SDI

A certain amount of mythology grew up around the Strategic Defense Initiative, the program I announced in 1983 to develop a defensive shield against nuclear missiles. It wasn't conceived by scientists, although they came on board and contributed greatly to its success. I came into office with a decided prejudice against our tacit agreement with the Soviet Union regarding nuclear missiles. I'm talking about the MAD policy - "mutual assured destruction" - the idea of deterrence providing safety so long as each of us had the power to destroy the other with nuclear missiles if one of us launched a first strike. Somehow this didn't seem to me to be something that would send you to bed feeling safe. It was like having two westerners standing in a saloon aiming their guns at each other's head - permanently. There had to be a better way.

Early in my first term, I called a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - our military leaders - and said to them: Every offensive weapon ever invented by man has resulted in the creation of a defense against it; isn't it possible in this age of technology that we could invent a defensive weapon that could intercept nuclear weapons and destroy them as they emerge from their silos? They looked at each other, then asked if they could huddle for a few moments. Very shortly, they came out of their huddle and said, "Yes, it's an idea worth exploring." My answer was, "Let's do it." So the SDI was born, and very shortly some in Congress and the press named it "Star Wars."

As the myths grew, one of them was that I had proposed the ideas to produce a bargaining chip for use in getting the Soviets to reduce their weaponry. I've had to tell the Soviet leaders a hundred times that the SDI was not a bargaining chip. I've told them I'd share it with others willing to give up their nuclear missiles. We all know how to make the missiles. One day a madman could come along and make the missiles and blackmail all of us - but not if we have a defense against them. My closing line was, "We all got together in 1925 and banned the use of poison gas. But we all kept our gas masks." Some people may take a different view, but if I had to choose the single most important reason, on the United States' side, for the historic breakthroughs that were to occur during the next five years in the quest for peace and a better relationship with the Soviet Union, I would say it was the Strategic Defense Initiative, along with the overall modernization of our military forces.

But looking back now on the entirety of those eight years I was in Washington, I have to say that the improvements in the U.S.-Soviet relations didn't come quickly and they didn't come easily. As I have mentioned before, the Soviet Union we faced during my first winter in office was guided by a policy of immoral and unbridled expansionism. During that first year, we embarked on a broad program of military renewal to upgrade our land, sea, and air forces and adopted a foreign policy aimed at making it clear to the Soviets that we now viewed them through a prism of reality: We knew what they were up to, we were not going to accept subversion of democratic governments, and we would never accept second place in the arms race. At the same time, recognizing the futility of the arms race and the hair-trigger risk of annihilation it posed to the world, I tried to send signals to Moscow indicating we were prepared to negotiate a winding down of the arms race if the Soviets were also sincere about it - and proved it with deeds.

These policies were linked: Because we now viewed the Soviets through the prism of reality, we knew we would never get anywhere with them at the arms control table if we went there in a position of military inferiority; if we were going to get them to sue for peace, we had to do it from a position of strength. And, because we viewed them realistically, it was clear that if we did negotiate an arms control agreement with the Soviets, it had to be absolutely verifiable. Agreements couldn't be based on trust alone. I didn't want the United States ever to have to do what it sometimes had been forced to do in the past: go to the arms control table with the Russians holding better cards and having to beg them to negotiate seriously with an appeal to their better nature. That's why "Peace through Strength" became one of the mottoes of our administration. And I decided that if we were to participate with the Russians in arms control talks, our goal should be to reduce nuclear weapons, not just limit their rate of increase, which is what past nuclear arms control agreements had done.

There is a myth that arms control agreements automatically produce arms reduction. Well, between 1969, when the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) began, and the mid-eighties, the Soviets increased their number of strategic nuclear weapons by thousands, and under the limits set by the SALT I and SALT II agreements the number could have reached thousands more. That might be arms limitation, but it sure wasn't arms reduction. Looking back at the recent history of the world, I find it amazing how far civilization has retrogressed so quickly. As recently as World War I - granted the rules were violated at times - we had a set of rules of warfare in which armies didn't make war against civilians: Soldiers fought soldiers. Then came World War II and Hitler's philosophy of total war, which meant the bombing not only of soldiers but of factories that produced their rifles, and, if surrounding communities were also hit, that was to be accepted; then, as the war progressed, it became common for the combatants simply to attack civilians as part of military strategy. By the time the 1980s rolled around, we were placing our entire faith in a weapon whose fundamental target was the civilian population. A nuclear war is aimed at people, no matter how often military men like to say, "No, we only aim to hit other missiles."

One of the first statistics I saw as president was one of the most sobering and startling I'd ever heard. I'll never forget it: The Pentagon said at least 150 million American lives would be lost in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union - even if we "won." For Americans who survived such a war, I couldn't imagine what life would be like. The planet would be so poisoned the "survivors" would have no place to live. Even if a nuclear war did not mean the extinction of mankind, it would certainly mean the end of civilization as we knew it. No one could "win" a nuclear war. Yet as long as nuclear weapons were in existence, there would always be risks they would be used, and once the first nuclear weapon was unleashed, who knew where it would end? My dream, then, became a world free of nuclear weapons and for the eight years I was president I never let my dream of a nuclear-free world fade from my mind.

Since I knew it would be a long and difficult task to rid the world of nuclear weapons, I had this second dream: the creation of a defense against nuclear missiles, so we could change from a policy of assured destruction to one of assured survival. My deepest hope was that someday our children and our grandchildren could live in a world free of the constant threat of nuclear war. Although I don't think I was ever able to convince the American people of the seriousness of the threat we faced from Marxist guerrillas in Central America, I think I succeeded in making my point when I took my case to the public regarding the need to press ahead with modernizing our military forces - Americans valued, above all, the security of their nation. During my speech to the country on March 23, I revealed some recently declassified information about the enormous Soviet arms buildup and previously secret photos documenting the expansion of Soviet military facilities on Cuba. "I know that all you want is peace, and so do I," I said. "I know too that many of you seriously believe that a nuclear freeze would further the cause of peace. But a freeze now would make us less, not more, secure and would raise, not reduce, the risks of war " I didn't want the United States to be in an arms race, I said, but the Soviet Union had put us in one and our survival as a nation was at stake. After appealing to the American people to tell their congressmen they were behind the military modernization program, I revealed my dream for the Strategic Defense Initiative:

Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive. Let us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base and that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today. 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?

I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it's reasonable for us to begin the effort. It will take years, probably decades of effort on many fronts. There will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. And as we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But isn't it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war?

Tonight, consistent with our obligations under the ABM [Antiballistic Missile] treaty and recognizing the need for closer consultation with our allies, I'm taking an important 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. We seek neither military superiority nor political advantage. Our only purpose - one all people share - is to search for ways to reduce the danger of nuclear war.

Several weeks later, convinced we had to do everything possible to develop a defense against the horrible weapons of mass destruction that the atomic age had produced, I gave a go-ahead to speed up research on Strategic Defense Initiative, noting in the diary:

Some 50 scientists were persuaded to look at the problem after my March 23, 1983, declaration. They started as skeptics and have wounded up enthusiastic. We'll proceed.

I said at one meeting that I was getting fed up with the way the Russians were behaving and that too often in the past the United States had accepted flaws agreements with them simply because we couldn't get any other kind of agreement. Afterward, I wrote in the diary: "I made it plain there must be no granting of concessions, one sided, to try to soften up the Soviets .we're convinced they want above all to negotiate away our right to seek defensive weapons against ballistic missiles. They fear our technology. I believe such a defense could render nuclear weapons obsolete and thus we could rid the world of that threat. Question is, will they use that to break off the talks and blame us?" A few days later there is this entry in the diary: "We had an N.S.P.G. meeting again on our negotiating posture in the upcoming meeting with Gromyko and the arms talks. I believe the Soviets have agreed to the talks only to head off our research on strategic defense against nuclear weapons. I stand firm we cannot retreat on that, no matter what they offer." A few days after that, on December 18, I made this entry in my diary: "A meeting with the Joint Chiefs regarding our military force compared to that of the Soviets. In strategic weapons, when the Soviets refer to maintaining stability they mean superiority and they have it. More and more I'm thinking the Soviets are preparing to walk out on the talks if we won't give up research on the strategic defense system. I hope I'm wrong ."

Just before Christmas, Margaret Thatcher came to Washington and Nancy and I invited her to Camp David. I met her helicopter in a golf cart and took her to Aspen, our weekend home, before going on to the main conference building, Laurel. She had just had a meeting with an up-and-coming member of the Soviet Politburo named Mikhail Gorbachev who, she said, expressed strong reservations over the SDI. When she seemed to share some of his misgivings I wondered if the British were concerned about the SDI and my hope of eliminating nuclear weapons because of fears that without the American nuclear shield the Soviets' superiority in conventional weapons would pose a threat to Western Europe. I assured Margaret we were simply embarking on a long-term research effort, not making a commitment to deploy the SDI; obviously, I said, it would be some time before we knew it would work as we hoped.

Cap Weinberger, a strong booster of the SDI, said the Russians were almost certainly going to demand that we kill it as the price for holding substantive negotiations. I told the group as emphatically as I could: The Strategic Defense Initiative was not a "bargaining chip" and we were going to stick with it no matter what the Russians wanted. The SDI might take decades to develop, but what more important mission did we have than finding the means to neutralize the terrible weapons produced by the nuclear age? I never viewed the SDI as an impenetrable shield - no defense could ever be expected to be one hundred percent effective.

But what made the idea promising was that, if it worked and we then entered an era when the nations of the world agreed to eliminate nuclear weapons, it could serve as a safety valve against cheating - or attacks by lunatics who managed to get their hands on a nuclear missile. And, if we couldn't reach an agreement eliminating nuclear missiles, the system would be able to knock down enough of an enemy's missiles so that if he ever pushed the button to attack, he would be doing so in the knowledge his attack was unable to prevent a devastating retaliatory strike. The SDI held too much potential for the security of mankind to be traded away at the negotiating table.

Courtesy of Simon and Schuster