Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer prize winning author, in his book published last month, “Arsenals of Folly”, recounts how President Ronald Reagan, who preferred information that he imbibed visually, viewed one morning the film “The Day After”, about a nuclear attack on Lawrence, Kansas. Reagan wrote that the film “left me greatly depressed”, the only time in his diary he confessed to that emotion.
Soon after, Reagan was given a briefing on the consequence of a nuclear war. Officials at the same meeting reported that the president became withdrawn. Caspar Weinberger, the defense secretary, attested that the president had found it a terribly disturbing experience.
So it was that at the summit in Reykjavik with the reforming Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, the two of them came as close as two antagonistic leaders have ever done to agreeing to abolish all nuclear weapons.
For the first time, thanks to Rhodes’ diligent research, we have a near verbatim record of the conversations of the two leaders plus an immense amount of the background negotiations by high— powered advisors from both sides, most of whom were coolly “professional” enough not to think of consequences and preferred to think of numbers, balance and advantages. The most morally self-contained of all was Richard Perle, the assistant secretary of defense, who was the hawk among hawks and who used the credibility earned by his formidable intelligence to persuade Reagan at the last minute to pull back from closing the deal. It remains a mystery why Reagan, despite his impulse to close the deal, allowed Perle to bend his ear — perhaps he knew that if Perle was not convinced the Senate or the mass of voters never would be either. And it remains a mystery why Gorbachev was so insistent that a total ban must include limiting research on Reagan’s pet baby, the Strategic Defense Initiative, only to the laboratory As Andre Sakharov, the Soviet physicist, informed Gorbachev, SDI would be a “Maginot line in space — expensive and ineffective.”
After both presidents had retired, Reagan and Nancy invited Gorbachev and Raisa to stay on their ranch in California. That was a conversation without records, but certainly worth imagining and thinking about — the reminiscing of two men who at one time felt the other represented an aggressive “evil empire”, out to pull off the coup de grace of a pre-emptive nuclear war, who gradually became convinced through their meetings that the other was sincere about total and quick nuclear disarmament. As the only remaining survivor of the foursome, Gorbachev should be encouraged to write about it, before the memory is extinct.
If Reykjavik did not produce the goods it did change the climate between the two superpowers. It produced soon after the agreement to abolish intermediate range nuclear weapons in Europe, the first treaty ever to eliminate a whole class of nuclear weapons, and it encouraged President George Bush Sr. to unilaterally get rid of all American tactical nuclear weapons. Gorbachev immediately responded with far-reaching initiatives of his own.
But once Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush Sr. were off the scene momentum on nuclear disarmament was dissipated. Clinton and to a lesser extent Yeltsin didn’t give it time or priority. President George W. Bush made an initial gesture by proposing a treaty-less major cut in strategic nuclear weapons, but weakened the result by placing the weapons in storage rather than destroying them.
Meanwhile, the remaining Russian missiles literally rust and rot in the silos, poorly serviced and maintained, a form of unwilling disarmament. Nevertheless, Georgi Arbatov, a close Gorbachev foreign adviser, who persuaded Gorbachev to drop the old Soviet policy of confrontation and instead adopt Olof Palme’s notion of “Common Security”, wants Russia to engage in willing unilateral disarmament. “We have so many weapons we could decrease the numbers unilaterally and show an example”, he told me recently, “We could dismantle our rockets and take others off alert and the Americans would be obliged to follow us.”
If Iran is ever to be persuaded that it should forgo nuclear weapons the promise made by the nuclear powers in the negotiations renewing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to make a substantial reduction in their numbers of nuclear missiles has to be realized. If Iran goes nuclear the genie will be truly out of the bag, especially in the volatile Middle East. Then even Richard Perle, if he is able to think properly about it, might blanche.
