Despite the fact that many administration officials supported this interpretation of the arms race, the then Secretary of Defense, Cap Weinberger, interviewed nearly twenty years after the fact, said that he did not see his task as trying to spend Moscow into oblivion, and was never so instructed. “I actually did not hear [Reagan] talk about that at all,” said Weinberger in an October 2002 interview. “I must say that I didn’t see a deliberate attempt to bankrupt them.” Rather, “I saw him [Reagan] trying to gain military strength for its own sake, for security, to counteract them, to make up for our weaknesses.” According to Weinberger, Reagan desired military power “because not having it was dangerous for the United States.” It was Weinberger’s charge to lessen that danger by expanding the military.51
A month after the above interview, Weinberger was publicly asked pointedly if the Reagan administration pursued a military buildup to bankrupt the Soviet Union. “I don’t think it was a conscious attempt to bankrupt them,” he replied. “It was a conscious attempt to tell them they could never win or prevail in an arms race with us.” In saying this, Weinberger quickly acknowledged that there does not appear to be a big difference in his two statements, though he ensured there is a difference.52
In Weinberger’s judgment, the military had deteriorated to a “truly appalling” state under President Carter, an ill which he and Reagan believed they could remedy through a buildup that would bring the Soviets to the bargaining table. In his memoirs, Weinberger listed four goals for the buildup, none of which were to “bankrupt” the USSR. And yet, he believed the buildup had that effect. “Our military buildup had an economic impact [on the USSR],” wrote Weinberger. “What else, besides President Reagan’s determination to win the Cold War, won it? First: Our military buildup.”53 In Weinberger’s eyes, the arms race bankrupting the Soviets was an incidental effect of Reagan’s policy, and an indirect result of the stated administration policy.
But while Weinberger did not view himself as tasked to spend the Soviets into the grave, other key administration players (and the Soviets) believed this to be precisely Reagan’s goal for a military buildup. Richard Allen, the first national security adviser, and Reagan’s foreign-policy adviser throughout the decisive latter 1970s (when Weinberger was not), states that Reagan decided from the start of his presidency that the United States would be dedicated to a plan of “spending it [the USSR] into oblivion.”54 He said Reagan saw an arms race as a means of shoving the enemy off the plank.55
This view of the arms race was one that Reagan seems to have advocated long before he became president. In discussing U.S.–USSR relations in that previously cited early 1960s speech, he said, “the only sure way to avoid war is to surrender without fighting.” “The other way,” he asserted, “is based on the belief (supported so far by all evidence) that in an all-out race our system is stronger, and eventually the enemy gives up the race as a hopeless cause.”56 In the 1970s, he explicitly stated that this “race” was an arms race. Similarly, during the 1980 campaign he told the National Journal and Washington Post that an arms race was “the last thing” the Soviets wanted to see from their American counterpart: “They know that if we turned our full industrial might into an arms race, they cannot keep pace with us. Why haven’t we played that card?”57
Once in office, Reagan looked to play that card. He continued to reiterate the importance of engaging the Soviets in an arms race that forced them to spend money beyond their means. In an October 16, 1981 interview, Reagan said of the Soviets: “They cannot vastly increase their military productivity because they’ve already got their people on a starvation diet…. If we show them [we have] the will and determination to go forward with a military build-up…then they have to weigh, do they want to meet us realistically on a program of disarmament or do they want to face a legitimate arms race in which we’re racing?…[N]ow they’re going to be faced with [the fact] that we could go forward with an arms race and they can’t keep up.”58
During a January 20, 1983 press conference, Reagan said he was “hopeful and optimistic” that the Soviets “cannot go on down the road they’re going in a perpetual arms race.” “And so,” he hinted, “this is one of the things in connection with our own arms race.”59 The next day he said that “if we ever hope to get disarmament, we will only get it by indicating to them that if they’re going to keep on with that buildup, they’re going to have to be able to match us, because we’re going to build up.”60 He added this anecdote: “There was a cartoon that explained it all. Brezhnev, before he died, was supposed to be talking to a Russian general. And he said to the general, ‘I liked the arms race better when we were the only ones in it.’”61 Connecting the dots, Reagan summed up: “So, this is what we’re doing. We want peace.”62
Looking back, in his memoirs, Reagan said candidly, “we were going to spend whatever it took to stay ahead of [the Soviets] in the arms race.” He figured, “Someone in the Kremlin had to realize that in arming themselves to the teeth, they were aggravating the desperate economic problems in the Soviet Union, which were the greatest evidence of the failure of Communism.” He noted, with irony that would have made Lenin cringe, that “the great dynamic success of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism—money.” The Soviets, Reagan explained, “could never win the arms race; we could outspend them forever. Moreover… we had the capacity to maintain a technological edge over them forever.”63
Although on the surface Cap Weinberger’s caveat appeared to discount the economic importance of the arms race, he may have been the lone dissenter who felt that Reagan’s military buildup was for its own sake. In truth, many of Reagan’s own statements (particularly in regard to SDI) suggested that he viewed the arms race as another front for the economic war. Indeed, it would have been surprising if Reagan, for whom seemingly every policy was an attempt to undo Communism, did not view the arms race as one of the cornerstones to his crusade. After all, the arms race gave him the opportunity to exercise his deepest held beliefs concerning the inevitable triumph of the capitalist system, since it pitted the two economies directly against one another.
THE FISCAL IMPACT OF THE ARMS RACE
By 1985, Reagan was certain that the Soviets were feeling the pinch of the arms race unlike ever before. His assessment was supported by high-level members of the Soviet government, who spared no chance to voice their concern over Reagan’s motivations. “The imperialists would like to exhaust us economically,” cried Soviet deputy R. N. Stakheyev.64 Izvestia complained: “They [the Reagan administration] want to impose on us an even more ruinous arms race. They calculate that the Soviet Union will not last the race. It lacks the resources, it lacks the technical potential. They hope that our country’s economy will be exhausted.”65
That was Reagan’s hope. At the time, CIA analysts struggled to pinpoint precise data on the Soviet spending, a problem that Gorbachev himself faced, since the totalitarian nature of Soviet society often left its own chieftains in the dark. Outside estimates on Soviet military spending ranged from as low as 7 percent of GDP to as high as 73 percent.66 Most estimates fell in the decidedly wide range of 20 to 50 percent.67 Though he found it difficult to nail down the specific numbers, Gorbachev knew that statements like this from the Moscow World Service in February 1984 were bald-faced lies: “We would like to remind you that in the Soviet Union defense spending has remained unchanged for several years. In 1984, it will amount to 4.66 percent of the national budget.” This deliberately false statement was issued to pose a contrast to U.S. figures released by the Pentagon the day before, which, according to the Moscow Service, signaled American “preparations for war.”68