declared that targeting civilians in a general nuclear war would produce more than 100 million casualties, and that “such a degree of devastation is not a strategic doctrine,” but “an abdication of moral and political responsibility.”55
In a sense, PD-59 foreshadowed Ronald Reagan’s early antagonism toward the Kremlin’s leaders. Both Carter and Reagan focused nuclear strategy on the eradication of the Soviet regime itself, almost personalizing nuclear war as punishment for the sins of the Politburo and the Soviet high command while attempting to spare the lives of the Russians and other Soviet peoples who may not have been willing participants in Moscow’s aggression. Although the term was not used at the time or in the same context, PD-59 represented nuclear “regime change.” PD-59 made clear that an attack on the United States might not mean the end of the world, but it would definitely mean the end of Soviet Communism. The Soviet leadership was so alarmed by this turn in American strategy that by the time of the 1980 U.S. election they actually preferred Reagan over Carter, thinking that things could not possibly get worse.56
They were, of course, wrong. They had terribly misjudged Reagan, who not only accepted the fundamental logic of PD-59, but expanded upon it.
The Second (and Last) Cold War
For most of his presidency, Ronald Reagan was misunderstood by his detractors as being overly enamored of nuclear weapons and too willing to think about using them. The truth was the exact opposite: he viscerally hated them, and wanted their complete elimination. (Journalist John Newhouse was the first to buck this conventional wisdom, when he dubbed Reagan “The Abolitionist” in a 1989 New Yorker article.)57 But Reagan hated Communism almost as much as he hated nuclear arms, and until the nuclear-free utopia arrived, the fortieth president’s innate distrust of the Soviet Union led him to stake deterrence on unarguable American nuclear superiority.
In a famous 1982 speech in London, Reagan asked whether civilization was destined to “perish in a hail of fiery atoms.” For his part, Reagan intended to forestall that outcome by making it clear to Moscow that the dangerous—and in his view, morally indefensible—days of MAD were over. In the wake of a global Soviet expansion into the Third World dating back to the last days of President Gerald Ford’s incomplete presidency and the later Soviet humiliations of President Carter, “détente” had become a term of scorn among conservative Republicans as well as a fair number of defense-minded Democrats, many of whom later served in Reagan’s two administrations. Gone was any sense of managing some sort of arms control regime with the Soviet Union; if the Soviets wanted a second, more intense Cold War and a real military competition with the West, Reagan, backed by a new slate of more energetic and anti-Soviet leaders across much of NATO, would give them one.
Reagan and his advisors sought to neutralize the Kremlin’s perception that it had gained the psychological upper hand in the arms race, and to that end his officials played a tough game of public diplomacy about nuclear war. Sometimes, these moves were over the top: Undersecretary of Defense Thomas Jones, for example, calmly told the Los Angeles Times in 1982 that “with enough shovels” to dig crude shelters before a nuclear attack, “everyone’s going to make it.”58 Reagan and his lieutenants sensed, correctly, that after the 1970s the Soviets were increasingly convinced that they were winning the Cold War. What Reagan did not understand, however, was how insecure the Soviet leaders were about the USSR’s position in the global competition against the United States, nor the degree to which his policies were inadvertently convincing the Kremlin that the United States was spoiling for a nuclear fight.
In early 1983, Reagan completed what Carter had started, and finally discarded the cornerstone of MAD. Seizing the same arguments made by the Soviets themselves in the 1960s, he embraced the possibility of national missile defenses and argued that constructing them was a moral imperative. Reagan upended the East-West nuclear competition by speaking of a future based not on deterrence but on defense, a world in which “free people could live secure in the knowledge … that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies.”59 At the time, Reagan was both applauded as a hero and dismissed as a dunce. Nonetheless, his vision held a broad appeal for many Americans who were tiring under the intense strain of the decades-long nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union.
Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was initially dubbed “Star Wars” by its detractors, but despite this early ridicule, ballistic missile defenses have now survived as a key U.S. strategic goal for more than thirty years. The concept is unlikely ever to be abandoned by either U.S. political party, not least because there is now a bureaucracy dedicated to creating missile defenses, and bureaucracies rarely surrender their own existence willingly. But it is also undeniable that the idea is popular, now as it was then, with an American public that supports the reassuring promise of knocking down incoming nuclear missiles. This public support is understandable, as most people do not understand the costs or technical challenges associated with such defenses; indeed, a plurality of U.S. voters in the late 1990s supported missile defenses because they thought the United States already had them.60
Reagan’s blistering rhetoric, combined with his administration’s adoption of Carter’s nuclear strategy and the subsequent additional challenge of SDI, convinced some of the key figures in the Kremlin that the United States was determined to launch a nuclear first strike against the USSR. Even before Reagan came to office, Soviet intelligence stations worldwide were given instructions to note any possible signs of an American nuclear attack; later accounts suggest that this paranoia was heavily centered in the KGB rather than shared throughout the Soviet government, but within a few years it was a consuming fear among many of the hidebound older leaders in Moscow.61 In late 1983, a NATO nuclear exercise code-named “Able Archer” triggered a Soviet nuclear alert in Eastern Europe, surprising Reagan and his advisors and serving as one of several incidents that convinced Reagan that he had to ratchet down tensions with the USSR.62
U.S.-Soviet talks did not get far, not least because three successive Soviet leaders—Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko—all died in the five years of Reagan’s presidency. When the Soviet leadership chose the younger and more forward-looking Mikhail Gorbachev as their new chairman in 1985, both he and Reagan both moved quickly and jointly affirmed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” As Reagan’s second term drew to a close, the “abolitionist” was finally able to take steps to realize his dream, one he came to realize he shared with Gorbachev, and together they engaged in a significant step toward denuclearizing Europe. Both the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to remove their most threatening and destabilizing nuclear systems from the Continent in a landmark 1987 treaty, and both sides agreed to pursue further cuts in the future. Gorbachev, however, was soon consumed with trying to hold together the disintegrating USSR, and it would fall to Reagan’s successor, President George H. W. Bush, to complete the delicate task of helping to manage the peaceful collapse of a nuclear superpower.
The first President Bush acted with a speed and decisiveness that would rarely be seen again in the American nuclear establishment. Until 1990, nuclear reductions were difficult for the Americans to consider without progress on reductions in conventional forces, but once it was clear that Gorbachev was also going to remove a substantial part of the Soviet Army from Eastern Europe, Bush pressed ahead on nuclear arms and seized the brief window between the Soviet collapse in 1991 and the emergence of the new Russia in 1992 to start shedding Cold War nuclear weapons and practices.63
As journalist David Hoffman later described, Bush took dramatic steps during the Soviet interregnum to initiate changes to the U.S. nuclear deterrent.
[Bush] launched a significant pullback of U.S. nuclear weapons, both land and sea. He did it without drawn-out negotiations, without a treaty, without verification measures and without waiting for Soviet reciprocity.
Bush announced the United States would
