Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present:

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Chapter 8: A Set of Measures for Ensuring Strategic Stability as an Exampleof an “Asymmetric Response” to Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense InitiativeProblems of securing strategic stability were vigorously discussed by the Soviet Union and theUnited States in the 1980s, which to a large extent was induced by the emergence of the wellknownStrategic Defense Initiative (SDI) of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the problem ofmedium-range missiles in Europe. At that time, Soviet scientists and experts (primarily as partof the activities of the Velikhov group) formulated the concept for a doctrinal directive regardingspecific programs to be deployed as an asymmetric response to the SDI program. The developedconcept was eventually adopted by the leadership of the USSR.This experience is still significant from both the theoretical and the purely applied viewpoints.The principal difference of the SDI concept from previous attempts to develop a multi-level missiledefense system primarily lies in the fact that the particular R&D programs considered by thePentagon were focused (a) on the space echelon of the missile defense system, and (b) on suchexotic means of destruction as various types of lasers, electromagnetic mass drivers, and particleaccelerators.The possibility of using high-power laser radiation to hit various targets was placed on the agendain the mid-1960s. At that time the Soviet Union, the United States and a number of other countries(especially France) had research programs aimed at development of laser weapons. It wasanticipated that such peculiar feature of lasers as the ability to concentrate the beam energy on asmall area on the surface of a target could lead to damage or destruction of a non-armored target(first of all, aircraft or missile bodies). 63A non-expert would find the SDI concept quite impressive. Reagan had set up a grand task: torid the United States of the fear of nuclear weapons by rendering them “outmoded and unnecessary”—i.e., to develop a perfect shield against what was called the “Soviet nuclear threat.”The reaction of the major part of the Soviet leadership to the Strategic Defense Initiative putforward by President Reagan was more than negative (and it quite deserved such an attitude). 64SDI ruined the view of securing strategic stability that had just been formed in the minds of theelderly leaders of the country who poorly digested new information and new developments. Thelevel of technical competence at the top of the state apparatus (except for the Military IndustrialCommission of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, part of the State Planning Committee andthe Defense Industry Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, technocrats in theadministration of the relevant ministries of the defense industry, and the Office of the Chief of theArmaments Department of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR) was quite low.It should also be kept in mind that in the 1980s, a number of high-ranking officials in the ReaganAdministration remarked that a nuclear war could be won or lost, and the Soviet leadership perceivedsuch statements very seriously. 6536Ensuring Strategic Stability in the Past and Present: Theoretical and Applied Questions
In the beginning of the 1980s, there were many media leaks in the U.S. concerning various possibilitiesof U.S.-launched decapitation strikes against the Soviet Union (for several decades theU.S. had been discussing a wide range of ways of waging and winning a nuclear war). 66 The USSRintensified its activities aimed at the development of systems and means of strategic and tacticalwarning of the adversary’s preparations for a massive preemptive strike—both in the militarydepartments and in the KGB, which was headed by Yuri Andropov. A number of principal strategicwarning ideas (based on recordings of a set of signs of the principal potential adversary’spreparations for a nuclear missile assault) were formulated in the 1970s at the Institute of the U.S.and Canada Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (here it is necessary to emphasize therole of the alumnus of the Department of Physics of Moscow State University, Doctor of HistoricalSciences Andrei Zhukov, who later headed a special department of the First Main Directorateof the KGB of the USSR). In combination with the aforementioned focus of the 1980 platform ofthe U.S. Republican Party on the attainment of “overall military superiority” by the United Statesover the Soviet Union, all that looked quite ominous. As in previous years, many state and partyleaders and military commanders were instinctively inclined to react with a “spike-against-spike”response and a strategy of symmetric measures (although by that time, more and more peopleunderstood that another round of the arms race, with the development and manufacturing ofextremely expensive systems based on new physical principles, would be unaffordable for theUSSR).Sen. Malcolm Wallop encouraged the United States to implement a space-based BMD programsimilar to the Manhattan project, which resulted in creation of the atomic bomb, and to strivefor the elimination of the “balance of fear” that was typical of the scenario of mutually assureddestruction that had emerged in U.S.-Soviet relations in the strategic nuclear area in the previousdecades. 67Attempts to bring SDI into line with such large-scale complex technical projects as, for example,the Manhattan project that created the atomic bomb, or the Apollo space program that landedthe first human on the moon, were confusing. The principle difference of the SDI program is thatit contests not just the laws of nature, which can be understood and remain unchanged, but alsoa prudent adversary, who can unpredictably use the same laws against the creators of the defensesystems, and who forces them to provide for all possible types of countermeasures. 68Intuitively, many average Americans had lingering hopes that in the course of implementationof the SDI program there would be a technical miracle that would immediately do away with allthe difficulties predicted by numerous critics of the SDI program. This was a shining example ofwishful thinking.Reagan was a well-known Hollywood actor, trade union official and successful governor of California.He unshakably believed in the omnipotence of the American genius, although he himselfwas an absolute know-nothing regarding technology and the natural sciences. In his understandingof the problems of military-strategic balance and strategic stability, Reagan was far behind notjust his predecessors, including Republican President Nixon and Democratic President JimmyCarter, but also behind Republican President Gerald Ford, whose narrow-mindedness was thesubject of many jokes in the American political establishment (as a matter of fact, Ford was notthat narrow-minded).Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs | Harvard Kennedy School 37
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