Old Presidents Never Die

...In 1972, President Richard M. Nixon negotiated something close to a ban on defensive missiles, with each side keeping the right to conduct further research on them...

...in 1982, only 20 per cent did...

...In fact, writes Aron, "Like almost everyone in the Soviet Union," these would-be dissidents believed that the market "meant a combination of generous state subsidies and social services and freedom in setting prices and disposing of produce...

...The place was a tourist attraction, and at the end of the tour someone almost always popped the same question Reagan asked...

...President Clinton has said he will decide this summer whether to authorize the building of a system now being developed for that purpose...

...Leon Aran's major new biography, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (St...

...The technical difficulties, however, remain...

...The press, too, is free...

...This and other suchnotions, uncovered by the press after Reagan's March 1983 "Star Wars" speech urging a strategic-defense effort to make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete," had little serious support in most of the defense community...

...Then, says Aron, Yeltsin asked, suppose the government were to grant you total independence...

...With less capable controls, the Soviets concentrated on delivering a largerpayload, hoping to hit something...

...For by early 1983, public opinion had begun to rum decisively against the military buildup of Reagan's first term...

...COMMUNISM FELL not because of anything we did but because it attempted to reform itself...

...The alleged Soviet strategic superiority was even more specious...

...One of the peculiarities of the anti-Communist upheavals of 1989-91, Aron observes, is that where earlier "revolutions killed off, arrested, exiled or at least dismissed the old ruling class...

...Conservatives and "Cold War liberals" now argued that the Soviet Union was on its way to achieving strategic superiority because its land-based missiles had larger "throw weights"—that is, the ability to carry a bigger package of bombs—than ours...

...But he kept his limousine, dacha and right to privileged health services...

...Since it was clear that neither country could hope to destroy all of the other's nuclear weapons in a first strike, both faced catastrophe if either pushed the button...

...Some of what Aron says, such as his assertion that Yeltsin ended the war in Chechnya, has been totally overtaken by events...

...The term then referred to a specific kind of inequality that had been created by Communism and probably did more to undermine it than its bloody history, for the past was mostly of interest to intellectuals...

...The system's initial test, held in October 1999, was at first described as successful, but it turned out that the interceptor hit its target by accident while homing in on a decoy...

...Despite the détente of the intervening years—or, many thought, because of it—Communism seemed to be on the march everywhere in Southeast Asia, Africa and, ultimately, Afghanistan...

...In short, Soviet and American systems differed because of conscious choices made by each side, and the choices made by the Soviets reflected their weaknesses, not their strengths...

...Notwithstanding the shift in opinion away from détente—a shift that in 1980 resulted in Reagan's election as President— during the 1970s strategic defenses were the preserve of Rightwing enthusiasts...

...But the cause of strategic defenses was revived during the 1991 Gulf War when the Patriot missile, a descendant of the Army's original system, was at first credited with destroying the Scuds that Iraq hurled at Israel and Saudi Arabia...

...Although Reagan's hold over the government was tenuous, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was his own contribution to the policies pursued in his name...

...Parties compete without restriction...

...these [revolutions] bought them out...

...Despite all the hatred that the new Russian nobility aroused, it survives...

...Protection against the missiles of "rogue states" is the current objective of our strategic defense program...

...But if "Yeltsin had crossed the boundary of the acceptable," says Aron, it was also true that he had chosen an issue capable of bringing him to the forefront of public consciousness when Gorbachev's revolution from above failed and history moved into the streets...

...One version of SDI's origins has been widely disseminated— "and small wonder, for it is a marvelous story," writes Frances FitzGerald in Way Out There in the Blue (Simon and Schuster, 480 pp., $30.00), her account of SDI's evolution and significance...

...Soviet defense spending did not really rise much in the 1980s...

...Hill and Reagan assented to the basic lines of this narrative, but FitzGerald insists, in all likelihood correctly, that it "must be regarded as something more than history...

...Russia is already a democracy in the sense that free election has succeeded free election...

...What became SDI came to the fore as a result of circumstances—and a mindset—that was peculiar to Reagan, and it is the emphasis on the importance of his personal contribution that distinguishes FitzGerald's book...

...In 1989, for instance, Yeltsin visited the Vorkuta mines, in northwestern Russia, a hotbed of anti-Soviet feeling...

...FitzGerald notes that "The answer, carefully prepared and endlessly repeated, was 'Nothing.' And the visitors would go away shaken, as was intended...

...Whatever its outcome, it is unlikely to give any real indication of whether the system can be made operational by 2005— supposedly the criterion for going ahead...

...In attacking it, Yeltsin was following in the footsteps of an earlier Communist reformer who soon broke with the movement: the Yugoslav Milovan Djilas, who made similar arguments during the 1950s, in The New Class...

...The tale begins in the summer of 1979, when Reagan, campaigning for the Presidency, accompanied economist Martin Anderson to the Colorado base of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), whose function was to track incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in a nuclear war...

...Indeed, the nomenklatura had evolved into a sort of nobility...

...In 1980, the year before his Presidency, the United States spent $ 142 billion on defense...

...There, says Aron, he had been the Party's obedient servant, but as the leader of the Moscow regional organization Yeltsin broke that mold by focusing on an issue euphemistically called "social justice...

...Other 1982 polls indicated that 70 per cent of all Americans supported proposals for a negotiated freeze on the further deployment of nuclear weapons...

...The Kennedy Administration decided against deploying it on the grounds that it would force the Soviets to improve their offensive missiles and we would have to respond in turn...

...Neither did détente, for contact with the West proved deeply corrosive...

...The members of the Soviet elite were distinguished not only by their higher incomes but also by their access to special resources—stores, hospitals, medical facilities, and schools—created solely for them...

...But in retrospect it is clear that adventurism in the Third World did not strengthen the USSR...

...A second test, in January, clearly failed...

...Moreover, land-based missiles were only one part of a strategic triad that included manned bombers and submarine-based missiles, in which we had a considerable lead...

...The outcome of Russia's present time of troubles will retroactively shape history's view of Yeltsin's achievements and shortcomings...

...Martin's, 934 pp., $35.00), ignores SDI and defense policy as an element in the USSR's breakdown...

...In December, Reagan's approval rating stood at 41 per cent—the lowest level ever for a President at that stage of his term...

...For one thing, a year before the NORAD excursion Reagan had said in a radio broadcast: "If the Soviets push the button, there is no defense against them, no way to prevent the nuclear destruction of their targets in the United States...

...His criticism of the elite's prerogatives—not his willingness to experiment with democracy, opposition parties, and private property, all of which came very late—is what made it hate him so fiercely...

...Of course, the claim by Reagan's officials that SDI brought down the Soviet Union rests not on the existence of workable devices but on the alleged Soviet response to our efforts to build them...

...A shield against a major missile attack will probably always be impossible, since it is far easier to improve offensive weapons—particularly those of the nuclear variety, which merely have to hit something—than to develop defensive weapons that have to "hit a bullet with a bullet...

...The program actually announced in March 1985 attempted to develop both space- and ground-based missile interceptors that would destroy their targets with laser beams—hence the sobriquet "Star Wars," inspired by the film...

...Soviet expenditures on strategic defenses did not increase and were never comparable to ours...

...But Aron argues that he is less to blame for this than Russian history and the Russian people...

...His tenure in office and replacement by Vladimir V. Putin didn't make it into the book, and neither, naturally, did Yeltsin's recent abdication in Putin's favor...

...To meet a deadline that was probably motivated by a desire to give the Democrats an opportunity to flex their military muscles, there will now have to be another test, in May...

...The Russians have so far resisted our attempts to amend or reinterpret it, but their real aim may simply be to get a good price for caving in...

...Reagan Administration luminaries like Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger and Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle claimed that their former chief had engineered its destruction...

...Hill replied that NORAD could track it, but that was all...

...His Administration refused to make any strategic arms limitation proposals until the expansion was well under way...

...Boris Yeltsin, like Gorbachev, was an apparatchik from Russia's periphery—Siberia in Yeltsin's case, southern Russia in Gorbachev's...

...Aron, an émigré scholar, believes as FitzGerald does that if not for Gorbachev's reform effort, Communism would probably have staggered on...

...it rose as a proportion of the Soviet economy because that economy was collapsing...

...State assets were sold at a discount to their Communist managers, whose enterprises continue to enjoy subsidies such as artificially low prices for inputs (particularly energy) and reduced taxes...

...In fact, the Soviet defense budget was overwhelmingly devoted to the conventional weapons needed to hold the empire together...

...The Westem sense of vulnerability extended to nuclear weapons...

...Polls suggested that in 1980, 80 per cent of the American people supported higher defense spending...

...Russia no longer imposes its rule on the Baltics, Central Asia, or even Ukraine...

...After touring the facility, Reagan entered its control room, said by Anderson (in his 1988 book Revolution) to look "just like such command centers do in the movies...

...by the time he came into office the Defense Department had been working on it for a generation...

...Approximately a third of the members of the country's economic elite held the same positions in 1993 that they had held in 1988...

...FitzGerald, though, maintains quite correctly that "the enormous military buildup of the Reagan years had no role at all in the demise of the Soviet Union...

...As Jerome Weisner, Kennedy's science adviser, rightly put it in 1962, strategic defenses would give us "steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security...

...FitzGerald argues persuasively that Reagan, though he knew about these proposals, was guided by other considerations...

...One problem is that an affirmative decision would appear to violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty...

...Time didn't treat the publishers kindly...

...The managers and workers poured out their hearts with stories of Moscow bureaucrats who had prevented them from running the industry in a rational way...

...Will Yeltsin fare better at its hands...

...the few Communist states that have survived are, with the exception of China, those we have worked hardest to isolate: Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam...

...Some of these fears seemed reasonable at the time...

...In the early 1960s, the Army was developing a system that, like its successors, could not distinguish missiles from decoys...

...What about state subsidies...

...It was Mikhail S. Gorbachev, not Ronald Reagan, who provoked its collapse by admitting to failures he could not in any way rectify...

...In 1985, Gorbachev called him to Moscow from Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg), where he had spent almost a decade as regional Party chief...

...As Moscow Party chief, Yeltsin ostentatiously took public transport to work, and his wife stood on queues at stores...

...Reagan "couldn't believe that the United States had no defense against nuclear missiles," wrote Anderson...

...Aran's narrative of events stops dead with the appointment of Yevgeny M. Primakov, the leader of the Center-Right forces in the Russian Duma, as Prime Minister in September 1998...

...As Tocqueville wrote in The Old Regime and the French Revolution, "the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways...

...Robert S. McNamara, Kennedy's (and later Lyndon B. Johnson's) Defense Secretary, proposed a different approach: an agreement with the Soviets banning strategic defenses and thus making the cost of nuclear war too high for either camp...

...Reagan asked the commander, General James Hill, what would happen if the Soviets launched an ICBM...

...Nothing at all practical came of that...

...Whenever Reagan committed himself to strategic defenses, the goal wasn't new...

...For another, his alleged discovery of this truth during the NORAD visit was not, as Anderson implied, the result of a chance inquiry...

...By Roger Draper President Ronald Reagan gave Boris N. Yeltsin no direct help during the years when he led the ultra-reform wing of the Soviet Communist Party and then the opposition to Communism itself...

...Their missiles were also heavier because the fuel they used weighed more than our fuel...

...Even if it clearly does work, where is it written that nuclear weapons must be delivered by ICBMs...

...Under the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), each side conceived of its nuclear forces as a deterrent rather than a means of waging war...

...For example, Daniel Graham, a former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, proposed the deployment of several hundred one-man space cruisers—a fleet, as FitzGeraldsays, "of lonesome astronaut-cowboys patrolling the boundaries of space"—to strike down incoming missiles...

...Although Yeltsin was the first Russian leader ever to yield power peacefully and in accordance with agreed-upon rules, the case in his favor is now distinctly weaker than it was when this book was being written, and unfortunately the text has not been updated...

...They responded: "What about the guaranteed supplies...

...Yeltsin, himself one of the holdovers, has thus disappointed those who hoped he would establish Western-style laissez faire...

...In the years since Yeltsin became President of a sovereign Russia in 1991, its economy has been privatized rather than reformed...

...If you wanted to use a bomb against this country, it would be much cheaper and easier to smuggle the components into it and assemble them here than to compete with us in missiles, as the Soviet Union unwisely did...

...in 1982, we spent S222 billion...

...After the demise of the Soviet Union, this kind of war may no longer be a threat in any case...

...We had smaller, lighter, less powerful land-based missiles than the Soviets did because our control systems were more sophisticated and had a better chance of guiding our weapons to theirtargets...

...These successes, though, would be questioned later on...

...According to them, Reagan's determination to develop a defense against offensive strategic (intercontinental) missiles is what forced the Soviet Union into a new arms race that bankrupted and finally undermined it...

...In the meantime, Aron makes a strong case for his subject...

...Only two Senators voted against the AntiBallistic Missile Treaty, but the consensus that made it possible dissolved by the mid-1970s...

...Although as Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon had seen, strategic defenses would disturb the balance between the superpowers, Reagan believed that he could sell SDI to the public simply because defensive weapons seemed, to his naïve imagination, less threatening, more uplifting, than offensive ones...