Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the history of the Cold War arms race is still shrouded by myths. Some of these seem to have a life of their own, such as the claim that U.S. President Ronald Reagan single-handedly bankrupted the Soviet Union with his Strategic Defense Initiative. And others, though less known, have proven just as durable, such as the Soviet suspicion that the United States maintained a hidden germ warfare program, as the Kremlin did, in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.
But the emergence of new evidence -- including memoirs from both sides and internal documents, some of which I've just obtained for my new book chronicling the late Cold War arms race -- has allowed some misconceptions to be dispelled. As Russia and the United States once again joust over arms control and global influence, it's useful to take a cold-eyed look at some of the old legends, and the lessons learned from them.
A previously unreleased CIA assessment of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985 reveals that, at first glance, agency experts -- including current Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates -- didn't quite know what to make of the would-be reformer.
In at least one case, fiction was not far from fact. Recall that in Stanley Kubrick's classic 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, the Soviets warn they possess a doomsday device that will automatically destroy life on Earth if they are attacked.
As it turns out, something similar really did exist. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet leaders feared decapitation -- a bolt-from-the-blue strike that would wipe them out before they could get out of the Kremlin. And they had reason to; the United States had advertised this as part of its nuclear strategy.
The Soviets were especially worried about the decision that an ailing leader like Leonid Brezhnev would have to make if faced with a warning of nuclear attack. He would have only minutes to decide, and the alert information might not be clear or certain. What if he hesitated? What if he made a mistake and issued a launch order based on a faulty warning?
The Soviet designers responded with an ingenious and incredible answer. They actually built a doomsday machine that would guarantee retaliation -- launching all the nuclear missiles -- if the leader's hand went limp. Now some details of the system have come to light in documents and interviews with officials who were involved. I have detailed the history and rationale of this doomsday machine in my new book. The system was in effect a switch that would allow the Soviet leader to delegate the decision about retaliation to someone else. An ailing general secretary could activate the system if he received a warning of attack, and thus might avoid the mistake of launching all the nuclear missiles based on a false alarm. Should the enemy missiles actually arrive and destroy the Kremlin, there would be guaranteed retaliation.
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Originally, the Soviet Union devised a totally automated, computer-driven retaliatory system known as the Dead Hand. If all the leaders and all the regular command systems were destroyed, computers would memorize the early-warning and nuclear attack data, wait out the onslaught, and then order retaliation without human control. This system would, basically, turn over the fate of mankind to machines.
However, this idea was too frightening for the Soviet designers and leaders, and they did not build it. Instead, they constructed a modified system, quite elaborate, known as Perimeter. Instead of machines, Perimeter had a human firewall to make the fateful decision -- a small group of duty officers buried deep underground in a concrete globe-shaped bunker. If certain conditions were met, including seismic data showing that a nuclear explosion had already detonated on Soviet soil, and if the Kremlin communications were down, these duty officers could launch a series of small command rockets in superhardened silos. Like robots, the command rockets would then fly across the country and issue the launch order to the intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Perimeter system was tested in November 1984 and put on combat duty in early 1985. But the Soviet Union kept this system a secret, and many features of it were not known to the United States until after the Cold War.
Perimeter was put on duty just as the tide turned in the Soviet leadership. Mikhail Gorbachev's rise to general secretary in March 1985 raised many questions for which Washington did not have answers: Was he truly a reformer, or an old-school type with new-style rhetoric? British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared of Gorbachev in late 1984: "We can do business together." But it took the CIA and the White House a lot longer to figure it out, a delay that arguably influenced the Cold War's final act of the 1980s.
The CIA's first major assessment of Gorbachev by the Office of Soviet Analysis, in June 1985, was titled "Gorbachev, The New Broom." (See sidebar.) The paper, released to me under the Freedom of Information Act, observed that Gorbachev was setting a fresh new style, that he was "the most aggressive and activist leader since Khrushchev." But there were doubts about how far he would go in making substantive change. "Gorbachev is gambling that an attack on corruption and inefficiency, not radical reform, will turn the domestic situation around," the CIA concluded. On foreign policy, the CIA expected Gorbachev would "concentrate on cultivating an image of strength, not conciliation."
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