At the time Reagan arrived in the White House, there was no reason to think of him as antinuclear. He had run two extended campaigns for the governorship and two more for the presidency without letting on to voters that he favored the abolition of nuclear weapons. His address to the 1976 convention was given only after his primary challenge to Ford had ended—and even then, the speech was more an expression of anxiety about nuclear weapons than a specific call for their abolition. During his 1980 campaign, Reagan had spoken about the need for civilian defense programs to help the United States survive a nuclear exchange.
Nor were there grounds to think of Reagan as opposed to nuclear weapons during his first years in the White House. After Reagan took office, his administration not only moved to bolster civil defense, but also approved a new defense policy that included plans for a “protracted” nuclear war. The new administration also launched extensive preparations to keep the federal government running with teams of officials outside of Washington if the president and vice president were killed or incapacitated during a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. (Among the leading participants in this secret program for “continuity of government” were a former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and a member of Congress, Dick Cheney.) During Reagan’s first term, the movement for a nuclear freeze gained in strength both in Europe and in the United States. Reagan determinedly opposed this movement, arguing that the United States should build up its forces and deploy Pershing missiles in Europe to offset the military power of the Soviet Union.
It seems likely, however, that Reagan’s opposition to nuclear weapons crystallized during these early years in the White House. Once he became president, Reagan was gradually obliged to confront the reality of what nuclear war would mean, and to recognize the necessity of split-second judgments and the possibility of error. By several accounts, including Reagan’s own, he was taken aback when he was briefed by the Pentagon about the details of America’s nuclear war planning—how many Soviet cities would be attacked, how many people would be killed, and what would happen to the United States as result of a Soviet attack. The White House and Pentagon carried out detailed exercises for nuclear war, in which Reagan was sometimes obliged to participate. A 1982 briefing on the Pentagon’s war plan, known as its SIOP, or Single Integrated Operational Plan, “made clear to Reagan that with but a nod of his head all the glories of imperial Russia, all the hopes and dreams of the peasants in Ukraine, and all the pioneering settlements in Kazakhstan would vanish,” wrote one U.S. official present for the briefing.4
In the fall of 1983, at the height of the nuclear freeze movement, ABC television produced the movie The Day After, an account of what would happen to a single town, Lawrence, Kansas, in a nuclear war. In the film, Kansas City was hit by nuclear missiles, and nearby Lawrence suffered from the fallout of the attack. After viewing a tape before it was aired, Reagan wrote in his diary that it was “very effective and left me very depressed…. My own reaction: we have to do all we can to have a deterrent and to see there is never a nuclear war.” Not long afterward, Reagan was again briefed on nuclear war planning in the White House Situation Room, and he wrote that it reminded him of the movie. “Yet there were still some people at the Pentagon who claimed a nuclear war was ‘winnable,’” Reagan observed. “I thought they were crazy.”5
That fall, two other episodes underlined for Reagan the possibility of a miscalculation that could lead to nuclear war. On September 1, 1983, a Korean Airlines plane was shot down after flying off course into Soviet territory; Soviet officials had wrongly believed it might be a military plane. Two months later, when NATO conducted an extensive military exercise called Able Archer, U.S. intelligence officials discovered that Soviet officials monitoring the allies’ activities believed that the Soviet Union was about to be attacked. Reagan recorded in his diary one day in November that the Soviets “are so defense minded, so paranoid about being attacked that without being in any way soft on them we ought to tell them no one here has any intention of doing anything like that.”6
By late 1983, it appears, Reagan had seen, heard, and witnessed enough as president to be in favor of trying to abolish nuclear weapons. In November of that year, on a trip to Asia, he began to talk vaguely of his beliefs. “I know I speak for people everywhere when I say, our dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of this earth,” Reagan said in a speech to the Japanese Diet. At the time, those words were understandably greeted with skepticism. Within weeks, Reagan began asking his speechwriters to insert into a speech on Soviet relations another expression of his hopes for a world without nuclear weapons. At meeting after meeting, he raised the subject of abolition. “The bureaucracy would not hear of it,” Secretary of State George Shultz reported.7
Reagan persisted. Following his 1984 reelection and throughout his second term, he made increasingly clear to the high-ranking officials around him that he would like to find a way to move toward a world without nuclear weapons. His aides argued with him, to no avail. “He periodically would say, ‘Let’s get rid of them [nuclear weapons],’” recalled Frank Carlucci, who served as national security adviser in 1986-87. “And I resurrected an old paper that [John] Poindexter [Carlucci’s predecessor] had done, saying we can’t get rid of them, and redid it and sent it back in.” Reagan wasn’t persuaded and didn’t change. At one point in 1987, Carlucci brought in Richard Perle, the staunch proponent of American military power who had been Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s principal adviser for Soviet policy, to try to convince Reagan it would be wrong to abolish nuclear weapons. Perle found that Reagan “was fixed in his ways on a nuclear-free world.”8
George Shultz told his State Department colleagues that the president had earned the right to his views. “When you win forty-eight out of fifty states, you, too, can talk about eliminating nuclear weapons,” Shultz said.9
Reagan and Gorbachev met each other for the first time in Geneva in November 1985. The event attracted nearly three thousand correspondents from around the world to analyze every word and gesture—for good reason, since this was the first superpower summit between American and Soviet leaders in more than six years. When Reagan emerged outside coatless and hatless in the frosty weather for his first meeting with the Soviet leader, the correspondents took it as a sign of Reagan’s vitality. Years later, Reagan’s personal aide, executive assistant Jim Kuhn, admitted that Reagan had himself put on an overcoat and scarf, and that Kuhn had repeatedly urged him to take it off for appearance’s sake. “Gorbachev is much younger, and I thought, ‘Gorbachev’s going to get out of that car, no coat on, no hat on, Reagan’s going to be bundled up like [an] old feeble man,’” Kuhn recalled. After several pleas, Reagan, clearly annoyed, pulled off the overcoat and threw it at Kuhn. “All right, damn it, have it your way,” Reagan said. He went out to greet Gorbachev, who was bundled up in a dark overcoat and scarf and was carrying a fedora.10
The two leaders reached no far-reaching accords at Geneva. They did agree to a joint statement saying that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” a declaration that, while seemingly self-evident, turned out to be of some modest significance as a spur for future, more concrete negotiations. During the meetings, Gorbachev repeatedly voiced strong opposition to Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, but Reagan refused to give ground. It was a summit in which the two leaders became acquainted with each other, taking each other’s measure for the first time. Each leader was dubious about the other, yet each came away thinking about the possibilities for some solid deals in the future. They agreed to two further meetings over the following years in Washington and Moscow.