The engaging history by Frank von Hippel of the second Reagan administration’s interactions with the USSR gets that part right but neglects how the policy was set up. The US carried out a deliberate campaign to shift power within the Politburo from the dominant army faction to the Communist Party, because President Ronald Reagan wanted “someone I can talk to” that would be less rigid than the ossified clique of Leonid Brezhnev.
Three steps undermined the influence of the Soviet Army. First, on the first day of the Reagan administration, the US sold Saudi Arabia thousands of shoulder-to-air missiles, which were deployed immediately to Afghanistan. That deployment tilted the war there against the USSR. Second, Reagan pushed deployment of the Pershing missiles in Europe. Third, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) speech in 1983 overturned our policy of mutual assured destruction and relied on the US’s vast technical reputation to daunt the Soviet army faction and many Soviet scientists. (The Reagan administration encouraged Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil, too, which cut the USSR’s hard cash reserves by lowering their oil sales income.)
In 1983 and 1984, I and others personally carried an optimistic message about SDI to some of the physicists von Hippel cites and to others. We spoke about defense aspects, including interception from orbit during missile boost phase (lasers, Brilliant Pebbles), plus midcourse methods, and even defenses close to the target zones. I hinted at capabilities we had and the Soviets didn’t—partly smoke and mirrors, partly quite solid.
The message was a deliberate psychological campaign to show US confidence and to use SDI as a bargaining chip for arms-control talks. We thought that by abandoning a nascent SDI, the US could secure more important Soviet concessions. Others in the Pentagon envisioned not the shelter Reagan imagined for the American people, but a limited system designed to defend just US silo missiles and thus preserve the option of a wartime counterattack. That system was developed and may be deployed now.
American technical credibility was a crucial step toward unleashing the social forces of perestroika, glasnost, and arms control. The strategic stage von Hippel saw in 1985 did not just accidentally appear.
