Annihilation from Within

issue was not a casual reaction. It reflected an understanding of nuclear weapons that was at once realistic and humane. His views contrasted favorably with the self-proclaimed expertise of many defense intellectuals who are prone to what Alfred North Whitehead called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” The same philosophical underpinnings explain Reagan’s decision—taken over the objection of the State Department—to endorse Weinberger’s recommendation that we seek a U.S.-Soviet agreement to get rid of all intermediate nuclear missiles deployed in Eastern and Western Europe. The State Department wanted to negotiate a lower, common level for these missiles that would—in the euphemism of mutual deterrence theory—“stabilize” a new nuclear confrontation between East and West. Reagan liked the idea of eliminating all these new missiles. As Weinberger later wrote: “Contrary to virtually all of the popular myths about him” Reagan “actually was very unhappy with the need to rely on nuclear weapons…. All of the required briefings, exercises, and the ‘Doomsday’ scenarios new Presidents have to be given, simply reinforced his own beliefs.”13 The proposal to reduce both the Soviet and the U.S. intermediate range missiles to zero was Richard Perle’s idea. He served as Assistant Secretary of Defense during most of the years when I served as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and he managed NATO affairs and arms control issues with brilliant inspiration and hard-knuckled bureaucratic skills. Would that more Americans willing to serve in government possessed both Perle’s creative intellect and his ability to translate good ideas into effective government policies.
It may seem counterintuitive, but I believe that one must be something of a wimp to endorse a confrontation of missile forces primed, day and night, year after year, to execute mutual genocide. Failure to grasp the magnitude of this gamble betokens a lack of emotional strength. No one can be certain that any such “mutual deterrent” will never fail. Fortunately, Reagan understood that reliance on the mutual nuclear threat was “a sad commentary on the human condition,” and with his Strategic Defense Initiative of March 23, 1983, he boldly swept aside decades of mistaken theorizing. He reached this decision knowing the arguments on both sides of the issue, thanks to his many discussions during his presidential campaign. His chief foreign policy advisor Richard V. Allen had organized these tutorials, expertly gathering the best strategic thinkers representing a wide range of views.
Yet it took another eighteen years for Washington and Moscow to overcome the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction. The catalyst for change was George W. Bush’s decision in 2001 to withdraw from the treaty banning missile defenses—a move that infuriated diehard supporters of MAD thinking. But George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin realized that the genocidal implications of MAD would harm useful cooperative relations between their two nations, and President Putin understood this better than the European and American arms control aficionados. They firmly predicted that ending this treaty would force Russia to expand its missile force, and almost felt betrayed by Putin when he did no such thing.
Reagan was not the first conservative statesman to distrust the concept of mutual deterrence. Winston Churchill had strongly supported America’s initial nuclear advantage in the fall of 1945, when he was the leader of the opposition. But by 1953 the Eisenhower administration’s apparent insouciance about putting atomic weapons “to military use” deeply troubled Churchill (who had again become Prime Minister).14 Even more important in reshaping Churchill’s thinking at that time was the impact, emotional and intellectual, of the recent thermonuclear weapon tests. On March 1, 1954, after the Soviet Union had demonstrated that it could build a thermonuclear bomb, the U.S. test at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific resulted in a yield of 15 megatons (equivalent to fifteen million times the largest conventional bombs of World War II), and—unforeseen by the designers of that test—spread radioactive contamination over the ocean that would have been fatal to unprotected people within an area of some 7,000 square miles.
Churchill, who always prided himself on his careful attention to scientific knowledge, was particularly moved by the data on the power of thermonuclear bombs made public by the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Committee. He wrote to Eisenhower on March 9: “You can imagine what my thoughts are about London. I am told several million people would certainly be obliterated by … the latest H-bombs.” He urged Eisenhower to agree to a U.S.-British summit meeting with the new Soviet leaders, a proposal he had already made after Stalin’s death the year before. Eisenhower remained opposed, and with hindsight one might judge him right since no great opportunity for arms control was missed at that time. Only after Gorbachev had revolutionized the political thinking in the Kremlin could Reagan and George H. W. Bush reach agreements with the Soviet Union to eliminate whole classes of nuclear weapons.
It must be granted, though, that Churchill’s timing made some sense. The Soviet leaders, too, had changed their views of nuclear war. It appears that even Communist dictators could be moved by the emotional impact of H-bomb tests. Before 1954, the Kremlin held to the thesis of the “inevitability of war” between East and West. Twelve days after the 1954 American H-bomb test, Georgii Malenkov, the new Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, made a statement opposing “the policy [read: Stalin’s policy] of preparing [for] a new world war, which with modern weapons means the end of civilization.”15
I see these reactions by government leaders as another instance of emotional hindsight emboldening foresight—giving statesmen the courage and foresight to fear nuclear weapons. A personal experience can strengthen this courage. Churchill had suffered a stroke less than a year before his letter to Eisenhower, and surely knew that he was close to the end of his career. This might have illuminated for him, with transcendent clarity, the reasons for the shallow public reaction to the searing facts about the thermonuclear bomb. As he put it:
The reason is that human minds recoil from the realization of such facts. The people, including