Reagan: The Life (63 page)

A widespread refusal to acknowledge this fact was vexing his efforts to counter Soviet power and curtail the arms race, Reagan said. The refusal lately took the form of calls for a “
nuclear freeze”—a halt to new weapons systems. Reagan explained that a freeze would reward the past Soviet buildup, prevent the United States from rectifying the resulting imbalance, and thereby actually hinder arms control, which the freeze advocates claimed to favor. The president granted that discussions of nuclear policy could get arcane, tempting nonspecialists to wash their hands of it. He cautioned his listeners against such a mistake. “I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”

No one was above the struggle. “While America’s military strength is important, let me add here that I’ve always maintained that the struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.”

A
S
R
EAGAN
’
S AUDIENCE
leaped to its feet to applaud his conclusion, reporters scanned their notes for the hook that would lead the coverage that evening and the next day. “Evil empire” was the phrase that caught on, with “focus of evil in the modern world” elaborating where space allowed. Most of Reagan’s conservative supporters joined the evangelicals in applauding the president’s forthrightness in calling the communists evil. His liberal critics groaned at his moralizing and contended that name-calling would yield nothing good.

Many on both sides missed Reagan’s point. Communism was evil, the president believed, but that didn’t absolve Americans from having to deal with it. In this respect Reagan wasn’t very different from Richard Nixon, the architect of
détente. Nixon never declared himself an agnostic between democracy and communism; he simply contended that American security required normalizing relations with the communists lest the two sides eventually destroy the world. Reagan came to the same conclusion, which was why he cautioned the evangelicals against thinking they were above the politics of superpower relations.

As much time as Reagan devoted to policy toward other areas of the world—
Central America, the Caribbean,
Poland, the Middle East—he never lost sight of the Soviet Union. The Soviet nuclear arsenal threatened the United States in a way none of the other challenges to American interests even approached. From the beginning of his presidency, Reagan pondered and calculated how to reduce the threat from Soviet arms, for the benefit of the United States and of the world. Reagan’s “evil empire” characterization of the Soviet Union fairly captured his judgment of communism as a guiding philosophy, but it didn’t prevent him from pursu
ing policy toward the communists that was pragmatic and surprisingly nonjudgmental. As in other areas of policy, Reagan showed himself quite capable of saying one thing and doing something else.

B
UT FIRST HE
had to give the Soviets an incentive to negotiate arms reductions. And that required persuading Congress to fund critical parts of his defense buildup. Congressional Democrats as a group had never liked Reagan’s defense plan, and with each round of budget negotiations they chipped away at programs they considered extravagant or expendable. The
MX missile fit both criteria in the minds of its critics. The MX (for “missile experimental”) was a proposed solution to the twin problems facing America’s existing arsenal of land-based intercontinental
missiles: their increasing age and the growing accuracy of Soviet missiles. Improvements in miniaturization and guidance made it possible for American arms builders to pack multiple, independently targetable warheads onto a single rocket, giving one launcher many times the destructive power of existing missiles. This offset the improved accuracy of the Soviet missiles, in that if even a small portion of the MXs survived a Soviet first strike, they could still obliterate most of the important targets in the Soviet Union. Soviet leaders, doing the apocalyptic arithmetic, would presumably be deterred from attacking.

On the other hand, given the paradoxes implicit in nuclear strategy, the Soviets might draw the opposite conclusion.
Because
the MXs packed so much punch, taking out even a few of them would be very tempting. One Soviet missile could save as many as ten Soviet cities. Reckoned this way, the MXs might
undermine
deterrence.

They might, that is, unless their vulnerability could be reduced. The missiles could be placed in hardened—reinforced—silos designed to withstand anything but a direct hit by a Soviet missile. Or they could be made stealthily mobile. Stealth and mobility were central to the potency of another leg of America’s nuclear triad, submarine-launched missiles, which were hidden beneath the waves and constantly on the move. (The third leg of the triad, bombs and cruise missiles launched from aircraft, were mobile but at this time less stealthy.) Both versions of vulnerability reduction—hardening and mobility—were pursued by the Pentagon’s weapon designers as they developed the MX.

But both were costly and so elicited resistance from Democrats and others who continued to complain that Reagan gorged the Pentagon while
starving social programs. Some of the critics asked why the United States needed a nuclear triad; would two legs or even one not suffice? Others took up the argument that the MX was destabilizing. Many cited Eisenhower’s lament about the military-industrial complex having imperatives separate from national security.

Yet Reagan considered the MX indispensable. “
Back to Washington and what I’ve been told may be the most momentous decision any president has had to make,” he wrote in his diary after a day trip to New Orleans midway through his first year in office. “It was to OK the strategic missile and bomber buildup for our future defense needs.” Reagan approved funding for a hundred MX missiles to get the program started.

Putting the new weapons in the budget was one thing, though; keeping them there was another. During the budget battles within the administration in 1982, the MX posed a tempting target for David Stockman and the other deficit hawks. They didn’t try to kill the program, merely to delay it. Reagan and his MX allies, most notably Caspar Weinberger, had to fight to keep it front and center. In May 1982 the president approved a National Security Decision Directive stressing the importance to American security of moving forward on the MX. “
It is absolutely essential that we maintain the momentum of the MX program and that we achieve Initial Operational Capability in 1986,” the directive declared. Getting specific, the directive added, “Development of MX will be completed and sufficient units produced to support 100 operational missiles.”

The Democrats in Congress still objected. They campaigned against the MX and other examples of what they considered Pentagon excess, and though their victories in the 1982 congressional elections—the Democrats gained twenty-six seats in the House while holding their ground in the Senate—owed more to the recession, they interpreted their success as a mandate to block the MX. “
We’re going to have trouble,” Reagan predicted. “The Dems will try to cancel out the whole system. It will take a full court press to get it. If we don’t I shudder to think what it will do to our arms reduction negotiations in Geneva.”

Reagan’s shudder underlined the dual purpose of the MX in his national security strategy. He accepted the arguments of the MX proponents that Soviet progress in nuclear arms put America’s existing arsenal of land-based missiles at risk. He concluded that the MX was vital for its own sake. But he also saw the system in the light of his negotiating position with respect to the Russians. Congressional approval of the MX would demonstrate America’s resolve to match the Russians missile
for missile. Moscow, realizing it couldn’t outspend the Americans, would come to the negotiating table to talk seriously about arms reductions. Perhaps those reductions would include some of the proposed MX missiles; if so, the missiles would have served a purpose without ever being built.

Negotiators typically keep their cards close to the vest. Reagan had done so as head of the actors’ guild when bargaining with the studios. Yet he was quite open with his nuclear strategy of bulking up for the purpose of slimming down. “
The United States wants deep cuts in the world’s arsenal of weapons, but unless we demonstrate the will to rebuild our strength and restore the military balance, the Soviets, since they’re so far ahead, have little incentive to negotiate with us,” he told the American people in a televised address. “Let me repeat that point because it goes to the heart of our policies. Unless we demonstrate the will to rebuild our strength, the Soviets have little incentive to negotiate. If we hadn’t begun to modernize, the Soviet negotiators would know we had nothing to bargain with except talk.”

The Democrats weren’t buying. They continued to oppose Reagan’s strategic missile upgrade. “
Tip O’Neill has mounted an all out campaign to kill the MX,” Reagan complained privately. It was one more thing he held against the House speaker, and it was perhaps the most damning of all, for it went beyond politics to the heart of national security.

E
VEN WHILE BATTLING
for the MX, Reagan opened a breathtaking new front in the arms race. In March 1983, two weeks after his speech to the evangelicals in Florida, the president addressed the nation on national security. His tone was decidedly different; his sole claim to the moral high ground was his assertion: “
The United States does not start fights; we will never be an aggressor.” America’s defense policy was
defensive
, he said. Yet it had to be robust. Reagan repeated that American arms had failed to keep pace with Soviet arms, hence the need for the current buildup. A
nuclear freeze would dangerously lock into place the Soviet advantage. The MX
missile was essential to the parity at which American policy was aimed. Members of Congress must stay the course, and American voters must make them do it. “We must continue to restore our military strength. If we stop in midstream, we will send a signal of decline, of lessened will, to friends and adversaries alike.”

Much of this was boilerplate by now. The novel part came toward the end. Reagan reminded his viewers that America’s nuclear defense policy was based
on deterrence through the threat of retaliation. The Soviet Union would not attack the United States, because it knew it would be destroyed in response, perhaps along with much of the rest of the world. Deterrence had worked so far. Or at least it had not failed. Yet Reagan found it fundamentally wanting. “I’ve become more and more deeply convinced that the human spirit must be capable of rising above dealing with other nations and human beings by threatening their existence.” There must be another way. An obvious alternative was
arms control, to which the administration remained committed. But arms control within the existing framework of deterrence would leave the world’s billions in the
crosshairs. “That’s a sad commentary on the human condition,” Reagan said. “Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them? Are we not capable of demonstrating our peaceful intentions by applying all our abilities and our ingenuity to achieving a truly lasting stability? I think we are. Indeed, we must.”

What Reagan proposed were defensive technologies that would shield the United States from nuclear attack. Such technologies could produce a transformation in human hopes and expectations, he said. “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?”

Reagan granted that constructing the defensive system he envisioned was not possible at present. “I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century.” Yet current technology permitted making a start. “Isn’t it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war?” He answered his own question. “We know it is.”

And so he was taking the crucial first step. “I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles. This could pave the way for arms control measures to eliminate the weapons themselves.” A world beyond nuclear weapons, beyond nuclear fear, was the objective. The quest for this new world began at once. “Tonight we’re launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history.”

R
EAGAN ARRIVED LATE
at his own revolution in some respects; the key concepts associated with the “
Reagan revolution”—smaller government, lower taxes—had been embraced by conservatives for decades before he came along. But with his articulation of a vision of a world beyond nuclear weapons, Reagan took the lead in a revolution that was far more audacious than anything else he ever attempted.

What he and the administration would call the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, marked the first step in this revolution. The idea had been percolating in Reagan’s mind for years. “
When he was governor of California,” Caspar Weinberger recalled, “he had expressed to me the not surprising view that we would be better advised to rest our defenses on
military strength not only of an offensive character, such as the missiles themselves, but also on means of protecting against the missiles of the other side.”

Reagan wasn’t alone; many nonspecialists thought defenses against nuclear missiles would be a grand idea. But no one could figure out how to make such defenses work. Ballistic missiles—the kind that blasted up into space and then hurtled back down into the atmosphere—approached their targets at many thousands of miles per hour, far faster than any interceptor in existence or planning. Moreover, because potential targets for enemy missiles were scattered across the breadth of the United States, it was impossible to know where to place the interceptors. Finally, no defensive system ever created had been wholly effective; a certain percentage of incoming fire—whether crossbow shafts, musket balls, or bombs dropped from airplanes—always managed to get through. In the pre-nuclear era, this was a problem but usually not a disqualifying one. In the nuclear age, even a few missiles that penetrated a defensive shield could kill millions.