Ronald Reagan Ronald Reagan was in active politics from 1 January

1 Ronald Reagan Ronald Reagan was in active politics from 1 January 1967, when he was elected governor of California for two consecutive terms of four years, until 1 January 1989 when he concluded his two term presidency of the United States. Before that he had been a sports commentator, an actor, and a member, director and finally president of the Screen Actors Guild (the actors trade union) at a time of left wing activity in Hollywood. He was passionately anti-Communist, anti-totalitarian and antiwelfare, and decidedly a pro-states rights, Republican, who was well known through his work in the media. Above all, however, he was a natural communicator. In the last years of the Carter presidency in the late 1970s, the United States appeared to be drifting in a very uncertain environment. It had been beaten in Vietnam, ignored by Iran and undermined elsewhere in the Third World. Instead Soviet militarism was pushing forward into Afghanistan, and through the use of proxy forces, notably the Cubans, in various African states, such as Angola and Mozambique. Reagan became President in January 1981 determined to arrest this slide into mediocrity by what had been formerly the world's greatest power. He chose to regain respect internationally by rebuilding the U.S. military machine, which had in relative terms declined under Carter. Spending on defence immediately rose by $7 million, while non-defence domestic expenditure fell by $41 billion. From 1981 onwards military spending rose by leaps and bounds to reach the figures spent by the U.S. at the time of the Vietnam War. Reagan defended this steep rise in military expenditure by painting a gloomy picture of the world beset by the forces of Communist darkness, the so-called `evil empire'. Those on the left of the political spectrum denounced him as a dangerous right wing hawk, a Conservative fanatic and a Cold War warrior. Reagan was unrepentant. He continued to 2 describe the Soviet Union as being the perpetrators of a worldwide conspiracy aimed at conquering the entire free world and eventually subduing the United States. Reagan knew how to appeal to his audiences and the continuing popularity of his presidency with the American people is testament to this. He deplored the loss of the Vietnam War and put it down to weakness of political leadership. He demanded that the U.S. build up its armaments to a point where it no longer lagged behind the Soviet Union. He felt that the U.S.A. would only be taken seriously by any power if it negotiated from a position of strength. Nonetheless, he also expressed his genuine revulsion towards the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction [M.A.D.]. He disliked the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks [SALT] begun by President Nixon and continued by his successors in the White House Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, because, in his view, the SALT agreements still enabled both powers to retain such an arsenal of weapons that they could ensure mutual destruction if these weapons were ever unleashed upon each other. Moreover, he never had much, if any, confidence in treaties, which he described as bits of paper, which could be torn up and thrown away at any time. Even so, if peace were to be assured in the future talks would eventually have to begin on something. It is for this reason, therefore, that Reagan conceived of the idea of START - or Strategic Arms Reduction Talks to replace the flagging SALT initiative. In order for the U.S.A. to achieve the type of respect and to play the role that Reagan wished it to perform, the Americans had to rearm aggressively. As the months passed and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan bogged down into a guerilla war, Reagan's confidence in his strategy grew. He had long thought that: The only way the Soviets will stop their drive for military superiority is when they realize that we are willing to go all out in an arms race. Right now 3 people say there is an arms race, but the Soviets are the only ones racing. If we release the forces of the economy to produce the weapons we need the Soviets will never be able to keep up. And then, and only then, will they become reasonable and willing to seriously consider reductions in nuclear weapons. From this strategic belief and yet his overwhelming desire for peace, Reagan conceived of a total and absolute defensive weapon which would render all existing warheads and weapons technologies obsolete. Reagan's initiative was to be a new type of defence technology that would be able to protect U.S. territory from any kind of nuclear attack in the future. This new development would have the great advantage of being extremely expensive to research and produce - so exorbitantly expensive that the Soviet Union would not be able to compete with them. This idea had found its way into the Republican Party Campaign literature for the 1980 Presidential election under the following sentence: We will proceed with vigorous research and development of an effective antiballistic missile system, such as is already at hand in the Soviet Union, as well as modern ABM technologies. This was longhand for what was to known as the `Strategic Defence Initiative', or, as Senator Edward Kennedy described it, `Star Wars'. Thereafter this appeared to be a White House inspired initiative. It did not follow the usual procedure of being evaluated by the Defence Department before being brought before the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council. Instead once installed in the White House Reagan delegated responsibility for pursuing the idea to a small four man committee of three presidential advisors and a lone scientist (George Keyworth). The President’s long-term friend, Ed. Meese, chaired the committee. They sought outside assistance from a group of influential scientists and reported 4 to President Reagan on 8 January 1982. Nearly a year later in December 1982 the Joint Chiefs of Staff met Reagan privately and in February 1983 recommended to him that the U.S.A. should abandon the MAD system of defence and move ahead with the new missile defence system - the S.D.I. Reagan spoke to the American nation on 23 March 1983 and indicated that he was totally committed to the course of building a strategic missile defence and stood ready to sign an agreement with the U.S.S.R. concerning future mutual reductions of nuclear weapons. Naturally, the speech caused a sensation in Nato countries, in the Soviet Union and the U.S.A. itself. Although many scientists derided the whole concept and said that it would not work, there was some evidence, fleeting though it might be, which suggested that it was possible. In 1984 an experiment with a Minuteman rocket equipped with sensors of the new system twice proved to be successful in hitting a target at a height of 4,000 miles and in destroying both targets in the atmosphere without showering the earth with debris. In 1986 a new interceptor missile called ERIS [Exoatmospheric Reentry Vehicle Interceptor Subsystem] and the HEDI [High Endoatmospheric Defense Interceptor] were reported to be most satisfactorily accurate. Robert McFarlane, the National Security Advisor to President Reagan, writing of S.D.I. recalled later: Those of us in the White House who proposed the S.D.I. believed that a reorientation of our investment strategy to emphasize an area of our comparative advantage - excellence in high technology - could persuade the Soviets that we could outstrip an entire generation of Soviet military investment. If we could do so, we could remove their only claim to superpower status and perhaps lead them to deal more constructively with our concerns about their forces. 5 As far as the Americans are concerned, the potentialities of the S.D.I. system easily outweighed the practical and financial problems that it carried with it. In many ways they were correct to think in this way since it was the sheer financial and research burden of this S.D.I. that unhinged the giant Soviet military complex and encouraged leaders, such as Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev, to reassess their country's economic system and to come to terms with its fundamental inability to compete in this arena with the U.S.A. This fact more than anything else helps to explain the attitude to the arms talks by the Soviets in the 1980s and the need for Perestroika and Glasnost as conceived by Gorbachev in the post-1985 period when he became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Andropov certainly believed that Reagan's main goal in seeking S.D.I. was offensive and not defensive as the President presented it. Gorbachev certainly was not in favour of S.D.I. and wanted it scrapped. He realised that the Soviet Union could not really compete with the U.S.A. in the financial and research fields over the long term - the U.S.S.R. simply did not have the economic resources to do so. Evidence of this concern was seen at Reykjavik in Iceland in October 1986. Reagan and Gorbachev had met there for a summit meeting. Reagan had put forward the zero-option (i.e., the elimination of all intermediate nuclear forces, the so-called INF Treaty) much to the amazement of the other members of NATO and in particular Mrs. Thatcher - who did not believe in a nuclear free world or placed any trust in S.D.I. - she believed in nuclear deterrence and knew that S.D.I. would only favour the U.S.A. What about the rest of Europe not sheltered by S.D.I.? Fortunately, Gorbachev, having accepted the zero-option, then tied it to the canceling of the S.D.I.- something, which Reagan refused to back down on. He was determined to deploy the system as soon as possible. In this way an impasse was reached and so the Reykjavik Summit ended up in failure, much to the relief of the British Prime 6 Minister. Immediately afterwards Mrs. Thatcher rushed off to see President Reagan to put him straight on the issue of NATO's defence policy and to discover from him whether he was still committed to the idea that S.D.I. was "to enhance not to undercut deterrence". But was S.D.I. attainable? General Poivier, a noted French military strategist, summed up his thoughts on S.D.I. in this way: Now we have military strategies based on make-believe...it is as though a dominant player could achieve certain current political ends, while being spared the effort of providing proof of his power with real forces. ......................... Mikhail Gorbachev Mikhail Gorbachev owed his rise to prominence within the Soviet state largely to his patron, Yuri Andropov, who saw in him a person of consummate ability and intellectual resource. Andropov, 68, was chosen as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union a mere 48 hours after the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982. He was also to acquire the position of President of the Soviet Union seven months later on 15 June 1983. After being the Soviet ambassador to Hungary at the time of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, Yuri V. Andropov had been in charge of the Socialist countries sector of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Thereafter he had become the head of the KGB for fifteen years from 1967-1982, during which time he had been drafted onto the Politburo in 1973. In May 1982 he had been appointed as one of the ten permanent secretaries of the Central Committee. Under Andropov the KGB expanded its functions and became a more sophisticated means of enforcing nearly absolute political control. Even telling jokes critical of the regime became a risky thing to do. As a contemporary story had it: "Comrade Andropov collects not only political stories, he also 7 collects people who tell them!" While head of the KGB, Andropov authorized a top-secret report on the economic structure and performance of the Soviet Union. From this report in 1981 emerged a damning conclusion, namely, that the U.S.S.R. could not sustain a high cost defence programme for the foreseeable future. As the Soviet economy languished, so the prospect of a future arms race with the U.S.A. would threaten financially to unhinge the entire country and send it spiraling into bankruptcy and an even deeper recession than it already faced. This was a sobering document for any Kremlin leader to deal with for it meant that unless the arms race could be stopped the U.S.S.R. would inevitably be outpaced by its ideological foe, the United States, in the medium to long term. On the face of it, there seemed little prospect of a slackening of the arms race since Reagan's presidency had begun with the American leader pledging to increase defence spending and rearm on a massive scale. These arresting conclusions left Andropov in what is colloquially referred to as being between a rock and a hard place, i.e., in a tight corner. It is not known whether Andropov passed on this information to the ailing Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Even if he did, the infirm leader did not appear to have reacted to it before his demise in the autumn of 1982. Andropov began his term as General Secretary by emphasizing the need to raise economic productivity in the Soviet Union by tightening discipline and controlling alcoholism. Knowledgeable and canny, Andropov was a wily and tough negotiator. Even before he assumed the top position in the U.S.S.R. he was exerting his authority on the international scene. For example, when the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force) talks began at Geneva in Nov.1981, he let it be known that he opposed any deployment by NATO of the new American medium range missiles (Cruise and Pershing II) because they could reach well into the Soviet Union from their bases in the U.K., Italy and West Germany. Their target zone prescribed an arc, which extended from the mouth of the Dnieper to 8 Leningrad. As such they could hit Soviet military bases and command centres in the Moscow area. When NATO showed no sign of stopping their deployment of these missiles in Western Europe in response to the siting of Soviet SS 20 missiles west of the Urals, Andropov decided to register a gesture of protest by instructing the Soviet delegation to leave the START talks at Geneva in December 1983. He also ended the MBFR (Mutual and balanced force reduction) negotiations in Vienna. As a result, the world embarked upon a two-year period in which no nuclear arms control talks went ahead. Andropov was a very intelligent and well-informed leader who realised that the Soviet Union suffered from corruption, nepotism and bureaucratic immobility. Suffering from diabetes and a chronic kidney ailment, Andropov was not prepared to undertake a major reform of the Soviet system. He quickly succumbed, was bedridden for five months and died in early February 1984. Andropov recommended that Mikhail Gorbachev should be his successor, but the old guard leadership simply disregarded his recommendation and opted instead for the senile 72year-old Konstantin V. Chernenko to become General Secretary. Chernenko was a conservative, clumsy, stubborn, bureaucratic nonentity who died after barely 13 months in office. As one of his comrades remarked about him: "There can be no personality cult where there is no personality!" He had tried, figuratively speaking, to put the clock back to the days of Brezhnev. He had forced the U.S.S.R. to boycott the Los Angeles Olympic Games in retaliation for the Western boycott of the Moscow Games in the summer of 1980. He had continued the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and had done nothing to thaw the Cold War, which had reasserted itself once more under his leadership. He introduced no initiatives to slow down the arms race or make the world a safer place to live in. He was a classic Cold War warrior, obviously distrustful and resentful towards the West. It was just as well that he soon slipped into a remorseless decline. 9 A mere 4 hours after the death of Chernenko had first been aired over Radio Moscow on 12 March 1985, the news broke that Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Andropov's protégé, had been elected to the vacant post of General Secretary of the CPSU. This was the quickest and smoothest transition of power in Soviet history. Gorbachev as merely 54 years of age. What do we know of Gorbachev? He was born in March 1931, the son of a kolkhoz peasant in the fertile Stavropol region in the Northern Caucasus. His father was the oldest party member in the village of Privol'noye and was awarded the Order of Lenin. Mikhail Gorbachev studied law and agriculture at Moscow University and joined the CPSU in 1952. There followed a string of minor party jobs before he was appointed the First Secretary of a City Party Committee. He followed that with a position as Second Secretary of a Territorial Committee, before he assumed the role of regional party boss at Stavropol, where he gained a reputation for being an efficient administrator. In 1971 he became a member of the CPSU Central Committee. Gorbachev's region, the Northern Caucasus, was favoured by the Kremlin elite because of its mild climate, luxuriant vegetation, numerous summer spa resorts and warm springs. As the local party boss, the friendly, gregarious, Gorbachev enjoyed his role and the close involvement with the CPSU party leadership, which it brought him into contact with. It was at one such resort that Gorbachev met Andropov, the KGB chief at that time and Suslov, the old party ideologue and iconoclast. It is not difficult to imagine Gorbachev and his wife Raisa going out of their way to serve the holidaying visitors from the Kremlin. In this way they befriended Andropov and turned him into their most important ally. In 1979, at the initiative of Andropov, Gorbachev was called to Moscow and joined the Politburo as a non-voting candidate member. A year later (Oct.1980) Gorbachev became a full member. As a close associate of Andropov, he became the recipient of his patron's KGB information. Once Andropov became the overall Soviet supremo in November 1982, Gorbachev's star began rising even faster. In the summer of the following year (1983), 10 Gorbachev began taking over responsibility for cadres, ideologies and consumer industries in addition to agriculture. This was a formidable accumulation of power, unrivalled by any other member of the Politburo. Gorbachev survived the challenges of the Chernenko era even though many reactionary figures in the party distrusted his political instincts and wanted him out of the Politburo - and he swiftly and deftly assumed power upon Chernenko's demise in March 1985. It did not take Gorbachev long to assert his authority by dismissing his opponents from their posts in the Politburo and Central Committee and bringing in his own men. At the start of July 1985 Gorbachev ousted his main rival Grigori Romanov and the 28 year career of the world's longest serving Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko - an unrepentant Stalinist was brought to an end by giving him a sinecure - a position with no real power - that of being the nominal President of the U.S.S.R. Into Gromyko's place as Foreign Minister came one of Gorbachev's friends from his days in the Caucasus, Edvard Shevardnadze, previously the party boss in Georgia and a candidate member of the Politburo. By the end of September 1985 the 79 year old Nikolai Tikhonov was ousted from the post of Prime Minister and replaced by Gorbachev's younger supporter and economic expert, Nikolai I. Ryzhkov. By the middle of October the Chairman of the State Planning Commission was also replaced by another reformer and so within 7 months had restructured and rejuvenated the top Soviet leadership more quickly than any of his predecessors. In late April 1986 the near meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear energy station near Kiev in the Ukraine was one of several public relations disasters for the Soviet Union that occurred in the early period of Gorbachev's rule. At the same time the Afghan war continued to go badly; oil production and prices were falling; the price of natural gas was falling and so was the growth rate of the Soviet GNP. In addition, there was corruption and inefficiency everywhere. Gorbachev's conclusion was that: "We must hurry up. We don't have much time 11 left". He considered the old over centralized economic model as being not only a serious impediment to progress but to the very survival of the Soviet Union as a global power. His plan was for some sort of economic reconstruction (perestroika). Whatever this did it was bound to arouse opposition from the traditional bureaucrats so Gorbachev resorted to another slogan (glasnost) - openness and publicity. This marked the beginning of the end for press censorship in the Soviet Union. Soon stories started appearing which revealed the whole sorry mess of the Soviet economy, the costly war in Afghanistan (a conflict that Gorbachev referred to as a "bleeding wound". ......................