That was then
That was then
October 11-12, 1986, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met
in Iceland for the Reykjavik Summit of. The standard narrative of the event,
established mostly by its participants, tells a tale of diplomatic heroism that
failed in the short-term but was soon understood as a heroic breakthrough on
the way to the tremendous nuclear arms reductions that followed over the next
decade. While these changes were underway, Gorbachev avoided the temptation to
use state violence to suppress national independence movements in the Soviet
sphere, and he consistently acted to reform the economic and political system
of the USSR. In contrast, the Reagan administration had no intention to look
inward at the faults of its own system, no interest in a program of perestroika
for capitalism. Reagan cut domestic social programs and weakened worker rights
at home, while overseas the government supported dictatorships in order to
suppress nationalist movements that wanted land reform and control of natural
resources.
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Gorbachev suggested Iceland as a symbolic “meeting you halfway”
point between Washington and Moscow. |
In the fall of 2016, there were commemorations in the media
of the thirty years since the Reykjavik Summit, and others marking the quarter
century since the Soviet Union dissolved on December 25, 1991, but many of
these skipped over the wider picture of the Cold War’s denouement. Though there
was much to applaud in the steps the Reagan administration took to make the
world safer from nuclear war, a commemoration of the 1980s disarmament summits
must also include the more unsavory record of the era in domains not related to
strategic weapons.
 |
| The Reykjavit Summit started much better than it ended. |
On October
11, 1986, …the leaders of the world’s two superpowers met at the stark and
picturesque Hofdi House in Reykjavik, Iceland. Secretary General Mikhail
Gorbachev had proposed the meeting to President Ronald Reagan less than thirty
days before. The expectations for the summit at Reykjavik were low. Reagan and
Gorbachev had established a personal relationship just one year before at their
Geneva Summit. In Geneva they attempted to reach agreement on bilateral nuclear
arms reductions… Both leaders hoped a face to face meeting at Reykjavik might
revive the negotiations. The talks between Reagan and Gorbachev at Reykjavik
proceeded at a breakneck pace... A proposal to eliminate all new strategic
missiles grew into a discussion, for the first time in history, of the real
possibility of eliminating nuclear weapons forever. Aides to both leaders were
shocked by the pace of the discussions. A summit that began with low
expectations had blossomed into one of the most dramatic and potentially
productive summits of all time… But one point of contention remained. Reagan
was committed to see his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to completion.
Gorbachev, fearing an imbalance of power, was equally determined to make sure
SDI would never be implemented. Reagan offered assurances to Gorbachev that the
missile defense shield… was being developed not to gain an advantage, but to
offer safety against accidents or outlaw nations. Reagan offered many times to
share this technology with the Soviets, which Gorbachev refused to believe…
Gorbachev would accept continued development of SDI as long as testing was
confined to the laboratory for the next ten years. Reagan would not agree...
Despite failing… Reykjavik will be recorded as one of the most important
summits in history. A year after Reykjavik the U.S. and Soviet Union signed the
Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), for the first time eliminating
an entire class of nuclear weapons. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START)
was signed a few years later during President H.W. Bush’s term. None of this
progress would have been possible without the courage of two leaders to look
beyond past hostilities and forge a new and lasting relationship... [1]
The bromance
Other retrospectives of the 1980s summits described the two
leaders as romantics, provincials, and establishment outsiders who rose to
power against all odds and were thus able to dream big and achieve what urban
elites and sophisticated insiders would never even dare attempt. Indeed it
might be helpful to think of the Reykjavik Summit as a specimen of another
global menace of the 1980s: the romantic comedy. The story of Ron and Mikhail
involves a wacky, mismatched pair who meet up for a dreamy arctic escape, far
from the naysayers in Washington and Moscow who would deny them their vision of
a nuclear free world. Through the series of summits they had during the late
1980s, the story followed the standard romcom formula (bromance-comedy?
bromcom?). They recoiled from each other at first, antagonized each other
through Act I and Act II, then grew close in Act III as they came to the end of
the their shared political destiny. Or perhaps it’s better to call it a
buddy/road movie. Instead of Trains, Planes and Automobiles,
think of it as Missiles,
Bombers and Submarines. Whatever the correct genre might be, they fought
against the opposition of their inner circles, and in spite of the oil-on-water
incompatibility of their personalities and intellects, against all odds they
triumphed in the end. So the story goes.
“But where is the comedy?” you ask. What’s so funny about
nuclear disarmament, or peace, love and understanding? First of all, they
talked seriously about reducing their arsenals completely while they imagined
Britain, China, France, India and Israel would naturally follow their lead, and
they were oblivious to the ongoing plans of Iraq, North Korea, South Africa and
Pakistan to become nuclear powers. Somehow it would all just sort itself out.
They really got ahead of themselves when they were far away from the madding
crowd for this crazy weekend in the far northern latitudes of Iceland.
Throughout the weekend Reagan cracked corny jokes with his
team to break the tension, but there was always something a little
condescending in the way his inner circle would indulge his sense of humor. One
of the unspoken truths held by Reagan administration staff was that the
president’s knowledge of history and world affairs was so thin that the
presidency was essentially a regency, with dozens of Cardinal Richelieus vying
for influence in the void. Reagan wouldn’t read briefing documents, so the CIA
had to make films produced at the level of a middle school documentary to
prepare him for trips abroad. (See this video of the 1988 Moscow Summit briefing). When Reagan cracked his
jokes, everyone laughed with him. When he was out of the room, they mocked him
and worried about his quixotic quest for a nuclear free world. In fact, he was
a little like Sancho Panza in a chapter of Don Quixote in
which he was set
up “in a governor’s chair” for the amusement of
the Washington nobility.
At one point during the weekend in Reykjavik, the American
team had to huddle for privacy in a small bathroom of the venue (Hofdi House),
with two advisors standing in the bathtub and the regent king “on the throne.”
Another huddle was done at the American embassy under a small plexiglas dome
that shielded the team from radio waves. Yes, that Cone of Silence in the old Get
Smart television
comedy was based on a real thing. Every embassy had one.
 |
The Cone of Silence was a running joke in the 1960s TV series Get Smart,
but Reagan and his team huddled under something similar during a break at the Reykjavit Summit. |
Perhaps the romcom metaphor doesn’t pay due respect to the
high drama of the occasion. We could also say the story contained all the best
elements of Shakespeare: comedy, romance, history and tragedy. All that was
missing was the bawdy humor, as the puns would have been lost in the
simultaneous translation.
The summit, which was supposed to have been just a preparatory
“base camp” on the way to a later summit, hinged on, and failed because of, the
American insistence on continuing development of space-based defense, or the
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, also known as Star Wars). The Soviets had
come with a compromise offer. Both sides would completely eliminate nuclear
weapons by the end of the century, but SDI would have to be confined to the
laboratory for at least ten years. The Americans refused, and the dream of
nuclear abolition failed because of this one point on which neither side would
yield. It was only after they returned to Moscow that Gorbachev and his
advisors remembered that they had a space station already aloft that was called
a “space lab,” which meant that by definition “testing in the lab” could be
testing in space just as the Americans had wanted. They went back to the
Americans with new concessions and negotiated arms reduction treaties, signed
in December 1987, to eliminate short and medium range missiles in Europe.
Reductions in long range missiles and tactical (battlefield) weapons followed
during the presidency of George Bush senior (1989-1992). These steps never led
to the total elimination of nuclear weapons, but they defused the Cold War in
Europe, especially since they were followed by massive reductions in
conventional forces and the independence of the Warsaw Pact nations.
Throughout the arms negotiations of the mid-1980s it was
Gorbachev who came wooing, showing more ardor because of his greater need to
save the Soviet Union by scaling back the costs of the military industry.
Meanwhile, Reagan was surrounded by the anti-communist hardliners of the
Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), thirty-one of whom he had appointed to
his administration. Some of them continued to serve in the administration of
Bush the Elder, laid low during the Clinton presidency, then returned en
force during
the terms of Bush the Younger with a new acronym, perhaps to not remind some of
the aging members of cardio-pulmonary disease: Project for a New American
Century (PNAC). The CPD cautioned Reagan not to “give away the store” in
negotiations with Gorbachev, and many were opposed to the president’s dreamy
ambition to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Some of them wanted no reductions
at all.
Reagan himself had said in speeches earlier in his career
that he held no illusions about a peaceful convergence between the American and
Soviet systems, a change that would require “that we whittle the back edge of
our heels round.” [2] He often used this expression “round-heeled,” which was a
term of his generation to refer to a woman who could be put on her back easily.
For Reagan at Reykjavik this meant not giving up the SDI, and not agreeing to
any cuts in forces that would leave America and NATO open to Soviet aggression.
The hardliners always warned that this peace offensive by Gorbachev might have
been just a deception, or they feared that he would soon be replaced by
hardliners who would renege on everything. Dick Cheney was one of the people
who held onto this view right up until Gorbachev announced the collapse of the
Soviet Union on December 25, 1991. He and George H.W. Bush never saw it coming,
apparently, although it was obvious to most observers that things were
unraveling quickly after the thwarted coup of August 1991. Bush seemed to
believe the union would hold together, and feared the instability that would
follow. In a 1991 statement that seems highly ironic now, after the US actively
assisted a Ukrainian extremist overthrow the pro-Russian government of Ukraine
in 2014, President Bush cautioned the republics against having high
expectations of a better life as independent nations. The contrast says much
about the recklessness of contemporary US adventurism:
Freedom is not the same as
independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order
to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those
who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred. [3]
During the autumn of 1991, US Senator Sam Nunn knew the end
was near for the Soviet Union. He had visited Russia recently and seen the
military shifting its allegiance to Yeltsin’s Russia. Suddenly, no one was
speaking of the Soviet Union but rather of fascinating changes taking place “in
Russia.” Nunn fought for $1 billion in US food and financial aid to ensure
stability and a smooth transfer of control of the nuclear arsenal as the
republics declared independence. [4] Even Richard Nixon wrote a memo to the
president (leaked to the press) in March 1992 about the danger of losing Russia
to a catastrophe that would put it beyond the reach of American influence.
Instead of meaningful assistance, Russia was soon treated to a decade of
economic shock therapy via the IMF and World Bank’s standard austerity
prescriptions, which coincided with the corrupt privatization of state
property.
Reagan’s evolution
Reagan began his presidency in 1981 by ending the détente
process begun by President Nixon. He wanted a nuclear free world, but didn’t
speak much of it during these first years when he wanted to establish a
position of strength from which to negotiate. He terrified the Soviet
leadership by accusing them of leading an “evil empire” bent on world
domination, and by drastically increasing military spending. He began a program
of random and unpredictable near-incursions of Soviet air space, which made
Soviet leaders and military planners jumpy and confused about American
intentions. These incursions played a role in famous Korean Airlines incident
in September 1983 in which a Soviet fighter jet shot down a passenger airliner
that had flown off course into Soviet airspace.
Just a few weeks later, at the end of September, a false
alarm indicated to a Soviet early warning center that five American nuclear
missiles had been launched toward the Soviet Union. According to protocol,
officer Stanislav Petrov should have reported the incident so that the Soviet
leadership could decide whether to launch on warning (before confirming nuclear
explosions), but he went with his feeling that it must be an error (which it
was) because the detection system was new and flawed, and he knew a first
strike would involve more than just five missiles.
During this tense period, Reagan’s tough talk came close to
making the Soviets fear that NATO’s Able Archer drill of November 1983 was a
little too realistic. One of the imagined scenarios for the launch of a first
strike had always been that the enemy would conceal it within an apparent
drill. Fearing a first strike was imminent, the Soviet side almost launched one
of their own. Reagan later realized, belatedly, that he might have gone too
far. Filmmaker Oliver Stone described the change in his thinking in The
Untold History of the United States:
Despite all his bluster, Reagan
too feared the possibility of war which he associated with the biblical
Armageddon. After watching the enormously popular 1983 ABC TV movie The Day
After, Reagan wrote in his diary that it “left me very depressed.” Reagan began to rethink his
approach to the Soviet union. He later wrote in his memoirs: “Three years had
taught me something surprising about the Russians. Many were genuinely afraid
of America and Americans.” Incredibly, if this diary is to be believed, it had
never dawned on president Reagan that the Soviets might indeed fear a US first
strike. [5]
Reagan had viewed The Day After, a graphic
depiction of the effects of total nuclear war on Lawrence, Kanas, a month
before the American public saw it. It was ironic that the terrified public was
never informed at the time about how high tensions were that autumn. It was
only later revealed that there had been the two close calls mentioned above.
While Reagan felt depressed by The Day After, for others in the
administration the broadcast of the film was a public relations nightmare. A
line-up of conservative experts had been readied for a televised panel
discussion after the showing in order to manage the public reaction. Physicist
Carl Sagan was the only person called upon to represent the voices of the
anti-nuclear movement. (See the previous
post about The Day After). Nonetheless, the strange series of events in 1983 had
changed Reagan and changed the game. He started to look for a channel of
communication with the Soviet leadership, but it was hard to make progress
because Soviet leaders were ill and dying in quick succession. Brezhnev,
Andropov and Chernenko died between November 1982 and March 1985.
When Gorbachev rose to power in March 1985, he took the
initiative to start meaningful disarmament talks, beginning with the 1985
Geneva Summit. The next year at Reykjavik, the possibility of a nuclear free
world was dashed only because of disagreement over SDI, and this turned out to
be the tragi-comic core of the Reykjavik narrative. In retrospect, it proved to
be much ado about nothing. Soon after the summit, news of the Iran-Contra
scandal broke, and Reagan was politically crippled afterwards. Support for SDI
dried up in the US Congress and nothing ever came of it. Critics had always
pointed out that it was a chimera. Perhaps the Soviets had been fools, too, for
having been seriously afraid of it. They could have indulged the Americans in
their fantasy and let America go broke trying to build it. They forgot the old
saying “never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Reagan held so fast to SDI because it would provide a
simple, happy ending to his political career, which he seemed to view like a
story arc in one of his Hollywood movies. He would make the world safe once and
for all by giving it a system that could shoot down any nuclear missile
launched by any rogue element in the peaceful world system, a little bit like
the inter-planetary enforcer in The Day the Earth Stood Still—the
1951 science fiction film he often cited as a favorite that inspired his
pursuit of world peace.
Faith in SDI required one to ignore the fact any
anti-missile system could be defeated, that some missiles would always get
through. Furthermore, there were other ways besides missiles to deliver nuclear
weapons. Reagan promised to share the technology with the Soviet Union and all other
peace-loving allies. He insisted it was just for defense against “madmen,”
assuming there would be some way of knowing who was a madman in all future
world conflicts. He didn’t understand why anyone would oppose SDI if they were
planning on getting rid of all their nuclear weapons anyway. Gorbachev thought
it was preposterous to suggest that the Americans would willingly share a
technology that had cost hundreds of billions of dollars to develop. He pointed
out that they didn’t share even basic industrial technology with the USSR. Many
in the Reagan administration agreed that the idea of sharing was absurd, and
they wished Reagan hadn’t mentioned it during the negotiations.
The American side also refused to acknowledge the fear that
they would have had if an adversary had been developing space-based defenses.
Missile defense systems can be used in a “layered” attack in which the side
with the missile defense system can be the aggressor, launching a first strike
then hitting the enemy’s retaliatory strike with the missile defense system.
Reagan knew that the Soviets had this concern, but he begged Gorbachev to
understand they were declaring peaceful intent, and now that they were friends,
wasn’t that good enough? He was asking Gorbachev to trust now but not be able
to verify future American intent. For Gorbachev, it was an absurd request and
he was stunned that Reagan could not understand why. In the present age, China
and Russia are making the same protests to America about its ground-based
missile defense systems stationed in South Korea and Romania.
On other points the Americans were equally illogical.
Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs,
claimed that the nuclear warheads on American bombers shouldn’t be counted in
the negotiations because the Soviet air defenses were supposedly impenetrable.
He didn’t seem to see the logical implication that if this were true, this leg
of the nuclear triad was unnecessary and a colossal waste of money. In May
1987, German teenager Matthias Rust landed a single-engine Cessna in Red
Square, proving something about the invincibility of Soviet air defenses.
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| Grim faces all around at the end of the Reykjavik Summit. |
Both leaders finished the Reykjavik talks feeling betrayed
and angry. Bitter words were spoken at the end and the two men walked out silently,
trying to put on a brave face for the media, but to no avail. Reagan had spoken
earlier of wanting to get away early so he would be home for dinner, so he
drove off to the embassy without meeting the press. Gorbachev, the communist,
demonstrated better Madison Avenue skills. He headed over to the building where
hundreds of journalists were waiting and, during the walk, had time to master
his emotions and think of a way to spin the outcome as a victory with words
that were met with thunderous applause:
In spite of all its drama,
Reykjavik is not a failure—it is a breakthrough, which allowed us for the first
time to look over the horizon. [6]
Challenging the Heroic Narrative
Most histories of Reykjavik and other disarmament summits
glorify and accept the premises of how these events should occur, who should
lead them, and who should have a say in them. Yet the United States and the
Soviet Union were, after all, the perpetrators of the crime. Why should they be
judge, prosecutor and enforcer, and take up the case only at their own leisure?
It would be better to think of them as two criminal syndicates whose interest
in peace arose only from a mutual need to cut losses in a long war of
attrition. To the extent that a moral imperative is involved, the community of
nations had to wait until the criminals decided to act on one.
Humanity has been slow to look at nuclear abolition this
way, but the development, testing and possession of nuclear weapons needs to be
seen as a crime against humanity and against the ecosystem. Great enduring harm
has been done in places such as Hanford, French Polynesia, Mayak and
Semipalatinsk, just to name a few examples where nuclear bomb manufacture and
testing took place. This damage already inflicted is in addition to the
reckless endangerment of risking the outbreak of full nuclear war.
It is difficult to imagine who would adjudicate in a legal
process that indicts the nuclear powers because there would have to be a force
in the world that could subordinate a nuclear power. Do they have nuclear
weapons because they were powerful enough to obtain them, or are they powerful
because they have nuclear weapons? Are nuclear arsenals the currency of power,
a kind of reserve currency that underpins the global order? (A question that
cynically raises another question: whether we should forget about going back to
the gold standard and instead peg a global currency to the plutonium standard.)
If it is so, how do we bring nuclear powers to justice? My romantic vision for
a path to a world free of nuclear weapons is to suggest that the non-nuclear
armed nations should be able to prosecute the nuclear-armed nations and force
them to disarm. They are the rogue nations, the axis of evil, and those nations
who don’t help in bringing them to justice are abetting them. To adapt the
famous Bushism, we could say, “You are either with us or you’re with the
nuclearists.” Recapturing the spirit of Reykjavik—a time when the two
superpowers at least looked over the horizon and seriously talked about total
abolition—might be a way to start, but a totally new kind of
international forum has to be invented, and it should resemble a tribunal more
than a summit. Or, at the very least, nuclear disarmament should be an
arbitration process with a neutral third party forcing the perpetrators to
undergo psychological counselling and resolve the terror they have inflicted on
the world.
Few accounts of the summits discuss the way that they paved
the way for the darker days that followed. The optimistic narrative is rarely
critically examined. The Reagan administration staff denied that there was any
plot to drive the Soviet Union into bankruptcy by outspending it on SDI and
other military projects. Such a motive would be difficult to prove, but the
dire situation of the USSR was understood by all, no matter how much effort was
put into stoking fears in the public of a mighty communist foe that was always
on the verge of gaining the strategic advantage.
Since the 1970s there had been growing speculation about an imminent
collapse of the Soviet system. By the mid-1970s, Americans were well aware that
they were keeping the USSR fed by sending wheat to it every year, then oil
prices crashed in the 1980s, further limiting the source of income that was
needed to keep the economy afloat. The war in Afghanistan and the Chernobyl
catastrophe had burdened the economy further and deepened public cynicism
beyond repair. In Arsenals
of Folly, Richard Rhodes describes how in 1976 one demographer predicted
both the timing and the way the USSR would collapse:
The boldest prediction of
impending Soviet collapse during this period… was the work of a… French
historical demographer named Emmanuel Todd… in a book entitled The Final Fall,
published in France in 1976… Unfortunately, almost without exception,
professional Sovietologists—Richard Pipes [of the CPD] was a typical
specimen—were the last to recognize the decline and fall of the political
system on whose leviathan enigmas they had built their careers. The reviewers
praised Todd’s innovative approach, but his prediction of impending Soviet
collapse was dismissed as a “penchant for dramatic prophesying”… Todd
dramatically—but also accurately—prophesied on the opening page of his book,
“In ten, twenty or thirty years, an astonished world will be witness to the
dissolution or the collapse of this, the first of the Communist systems.” …The
perspicacious young Frenchman doubted that the Soviet regime would “suffer a
violent upheaval.” Its organization protected it from mass uprisings, and the
West was intervening to protect it from famine. Astonishingly, he thought, “the
successive or simultaneous breaking away of the [East European] satellites
should soon be accepted by the Kremlin without too much fuss” … Soviet reform
would have to be intelligently executed. The situation in which the USSR finds
itself is so implausible and tangled that it would require perfect mastery on
the part of a solidly established ruling class… Let’s pray for a uniformly
intelligent Politburo in the years to come.” It mattered greatly whether the US
government believed the Soviet Union to be an expanding or a declining power. [7]
All of this was known, or should have been known, by the
CIA, if the agency had not been purged of analysts who could do objective work.
Many of these signals were missed because, as in the hunt for weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq in 2002-2003, ideology was dictating the information that
would be selected by the administration. At the very least, however, the
Americans knew that Gorbachev came to Reykjavik more anxious than they to make
a deal that would cut military spending. The Americans could wait, but he
couldn’t. At the first Politburo meeting after the summit, Gorbachev complained
that the Americans were indeed trying to bleed them dry:
It is [the
belief] that the US might exhaust us economically via an arms race, create
obstacles for Gorbachev and for the entire Soviet leadership, undermine its
plans for resolving economic and social problems and thereby provoke
discontent. Moreover, in this way they hope to limit the possibilities for
Soviet economic ties with the developing countries, to create a situation where
those countries would be forced to come bowing to the United States. Finally,
their mistake is in thinking that with the help of the SDI they could undermine
the [strategic] parity and achieve military superiority. [8]
To some degree, these complaints must have been the
necessary bluster that Gorbachev had to demonstrate before the Politburo, but
it reveals a side of him that he toned down in the West, where he had become a
celebrity. Gorbachev was an enigma in those days. Did the celebrity status go
to his head, or was it a conscious ruse he engaged in to make perestroika
succeed? Nonetheless, it was jarring for the world to hear him say he had
become “friends” with such people as Margaret Thatcher, which made him a friend
of a friend of Chilean fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet. While he was cutting
ties with Angola and Cuba and halting all talk of supporting socialism in the
world, here in front of the Politburo he spoke about Reagan like an unreformed
Marxist:
… we had to wage a struggle in
Reykjavik not only with the class enemy, but also with such a representative of
our class enemy, who exhibited extreme primitivism, a caveman outlook and
intellectual impotence. [9]
His mention of developing countries in the Politburo meeting
is interesting because during the Reykjavik summit Reagan pushed him hard on
human rights, and several concessions were made in order to make progress in
disarmament talks. Unfortunately, Gorbachev was not in a position from which he
could push back. Gorbachev freed the dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov under
pressure from Reagan, but the American dissident Noam Chomsky (not living in a
gulag but shut out of establishment media) could have supplied him with copious
notes on American-sponsored atrocities in East Timor and Central America. [10]
Gorbachev could not have been uninformed on these aspects of American foreign
policy, but he knew but couldn’t make them an issue in these negotiations. Many
years later, Fidel Castro said about Gorbachev’s 1989 visit to Cuba:
I told him that the USSR had to
broaden its relations with all the political forces and to that end, I advised
him to hold a meeting with the revolutionary, progressive, and democratic
forces, and I think he accepted my suggestion. [11]
As much as Gorbachev may have agreed with Castro, the
historical record shows that the Soviet Union and Russia were never again able
to support revolutionary, progressive, and democratic forces not aligned with
Western interests. This is the tragedy of the end days of the Soviet Union, the
corner that Gorbachev had painted himself into with the pursuit of perestroika
and nuclear arms agreements with America. He would be accused of betraying the
developing world. Many scholars have insisted that Gorbachev was the reckless
destroyer of the Soviet socialist experiment. They argue that the economic
crisis was not as dire as stated in the standard narrative, and that the union
could have been held together by a leader with a stronger grip on the second
economy (the illegal black market) and separatist forces. [12] Fidel Castro
perhaps made the most concise assessment of the Soviet demise when he
concluded, “Socialism did not die from natural causes: it was a suicide.” [13] Others,
including Gorbachev in his memoirs, would blame Yeltsin and all those who
hijacked perestroika, looted
public assets (“grab-it-ization”), stoked
false hopes in the republics of the union for a better future as independent
nations, and condemned Russia in the 1990s to Western economic shock therapy.
Gorbachev could have stood up for the Third World, if he had
had some leverage, but he had little, and the Americans knew it. It would have
been nice if he could have reminded Reagan of his words in the “evil empire” [14]
speech regarding racial equality, that what was “once a source of disunity and
civil war, is now a point of pride for all Americans.” Apartheid in South
Africa would have ended sooner if America had stopped supporting South Africa’s
war against Angola. Gorbachev also never challenged the American understanding
of Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. He could have done more to defend how the
Soviet Union got involved there reluctantly, not for world conquest but because
it feared the destabilizing effects of the Iranian revolution rippling into
other Islamic regions. He could have cautioned Americans about the blowback
that would come from arming the Mujahidin and Osama bin Laden.
Today, the popular narrative about the Reagan years ignores
these issues. The story goes that that he ended or “won” the Cold War, while
the brutal crimes of the regimes supported by America in the 1980s are stories
told in the margins. In the report about the Reykjavik Summit issued by Hoover
Press in 2007, Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Shultz, the editor, put on
the cover the line “a key lesson learned at Reykjavik: the importance of
negotiating with enemies.” [15] Shultz is one of the heroes of the arms
reduction success story. He wasn’t one of the extremists in the CPD, and he
managed to deflect the influence of those who wanted to sabotage any deal on
strategic arms reductions. He formed a personal bond with Gorbachev and his
counterpart, Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze. However, the heroic
narrative omits that he adamantly refused to negotiate with Daniel Ortega’s
government in Nicaragua, and he supported violent overthrow of it, calling it
“a cancer, right here on our land mass.” [16] He supported all of the foreign policy
that sought to suppress the developing world’s independence and control of its
own resources. The line on the book cover should really be this: the importance
of negotiating with enemies, if they have the power to annihilate you.
This comparison of the two facets of Shultz’s achievements
points to the fact that there is a certain amount of reputation polishing among
the elder statesmen who focus on their achievements in nuclear disarmament,
which is uncontroversially seen by almost everyone as a good thing. On the
other hand, they don’t talk so loud and don’t seem so proud of their war crimes
in Central America. There are no books written in retirement about that, no
nostalgic visits with Gorbachev to talk about what was done there. Let us never
say that nuclear arsenals are useless because one of their unacknowledged
functions is that they provide great leverage and distraction in negotiations
with adversaries, and they create the need to always prioritize discussions
about their elimination. As a bonus, when reductions are achieved, they polish
the image of those who sign the deals. Lesser priorities such as the right to
self-determination and control of national resources can be endlessly ignored
while serious men talk the talk of dealing with “the existential threat” but do
not walk the walk of actually eliminating it.
This is now
As Russians now assess the world events that have occurred
since 1986, they have taken a lesson from Gorbachev’s experience in negotiating
with enemies from a position of weakness. Since the early 1990s, Gorbachev has
denounced the new world order led by a single superpower, the betrayal of the
promise not to expand NATO eastward, and the quick resort to military force as
a solution to all global disputes. Vladimir Putin, as well as many Russian
citizens, have perhaps come around to agreeing with Ronald Reagan’s words in
the “Evil Empire” speech of 1983: “Simple-minded appeasement or wishful
thinking about our adversaries is folly… they sometimes speak in soothing tones
of brotherhood and peace” but “the only morality they recognize is that which
will further their cause… morality is entirely subordinate to the interests…
and everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of…” resistance
to the American Empire. Reagan was speaking of his fear of Marxist world
revolution, but now his words can be turned back on him, to a nation that, after
2001 especially, reverted to an extreme emphasis on supremacy rather than on
common security.
As we look backward over the horizon to the Reykjavik
Summit, there is a dismal reckoning to be made of the opportunities lost. In
the early 21st century, the US went back to where it was in the early 1980s,
reviving missile defense and continuing with standard nuclear doctrine, then it
made things even worse by creating a bilateral relationship in which a
US-Russia summit on disarmament would now be unimaginable.
There are fewer nuclear weapons in the world, but that
hardly matters when there are still enough to cause a nuclear holocaust.
Perhaps the reductions were done just to reduce costs and eliminate some of the
redundancy. Far back in 1983, during the panel discussion after The
Day After, US General Brent Scowcroft stressed the importance of having an
arsenal that far exceeded what any other country could produce. Otherwise there
would be more “instability” as other countries got the idea that they could
catch up to the superpowers. [17] Thus in 2016 there have been no significant
reductions in twenty years and the US and Russia still have 93% of all the
nuclear weapons in the world. None of the other nuclear-armed nations has shown
interest in disarmament, and it is a dead issue as long as the United States
works to antagonize Russia, remains silent about Israel’s nuclear arsenal, and
wages an illegal war in Syria, demanding absurdly that the government of Syria
stop attempting to gain control over its sovereign territory.
When President Bush II took America out of the ABM Treaty,
then sped up development of missile defense and reverted to the pursuit of
nuclear supremacy, American policy makers were embarking
on the
same erroneous ways that
had been so painfully unlearned by the 1980s. They were once again making the
philosopher’s category mistake of assuming that nuclear explosives, with the
resultant missile defense counter-measures, are military weapons. The problem
posed by nuclear weapons requires a political solution. Richard Rhodes finishes
his book with a paragraph that sums up the fundamental problem:
The discovery of how to release
nuclear energy… revealed that there was no limit to the amount of energy that
might be packaged into small, portable, and relatively inexpensive weapons;
that there could be no defense against such weapons, each of which could
destroy a city; that therefore a policy of common security in the sort run and
program of abolition in the long run would be necessary to accommodate the new
reality and avoid disaster. Recoiling from such urgencies, which would require
negotiation, compromise, and a measure of humility, we chose instead to distend
ourselves into the largest scorpion in the bottle. Obstinately misreading the
failure of our authoritarian counterpart on the other side of the world, to our
shame and misfortune, we continue to claim an old and derelict sovereignty that
the weapons themselves deny. [18]
 |
“We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of
killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.” – J. Robert Oppenheimer. |
For a conclusion, I finish with a recent quote by Russian
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov. The points of contention he lists make
for a grim reiteration of everything that was at issue in Reykjavik thirty
years ago, and it is a sad contrast with the WorldNews summary above that
described how in Reykjavik Reagan and Gorbachev managed “to look beyond past
hostilities and forge a new and lasting relationship”:
Without finding a solution to the
missile defense problem, without preventing a new arms race in space and making
the nuclear test ban a universal treaty, without settling the issues connected
with the lack of balance in conventional weapons, the nuclear talks with the
United States are impossible. They know about it. It has been publicly announced
before. NATO members continue to build up their anti-missile potential in
Europe as part of their so-called phased adaptive approach. We have repeatedly
expressed our concern over the placing of strategic infrastructure in the
direct vicinity of our borders as this affects our interests in the security
sphere. Moscow will keep a close watch at the situation and will not cease its
efforts to explain the inevitable and undesirable consequences of the American
project’s realization. [19]
Twenty thousand people /
Cross Bösebrücke /Fingers are crossed / Just in case / Walking the dead / Where
are we now, where are we now? / The moment you know, you know, you know / As
long as there's sun / As long as there's sun / As long as there's rain / As
long as there's rain / As long as there's fire / As long as there's fire / As
long as there's me / As long as there's you
The Bösebrücke is the bridge in Berlin that was
the former border crossing between East and West Berlin. 20,000 people
crossed over on November 10, 1989 when it became the first open checkpoint
since 1961. David Bowie’s Where are we now?
is full of obscure references to his personal experiences in Berlin. If you
don’t know Berlin and you weren’t there, it’s hard to relate, but Bowie’s songs
often connected the personal with a concern for the wider world. In the last
verse the references shift from the personal, making the question in the title
about the still fragile peace that has existed since the Berlin Wall came down.
The “me” and “you” in the lyrics may give the impression that this is just a
love song, but they are also an expression of the “common security” that is
discussed throughout the book Arsenals of
Folly.
Notes
[2] Governors’ conference in 1963, “Are
Liberals Really Liberal?” In Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly, 260-262.
[3] Richard Rhodes, The
Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospect of a
World without Nuclear Weapons (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010),
106-107.
[4] Richard Rhodes, Ibid, 99.
[5] Oliver Stone (Director), Peter
Kuznick (Writer), The
Untold History of the United States, Part 8, DVD, Warner Home Video,
00:36:35~.
[6] Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (London:
Doubleday, 1995), 419.
[7] Richard Rhodes, Arsenals
of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (New
York: Vintage, 2007), 140-141. Much of the information in this essay was found
in this book, especially chapter 13 (pages 236-270) on the Reykjavik Summit.
Rather than fill the essay with excessive endnotes, I make just this general
reference. Unless otherwise stated, all interpretations and opinions are my
own.
[9] USSR CC CPSU Politburo… Ibid.
[10] Noam Chomsky, “The Contra War
in Nicaragua,” Libcom.org,
September 8, 2006. Originally published in What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Odonian
Press, 1992.
[11] Francesco Merlo, “Fidel Castro on
Socialism, Economy, Clinton,” Latin
American Network Information Center, translation of the original article in
Italian published in Milan Corriere Della Sera December
5, 1992.
[12] Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny, Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of
the Soviet Union (Bloomington, Indiana: iUniverse, 2010).
[13] Euvkeny Novikov and Patrick
Bascio, Gorbachev and the Collapse of the
Soviet Communist Party (New York: Peter Lang, 1994).
[18] Richard Rhodes, Arsenals
of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (New York: Vintage,
2007), 308-309.
