1985.
Critics scoffed at Reagan’s SDI. The arms control fraternity,
which had spent years developing treaties which only limited the
rate of growth of nuclear arsenals, warned that this would
destabilize the “Mutually Assured Destruction” equation between the
U.S. and the USSR. Political foes and the media dubbed it “Star
Wars,” the former in order to trivialize it; the latter as part of
their endless effort to simplify complex issues.
In the years since the demise of the USSR, former Soviet
officials have related that the Kremlin’s leaders were seriously
concerned about Reagan’s announcement. They knew we had the
technical and financial resources to develop such a system, but
felt we lacked the political will. What concerned them was that
Reagan was serious; he was going to supply the political will.
The genesis of the “missile shield” concept predates Reagan’s
announcement by 16 years. In 1967, as the new Governor of
California, he was invited to visit the Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory by Dr. Edward Teller, then its director. There the
scientists briefed him on their planning of a defense shield to
protect the United States from intercontinental ballistic
missiles!
In July 1979, Reagan visited NORAD, the North American defense
command, deep in a Colorado mountain. He saw the sophisticated
monitoring system which could track an incoming missile from the
moment it was launched. Yet, all we could do in defense would be to
launch our own missiles. This was a result of the ABM Treaty which
prohibited all but a single missile defense site in each
country.
About a month later, a Carter White House official briefed
Reagan on the newly-completed Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty
(SALT II). Like its predecessor, SALT I, it simply limited the rate
of increase of strategic arms. Reagan then called in a number of
independent experts. At the conclusion of an all-day session, he
said he would oppose the SALT II treaty because “what we need are
not strategic arms limitation talks, but strategic arms reduction
talks.”
Thus, strategic arms reduction became a basic objective for
Reagan. In his 1980 campaign he called for rebuilding our defense
strength — “Peace Through Strength” — so that “we would be second
to no one.” He put it into practice as soon as he was
inaugurated.
A series of things turned up the heat: in 1981 a speech at Notre
Dame University in which he said communism would end up on the “ash
heap of history”; in June 1982, a speech to the Houses of
Parliament at Westminster, in which he enunciated what became the
Reagan Doctrine (assistance to democratic movements behind the Iron
Curtain); on March 8, 1983, the speech to the evangelical group in
Florida in which he called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire”; then
his SDI announcement.
Both of the March speeches had a much greater effect on the
Kremlin than was supposed at the time. Not longer afterward, the
young government of Helmut Kohl in Germany agreed to station
Pershing cruise missiles on its soil. Other NATO nations soon
followed, thus checkmating the intermediate range SS-20 missiles
which the Soviets had targeted on Western European capitals.
Reagan kept expecting the Soviet leaders to agree to a summit
meeting in which arms reduction discussions would begin. “But they
kept dying on me,” he said. Brezhnev, Andropov, then Chernenko all
expired. Gorbachev took over in Spring 1985. When the summit was
finally held, Reagan told him they had two alternatives: “…to
find a way to trust one another enough to begin to reduce arms, or
to have an all-out arms race. That’s a race you can’t win.”
Although Gorbachev did not concede the point, Reagan felt they
could deal realistically with one another.
At their second summit, in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986,
talk quickly moved to the so-called Zero Option, the elimination of
all strategic weapons. At the second and last session, however,
Gorbachev said he would agree only if Reagan would shelve the
Strategic Defense Initiative. This came as a surprise to Reagan,
who angrily ended the meeting.
Reagan received a storm of criticism from poohbahs for not
coming away with a signed agreement. Yet, in retrospect, it seems
clear that his action at Reykjavik was the climactic event of the
Cold War. Gorbachev knew the game was up. He tried to reform his
overextended economy with perestroika and to permit limited free
speech with glasnost. The former did not work and the latter
unleashed demands for greater freedoms. The days of the Soviet
Union were numbered.
Twenty years ago, when Reagan made his SDI announcement, few
could have imagined that two decades later Russia would be our
friend. Today, the missile defense shield is still needed, but now
it is to defend against rogue states and terrorists. Next year,
President George W. Bush will preside over the deployment of the
first installations of this system.
