Two books on the end of cold war just made it onto my “must read” list. This is partly to check out my own story of how Jimmy Carter and Oleg Gordievsky helped Reagan end the cold war. While the American Catholic Bishops didn’t recognize it, Reagan was responded to their wish to end the danger of nuclear war – but succeeded by rejecting the advice of many of them.
If you think than I'm indulging in an “I told you so” posting, just wait until you read my last paragraph.
First, here is an extract from Rich Lowry’s review of historian Paul Lettow’s Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons:
"Lettow, a first-time author whose book resulted from his work on an Oxford doctorate, demonstrates that Reagan had acquired his fundamental beliefs in this area by the 1960s. He wanted to do away with nuclear weapons entirely, perhaps because he thought the biblical story of Armageddon foretold a nuclear war. He believed that the Soviet economy would buckle under the pressure of stiff competition in the arms race. And he supported missile defense as a technological and moral alternative to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction."
Second, an extract from George Perkovich’s review of Gerard J. DeGroot’s The Bomb:
"Intelligence failures contributed to some of the most dramatic nuclear episodes of the Cold War, as they did in Iraq. Washington underestimated how long it would take the Soviets to get atomic and hydrogen bombs, then famously overestimated the "missile gap" in 1960. Both failures killed any prospect of limiting the arms race or taming competitive paranoia. Faulty intelligence kept U.S. officials from seeing the full extent of the nuclear danger during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and in the 1980s caused Soviet leaders to overestimate the threat of nuclear attack by the Reagan administration."
In my account, that overestimate became a turning point.
I was watching all of this from the vantage point of a senior intelligence analyst and a supervisor. Our pastor was deeply concerned about the danger of nuclear war and at one point proposed that the parish council declare the parish a nuclear free zone. Later one of my colleagues was privileged to travel to Germany and witness the destruction of SS20 and Pershing II missiles. (The entrance to the Air and Space museum in DC has a shells of each missile standing in silent witness to the end of this age of terror.) The American and Russian observers exchanged tokens and medals – in the same way that Boy Scouts do at a Jamboree. My colleague presented one of them – a medal of a broken rocket – to our pastor with words to the effect that Ronald Reagan was right.
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