Fantasia
LARS-ERIK NELSON 2
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That is, overall, the defeat of the Soviet Union went according to a far-sighted strategic plan, conceived by Reagan, who could see Soviet weaknesses that escaped his own closest advisers, including his secretary of defense and the Central Intelligence Agency. It is as pretty a story as any that Reagan himself ever told. But it should not survive Frances FitzGerald's devastating, carefully researched study of the Reagan administration's confused, chaotic, and contradictory dealings with the Soviet Union and the conservative obsession with Star Wars.
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As FitzGerald shows, those who see Reagan's Star Wars speech on March 23, 1983, as the trumpet blast that brought down the walls of the Soviet Union do not even have the benefit of the logical fallacy of post hoc, propter hoc. There is no hoc. Yes, Reagan made his speech, and, yes, the Soviet Union subsequently collapsed. But Star Wars has never been built; after an expenditure of more than $60 billion, none of its variations has ever passed a realistic operational test.
FitzGerald acknowledges that Star Wars may have had some purpose as a bargaining chip, even if only as a bluff, as former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane conceived it. But by 1987, under the tutelage of newly freed dissident Andrei Sakharov, a designer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Gorbachev called that bluff. As Reagan persisted at a Washington summit in trying to win Soviet approval for Star Wars tests, Gorbachev told him, "I think you're wasting money. I don't think it will work. But if that's what you want to do, go ahead."
Star Wars then ceased to have any negotiating value. Yet, astonishingly, the Reagan administration was by then so captive of its own rhetoric that it offered to give up real nuclear weapons if it could proceed with Star Wars research. "This was the ultimate irony," FitzGerald writes. "For the past three and a half years [US arms negotiator Paul] Nitze had been working on a grand compromise in which the US would use the SDI bluff as a bargaining chip to extract major concessions on offensive weapons from the Soviet Union. But now here he was offering the Soviets a concession on offensive weapons for the sake of a non-existent defense."
FitzGerald also shows that the Soviet Union never tried to match the Reagan defense buildup, the size of which was, in itself, based on a mathematical miscalculation rather than a strategic plan. The Reagan administration was simply determined to outspend the Carter administration on defense, not realizing that President Carter had already built in a substantial increase. Reagan officials then tried to find threats and weapons systems that would justify expenditures that had no relation to any military need. They revived the B-1 bomber and recommissioned two World War II-era battleships. They planned for a six-hundred-ship navy. They bought toilet seats at $600 each, and an Air Force airborne coffee maker for $14,000. Meanwhile, Soviet defense outlays continued to grow modestly, and increased as a percentage of gross domestic product largely because the civilian sector was collapsing.
In fact, Reagan and his conservative allies had inflated the Soviet threat, announced, but did not fully build, a defense program to resist it, and then claimed credit for the defeat of a mighty giant. The claim conflicts with reality. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a Democrat who had served as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, tells us that in 1989 the CIA revised its estimates. Soviet per capita income was not equal to Britain's; it was on a par with Mexico's (and probably had been all along). Defense spending was surely a strain on the Kremlin, but that was an argument for reducing defense spending through arms control or retrenchment. The US military buildup and Star Wars do not explain the political and moral collapse of an empire that covered one sixth of the earth's land surface and believed itself to hold "the brighter future for all mankind." |
