It was nothing new in the annals of strategic policy when Reagan’s first Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, said that he could imagine the U.S. firing off a single nuclear weapon for “demonstration” purposes during a war in Europe, or when Reagan himself or his Vice-President, George Bush, held discourse on the conceivability of fighting or winning a limited nuclear war. Contrary to many press reports of the day, there was nothing much new about Reagan’s defense program generally. Reagan was certainly spending a lot more money on defense: his first defense budget amounted to $258 billion, $43.7 billion higher than Carter’s last, a 13.2 percent increase even after allowing for inflation. However, 80 percent of this increase was for more surface ships and submarines, more expensive airplanes, tanks and other weapons of conventional battle that have nothing to do with nuclear war. More money was also slated for nuclear weapons; but even though in some instances Reagan called for more or faster spending, nearly every program—cruise missiles, the Trident II submarine-launched missile, the MX, extended command-control-communications systems, the beginnings of stepped-up activity on civil defense had started in the Carter Administration or before.
Reagan did launch one major initiative: a plan to build weapons that could shoot down enemy missiles and warheads in outer space before they struck American or allied soil. Skeptics called the idea “Star Wars.” Many of the same scientists who publicly criticized the ABM system of the late 1960s—most notably Hans Bethe and Richard Garwin—attacked Star Wars as well, and for many of the same reasons: the technology was infeasible; even if it could be made feasible, the offense could easily overwhelm it. Reagan took a personal interest in space-based defensive weapons in the spring of 1983 after hearing Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb and a leading ABM advocate from the 1960s, wax lyrical on their potential. However, most of the Pentagon bureaucracy, with the exception of a small group of space enthusiasts in the Air Force and among the civilian technocrats, was as skeptical as much of the scientific community, and went along with the program only because it was seen as the President’s program and therefore inviolable. Weapons panels have estimated that a full-blown system would probably cost $1 trillion to build, deploy and maintain. Most observers doubt the program will ever really take off. More than anything else, Star Wars could be viewed as the latest, and probably not the last, chapter of the ABM story, played out on a higher, more costly and even less practical plane—a symbol of the holy-grail quest for the perfect piece of technology, the wonder weapon that can resolve all the dilemmas and vanquish all the fears of the nuclear age.
The only other substantial difference between Reagan’s and Carter’s strategic programs was the B-1 bomber, which Carter had killed in 1977 and which Reagan revived in 1981. But the B-1 had little effect on the underlying philosophy of nuclear war-fighting—which was scarcely changed at all. Like the Reagan defense budget, it was only expressed with slightly greater exuberance.
What was shocking and new about many of the statements made by Reagan officials on nuclear war, however, was their baldness, the nonchalant innocence with which they were frequently uttered. Indeed, it was because these theories were not new that their proponents could recite them so casually. To those most deeply ensconced in the strategic community’s inner circle, something like the Reagan-Weinberger “Defense Guidance” appeared simply as more of the same, as a restatement and slight refinement of a long legacy of strategic thought and policy. The insidious aspect of this legacy was that it had loomed so constantly throughout their professional lives that it was, by now, difficult for them to think of these ideas as mere theories. They had taken on all the appearances of a scientifically based reality. There were calculations that could be reproduced and documents that could be recalled or taken off the shelf—PD-59, NSDM-242, the Foster Panel’s work, NU-OPTS, the McNamara SIOP-63 guidance, the work at RAND by Schlesinger, Kaufmann, Marshall, Kahn, Digby, Brodie and the Strategic Objectives Committee. It was so tangible, the ideas had been around and had been officially (if not always publicly) accepted for so long, that it was easy to forget that there was nothing more in the real world to substantiate them in 1982 than there had been in 1952, when the ideas first took form.
The “new generation,” as Philip Morse called these war planners who never saw war, had taken over completely. In the absence of any reality that was congenial to their abstract theorizing, the strategists in power treated the theory as if it were reality. For those mired in thinking about it all day, every day, in the corridors of officialdom, nuclear strategy had become the stuff of a living dreamworld.
This mixture of habit, inertia, analytical convenience and fantasy was fueled by a peculiar logic as well. It was, after all, only rational to try to keep a nuclear war limited if one ever broke out, to devise plans and options ahead of time that might end the war quickly and favorably, to keep the scope of its damage not too far out-of tune with the importance of the political objectives over which the war was declared to begin with. Yet over the years, despite endless studies, nobody could find any options that seemed practical or made sense.
In 1946, in the beginning, Bernard Brodie wrote, “Everything about the atomic bomb is overshadowed by the twin facts that it exists and that its destructive power is fantastically great.” The story of nuclear strategy, from that moment on, has been the story of intellectuals—not least of them, for many years anyway, Brodie himself—trying to outmaneuver the force of those axioms, trying to make the atomic bomb and later the hydrogen bomb manageable, controllable, to make it conform to human proportions. The method of mathematical calculation, derived mainly from the theory of economics that they had all studied, gave the strategists of the new age a handle on the colossally destructive power of the weapon they found in their midst. But over the years, the method became a catechism, the first principles carved into the mystical stone of dogma. The precise calculations and the cool, comfortable vocabulary were coming all too commonly to be grasped not merely as tools of desperation but as genuine reflections of the nature of nuclear war.
It was a compelling illusion. Even many of those who recognized its pretense and inadequacy willingly fell under its spell. They continued to play the game because there was no other. They performed their calculations and spoke in their strange and esoteric tongues because to do otherwise would be to recognize, all too clearly and constantly, the ghastliness of their contemplations. They contrived their options because without them the bomb would appear too starkly as the thing that they had tried to prevent it from being but that it ultimately would become if it ever were used—a device of sheer mayhem, a weapon whose cataclysmic powers no one really had the faintest idea of how to control. The nuclear strategists had come to impose order—but in the end, chaos still prevailed.
NOTES
I have not specified material taken from interviews, since almost all of them were conducted on a confidential basis; much of the information gathered from them would not have been revealed otherwise. Virtually everything, however, has been checked with several sources; this is especially the case with historically significant facts and with anecdotes that may have been told to me for self-serving or ax-grinding reasons. If interview material was inconsistent with documents, I sided with the documents. When material was based in part on printed sources and in part on interviews, I have cited the documented source, followed by “and interview(s).” A list of those I interviewed appears after the notes.