The Dead Hand (39 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Not a single nuclear warhead was eliminated at Geneva; Reagan was 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.
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O
n 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.”

The next morning, Akhromeyev gave Chervov an envelope for Gorbachev, ordered his personal driver to take him to the airport and said Gorbachev would be expecting him at 10
A.M
.

“Can I ask a question?” Chervov said, nervously. “What’s inside the envelope?”

Akhromeyev told him it was the draft of the program on global disarmament. “Report all details to the General Secretary.”
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After the Geneva summit with Reagan, Gorbachev was searching for something new. When Chervov arrived with the envelope, Gorbachev greeted him warmly. Gorbachev was vacationing in a house on the coast at Pitsunda, in the republic of Georgia, set in a pine grove, with woodpaneled interiors, spacious rooms and an office. It was a restful place in the solitude of a nature reserve; outside, waves swept across a fine pebble beach. Without wasting words, Gorbachev asked right away, “What have you brought?”
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The envelope contained a written proposal to eliminate all nuclear weapons—
all
, including those of the United States, the Soviet Union and other countries—by the year 2000, in three stages, with specific deadlines. Akhromeyev had been working on the idea ever since the Soviets walked out of the Geneva talks in late 1983. He brought in weapons scientists and the staff of different branches of the military, who debated in secret. Once the proposal was drafted, Akhromeyev put it in his desk drawer. In Gorbachev’s first year, Akhromeyev kept it to himself, thinking the time was not right to bring it out. By the end of 1985, when Gorbachev was searching for new initiatives, Akhromeyev opened the drawer. The file was titled “Proposal of the USSR for a Program of Full Liquidation of Nuclear Weapons in the Whole World by the Year 2000.” It was a sweeping proposal that could grab headlines and win sympathy from antinuclear forces around the world. After a year as chief of the General Staff and eight months working with Gorbachev, Akhromeyev could see pressures were building to reduce nuclear arsenals. He personally wanted to scale back the huge stockpiles of warheads, and he felt that Gorbachev’s proposal might at least bring about significant cuts, if not lead all the way to total elimination. He could see, too, that Gorbachev was a man of action. The Soviet Union had been calling for general disarmament for decades. But what was new in Akhromeyev’s plan was a certain date—the turn of the century.
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When Chervov took out the papers, Gorbachev expressed skepticism at first. “What can there be that’s new in your initiative?” he asked. “We have been harping on this since 1945. Gromyko has been constantly talking about this at the United Nations. Should the General Secretary repeat this all over again?”

“Mikhail Sergeyevich, everything that you say is correct,” Chervov replied. “However, in the past there were only general declarations and wishes to liquidate nuclear weapons. There was nothing concrete. We only came out with a general idea, like ‘We are for the liquidation.’ … This is a completely new program that gives a detailed description of all the possible problems. The nuclear issue is becoming a more burning problem by the day. I ask you to have a look at the document.” Gorbachev was in no hurry to take the papers. As if he were talking to himself, he asked Chervov, “And
should
we liquidate all the nuclear weapons? In the West they keep saying that the more nuclear weapons there are, the stronger a country’s security is. Should we accept such a concept? What do you think?”

“Mikhail Sergeyevich, everyone has heard the Western leaders’ statements to this effect, such as Thatcher, for example. I believe these are dangerous statements. There is a saying,
when there are too many guns, they begin to shoot by themselves
. Today, so many nuclear weapons have been stockpiled in the world, they can explode by themselves … the nuclear danger is growing in proportion to the stockpiles.” The proverb was familiar; Gorbachev had recalled a similar one to make the same point to British Foreign Minister Geoffrey Howe in late 1984. Gorbachev listened, asked a few more questions and took the envelope. He read the documents in silence. Chervov thought Gorbachev fell into deep thought. Then he said, “This is it. This is what’s needed.” But Gorbachev wanted to add more. Why not add something about stopping nuclear tests? Banning chemical weapons? Gorbachev took a blank sheet of paper and began writing instructions. When he was finished, Chervov gathered up the papers and flew back to Akhromeyev in Moscow.
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