The Dead Hand Read online

Reagan added, “He will be a formidable negotiator and will try to make Soviet foreign and military policy more effective. He is (as are all Soviet General Secretaries) dependent on the Soviet-Communist hierarchy and will be out to prove to them his strength and dedication to Soviet traditional goals.” On arms control, Reagan wrote that Gorbachev wished to “reduce the burden of defense spending that is stagnating the Soviet economy,” and that “could contribute to his opposition to SDI” since “he doesn’t want to face the cost of competing with us.”63

  The economic pressures on the Soviet system had gravely worsened that autumn. Saudi Arabia increased oil production in a radical change in policy that was undertaken to boost its market share. A glut of crude hit world oil markets, prices collapsed and so did Soviet foreign currency earnings. By one estimate, Moscow had just lost $20 billion a year. Gorbachev’s backward country suddenly became a lot poorer.64

  Reagan’s memo also included a curious statement about the Soviet military. In the original memo, he wrote that an internal study “makes it plain the Soviets are planning a war. They would like to win without it and their chances of doing that depend on being so prepared we could be faced with a surrender or die ultimatum.” The surrender-or-die ultimatum was one of Reagan’s old chestnuts from his anti-communism speeches. Reagan’s comment seemed to be lifted right out of his late-1970s slogans warning of a “window of vulnerability.”

  According to Matlock, Reagan “had not been advised that the Soviets were planning to start a war, but that they were planning so that they could fight one and prevail.”

  When he read what he had written, Reagan felt misgivings, and crossed out the part about the Soviets planning a war. He substituted instead: “They would like to win by being so much better prepared we could be faced with a surrender or die ultimatum.” It was still a skeptical, fearsome, dark view of the other side.

  To prepare for the summit, Shultz and McFarlane went to Moscow and met Gorbachev on November 5. They found Gorbachev in a feisty, uncompromising mood. Gorbachev’s remarks followed the broad outline of the “asymmetrical response,” but he was clumsy. He attacked Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, saying at one point the purpose was to bail out the military-industrial complex in the United States, which Gorbachev claimed employed 18 million Americans. Shultz, an economist and former labor secretary, was surprised at Gorbachev’s bad information, and responded that defense was only a small part of the American economy. He delivered a mini-lecture to Gorbachev—which he had composed in his mind before the trip—about how the global economy was turning to a new information age. Gorbachev was stubborn and unmoved. “We know what’s going on,” he insisted. “We know why you’re doing this. You’re inspired by illusions. You think you’re ahead of us in information. You think you’re ahead of us in technology and that you can use these things to gain superiority over the Soviet Union. But this is an illusion.” If Reagan went ahead with the plan for Star Wars, Gorbachev warned, “We will let you bankrupt yourselves.”

  Then he added, “We will engage in a buildup that will break your shield.”65

  Shultz called Reagan afterward. Reagan wrote in his journal that night, “Gorbachev is adamant we must cave in our S.D.I.—well, this will be a case of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.”66

  After Shultz flew back and briefed Reagan, the president added, “It seems Mr. G. is filled with a lot of false info about the U.S. & believes it all. For example, Americans hate the Russians because our arms manufacturers stir them up with propaganda so they can keep selling us weapons.”67 Reagan vowed, “In Geneva I’ll have to get him in a room alone and set him straight.”68

  In the weeks before the summit, Roald Sagdeev, the space institute director who had been skeptical about a Soviet Star Wars, was invited to a meeting at the Central Committee with others from the academic and arts elite. They were told that, from now on, they were totally free to meet foreigners without asking permission. “It was a thrilling sensation,” Sagdeev recalled. “In a society where everything was under strict control and tight regulation, even phone numbers could not be given to foreigners.” He was ordered to join Velikhov and other leading advisers to Gorbachev on a plane to Geneva one week before the summit. The instructions: be open, give press interviews.69 Hundreds of reporters called, and the group kept busy. A total of 3,614 journalists, including television technicians, registered for the summit. They were drawn by the sense of unpredictability—rarely in the history of superpower summits had there been a meeting without a prearranged script and treaty to be signed; adding to the uncertainty was Reagan’s long history of anti-communism and the curiosity stirred by Gorbachev’s first months in power. The CIA was there, too. The agency “pulled out all the stops to make Gorbachev feel unwelcome in Geneva,” Gates recalled. The CIA sponsored anti-Soviet demonstrations, meetings and exhibits.70

  When he arrived in Geneva November 16, Reagan, then seventy-four years old, was full of anticipation. “Lord I hope I am ready and not overtrained,” he wrote. The first meeting was to be held at Maison Fleur d’Eau, a twenty-room, nineteenth-century villa on the western shore of Lake Geneva. He and Nancy Reagan toured it in advance, spotting a cozy pool house on the lakeshore. Reagan made sure the White House advance team knew he wanted to steer Gorbachev there for a private chat, with a fire blazing. In the preparations, Reagan held a mock summit session, with Matlock playing Gorbachev, speaking in Russian and trying to mimic Gorbachev’s gestures.71 In another briefing, Reagan seemed to glaze over. There was a long silence. “I’m in the year 1830,” the president suddenly said, startling his aides. “What happened to all these small shopkeepers in St. Petersburg in the year 1830 and to all that entrepreneurial talent in Russia? How can it have just disappeared?” The aides realized he was absorbed in thought about Massie’s book.72

  Cold winds blew off Lake Geneva as Reagan bounded down the steps to greet Gorbachev without an overcoat just after 10 A.M. on November 19. Gorbachev, then fifty-four years old, in office less than a year, stepped out of his black ZIL limousine, bundled up in a blue patterned scarf and overcoat, and took off his fedora, asking Reagan: “Where is your coat?” “It’s inside,” Reagan replied as he motioned toward the glass doors and the warmth of the chateau, guiding Gorbachev by the elbow. As they shook hands for the photographers, Reagan later recalled, “I had to admit…that there was something likeable about Gorbachev. There was a warmth in his face and his style, not the coldness bordering on hatred I’d seen in most senior Soviet officials I’d met until then.”73

  Once inside, the original plan called for a short tête-à-tête, fifteen minutes, then a larger session, but Reagan and Gorbachev spent an hour with just interpreters in their first encounter. Reagan declared right away he wanted to ease mistrust between them. They held the fate of the world in their hands, he said. He offered bromides and aphorisms collected from a lifetime of speeches. Countries do not mistrust each other because of arms, but arm each other because of mistrust, he said. People do not get into trouble when they talk to each other, but when they talk about each other. Gorbachev responded with an unemotional, reasoned appeal. The two superpowers could not ignore each other, he said. They were too interrelated. Gorbachev said he had come to improve their relations despite the differences of the past. They needed to create a concrete “impetus,” he said, to show the world they were serious about ending the arms race. Gorbachev, in a preplanned gesture to Reagan, told the president that Soviet scientists had recently calculated there was a high probability of a big earthquake within the next three years in California. Reagan said he realized a quake was overdue. The two leaders had broken the ice.

  In the formal meeting that followed, flanked by aides, they turned to the arms race. In both countries, “the military is devouring huge resources,” Gorbachev said. The “central question is how to halt the arms race and disarm.” Reagan brought up Eisenhower’s speech “Atoms for Peace,” offering to internationalize the atom. The United States was
always giving, and the Soviet Union rejecting, Reagan complained. While earlier the superpowers reached agreements to slow the growth in weapons, Reagan said, now he wanted to actually reduce the “mountains of weapons.” Reagan then launched into an exposition of his dream of “an antimissile shield which would destroy missiles before they hit the target.” Reagan said he didn’t want to call it a weapon, but a defensive system, and if it worked, he would share it with the Soviet Union. This was a small preplanned surprise Reagan had decided to offer Gorbachev. The Soviet leader did not have time to respond before they broke for lunch, but he was downbeat as he went back to his residence.74

  “Reagan appeared to me not simply a conservative, but a political ‘dinosaur,’” he recalled of his first impressions.75

  But the president was chipper. “Our gang told me I’d done good.”76

  In the afternoon, Gorbachev came roaring back, this time deploying the “asymmetrical response” with energy and verve. Gorbachev fired volley after volley of arguments against the Strategic Defense Initiative. It would lead to an arms race in space, not just a defensive one, but an offensive one, he said. Scholars say any shield can be pierced, he added, so why create it? He threatened retaliation; if Reagan went ahead, there could be no reduction of existing offensive weapons. The Soviet response “would not be a mirror,” Gorbachev added, but “a simpler, more effective system.”

  “We will build up to smash your shield,” he said.

  If there were “seven layers” of space defenses, Gorbachev added, it would require automation, putting important decisions in the hands of computers. Political leaders would just be hiding in bunkers with computers making the decisions. “This could unleash an uncontrollable process. You haven’t thought this through, it will be a waste of money, and also will cause more distrust and more weapons,” he told Reagan.

  Reagan responded the best way he knew how, by articulating his visions and his dream. “There is something uncivilized” about the idea of mutual assured destruction, he said. He told Gorbachev a story. The American ambassador to the United Nations had met some Chinese. They had asked him: what happens when a man with a spear that can penetrate anything meets a man with a shield that is impenetrable? The ambassador said he didn’t know, but he did know what happens when a man with no shield meets that same opponent who has the spear. Neither wants to be in the position of having no shield, Reagan insisted.

  At this point, Reagan invited Gorbachev to get some fresh air and go down to the pool house. Gorbachev “leaped out of his chair,” eager to go, Reagan remembered.77 When they reached the small room in the pool house, a fire was already roaring. They sat in easy chairs, only interpreters present.

  Immediately, Reagan took papers out of a manila folder and handed them to Gorbachev. These are goals for arms control talks, Reagan said, which could be the seeds of a future agreement. Gorbachev started to read and the room was quiet for a few minutes. Soon they had resumed the most difficult disagreement—missile defense, weapons in space. Gorbachev demanded to know: why was there nothing on Reagan’s list about that? Reagan repeated his dream was defensive and would not aggravate the arms race. Back and forth they went—Gorbachev seeking to talk Reagan out of his dream, Reagan striving to get Gorbachev to feel the magic. The dialogue was captured in the interpreter’s notes:

  Gorbachev: If the goal was to get rid of nuclear weapons, why start an arms race in another sphere?

  Reagan: These are not weapons that kill people or destroy cities, these are weapons that destroy nuclear missiles.

  Gorbachev: Let’s ban research, development, testing and deployment of space weapons, then cut offensive arms by 50 percent.

  Reagan: Why do you keep speaking about space weapons? We certainly have no intention of putting something into space that would threaten people on Earth.

  Gorbachev: A defense against one level of missiles is one thing, but a defense against a much larger number would not be reliable at all.

  Reagan: Our people overwhelmingly want this defense. They look at the sky and think what might happen if missiles suddenly appear and blow up everything in our country.

  Gorbachev: The missiles are not yet flying. If S.D.I. is actually implemented, then layer after layer of offensive weapons, Soviet and American, would appear in outer space and only God himself would know what they were. And God provides information only very selectively and rarely. Please understand the signal we are giving you—we now have a chance which we must not miss!

  They walked back to the main house, having settled nothing. But something had happened to both of them. They had finally taken the measure of the other. “He’s adamant but so am I,” Reagan wrote that night in his diary. “The ‘human factor’ had quietly come into action,” Gorbachev recalled. “We both sensed that we must maintain contact and try to avoid a break.”78

  Gorbachev was chilled suddenly in the air on the walk back. But he told Reagan this would not be their last meeting. Reagan suggested they visit each other’s country. Gorbachev agreed before they got to the door.79

  On the second day, tempers rose even higher. Gorbachev said a Soviet scientist had done research and found out the explanation for Reagan’s determination to build the Strategic Defense Initiative was that it would add $600 billion to $1 trillion in new military expenditures. Reagan said the scientist was dealing in fantasy. If a defensive system could be found, it would be available to all. This would end the nuclear nightmare for the people of the United States, the Soviet Union, indeed for “all people.”

  Gorbachev started to interrupt Reagan. Why wouldn’t Reagan believe him when he said the Soviet Union would never attack? Before Reagan could answer, Gorbachev repeated the question. He again interrupted Reagan’s answer to insist on a response. Gorbachev questioned Reagan’s sincerity in offering to share research, saying the United States did not even share advanced technology with its allies.

  Reagan tried to overcome the interruptions, and in exasperation at one point spilled out one of his deepest hopes—nuclear weapons could be eliminated altogether. At another point, he asked Gorbachev whether he believed in reincarnation and then speculated that perhaps he, Reagan, had invented the shield in an earlier life.

  Listening to one of Reagan’s pitches for cooperation on Star Wars, Gorbachev lost his cool. Don’t treat us as simple people! Reagan said he did not see how he had shown disrespect in any way. It was an open debate.

  Reagan captured the spirit of the day in his diary that night: “… the stuff really hit the fan. He was really belligerent & d–n it I stood firm.”

  That evening, after dinner, Reagan and Gorbachev met in the study over coffee to consider how they would present the summit to the world the next morning. Shultz complained angrily to Gorbachev, his voice rising, finger pointing, that Soviet negotiators—especially the deputy foreign minister Georgi Korniyenko—were backpedaling on agreements. Shultz said the negotiators should stay up all night, if necessary, to hammer it out.

  At this point, Reagan and Gorbachev, listening while sitting side by side on a red silk couch, decided to intervene. Reagan insisted they should take matters into their own hands and order the negotiators to go back to the table and work out their differences. Gorbachev agreed. The next morning, November 21, the joint statement was ready. When Reagan and Gorbachev came to the international press center to read their statements, Reagan turned to Gorbachev and whispered, “I bet the hardliners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands.” Gorbachev nodded in agreement.80

  The headline from the summit was that Reagan and Gorbachev would meet again. But in retrospect, it was not the most important news. Much more significant was a short, innocuous phrase in the joint statement. The two superpowers agreed, the statement said, that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

  These words could be dismissed as nothing more than a feel-good slogan, and Reagan had spoken them before.81 Not a single nuclear warhead was eliminated at Geneva; Reagan w
as not any closer to his cherished goal of building a missile defense system; Gorbachev was no closer to stopping it. But in so openly announcing that a nuclear war could not be won and must never be fought, the radical reformer from Stavropol and the dreamer from Hollywood had called a halt to years of extraordinary tension and fright. They had put behind them the terrible worries of the RYAN operation and Andropov’s fears of imminent attack. They had buried the idea that the Soviets were planning to fight and win a nuclear war. Both of them wanted a world with fewer nuclear weapons, and they had jointly made Geneva their first waypoint on that path. Words had power, and they had found the words. Now they had to find the deeds.

  On New Year’s Day, Reagan and Gorbachev exchanged simultaneous televised greetings to people in each other’s countries, an historic first. Reagan’s address appeared at the opening of the main evening news program, and many people in the Soviet Union saw Reagan directly for the first time. “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” Reagan said.82

  ————— 11 —————

  THE ROAD TO REYKJAVIK

  On Sunday, January 5, 1986, very late in the evening, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the chief of the Soviet military’s General Staff, telephoned one of his deputies, Colonel General Nikolai Chervov, head of the legal department, which handled arms control negotiations. Both men were products of the World War II generation who rose to the General Staff in the Cold War years. Akhromeyev, the ramrod-straight commander who had promised to help Gorbachev, asked Chervov to report to headquarters at 6 A.M. the next morning. “You will fly to Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev,” Akhromeyev said. The Soviet leader was vacationing on the Black Sea coast.

  “What must I have with me and what uniform must I wear?” Chervov asked.

  “Have your wits about you,” Akhromeyev said. “And wear your military uniform.”