Walter C. Uhler.com--Misreading the Soviet Threat

The Journal of Slavic Military Studies (London)
March 2001
Misreading the Soviet Threat

WALTER C. UHLER
Review Of:
Noel E. Firth and James H. Noren, Soviet Defense Spending: A History of CIA Estimates, 1950-1990, College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998. Pp.xix + 291, appendices, notes, references, index. $49.95. ISBN 0-89096-805-5
Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Pp.viii + 232, appendix, glossary, bibliog., index. $24.50. ISBN 0-271-01791-0
Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Pp.604, notes, index. $30. ISBN 0-684-81081-6
Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Pp.592, glossary, notes, index. $30. ISBN 0-684-84416-8 ________________________________________________________________________________

During President Reagan's first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, in Geneva in November 1985, the Soviet leader informed Reagan that "I think you should know that we have already developed a response [to your "Star Wars"¹ missile defense program]. It will be effective and far less expensive than your project, and be ready for use in less time." ² In fact, development of the TOPOL-M ICBM (SS-27) commenced in the mid-1980s, specifically in response to Star Wars. ³ With the first deployment of 10 TOPOL-M ICBMs in 1998, ⁴ Gorbachev's prediction had been substantiated on all three counts.
Virtually unnoticed in the United States, TOPOL-M deployment by the Russians undermined claims, made in the West, that: (1) attempting to match Reagan's military buildup bankrupted the Soviet Union and (2) Star Wars technology convinced the Soviet leadership that it could not compete technologically, thus compelling it to restructure its economy. Instead, actual deployment raises questions about the impact of the Reagan administration's attempt to leverage America's technological superiority ("competitive strategies"), as well as the question of why one administration after another, beginning with President Reagan's, would proceed with a missile defense system soon to be rendered obsolete by an asymmetric Soviet/Russian response. Such doubts are part of an emerging laundry list that call into question America's Soviet policy during the Cold War and its Russia policy today.
Recent scholarship and memoirs by his son have detailed Nikita Khrushchev's conscious effort to contain his "thick-headed types you find wearing uniforms's" ⁵ by curbing military spending. He accomplished this by subordinating other elements of Soviet military power to the development of a few ballistic missiles. ⁶ Yet it was fear of nuclear war that persuaded him to reject "Lenin's theses concerning the inevitability of war and the role of war as the 'midwife of the revolution,' and replace them with the principle of 'peaceful coexistence between states with differing social systems.'" ⁷ The subsequent and substantial military buildup by his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, was attributable, in part, to a powerful, self-interested defense industry. To that extent, according to Nikolai Sokov, the ominous strategic military posture of the late 1970s was "unintended." ⁸ But it clearly was subordinate to a bona fide commitment by the civilian leaders against using nuclear weapons first; ⁹ Brezhnev's "Tula Line" of 1977.
Such cumulative evidence further underscores doubts about the extreme militarization of America's Soviet policy (so notably decried by George Kennan) during the late 1970s and early 1980s - the very period when the Soviet Union actually was slowing or reducing various defense expenditures. The four books under consideration here evaluate the distortions contained in America's Cold War assessments of the Soviet defense buildup. Thus, all four provide important answers to the criticism raised by Kennan.
Noel Firth and James Noren assert that "the CIA estimates of Soviet defense spending for most of its history were in the middle of one of the biggest and most enduring battles in Washington: the annual struggle over the size of the U.S. defense budget." ¹⁰ During its early years, however, the Cold War was waged without the benefit of much knowledge about the Soviet military, its expenditures or their burden on the economy. ¹¹ The available information was unsatisfactory, derived as it was from US military intelligence organizations that had an interest in stating the "worst-case scenario" in order to support the budgetary goals of their parent services. ¹² These excesses "were probably the primary motivating factor in the creation of a centralized intelligence function under civilian control." ¹³
Prior to the establishment of the CIA on 18 September 1947, the Central Intelligence Group's Office of Research and Estimates (ORE) produced economic intelligence estimates of questionable value. ¹⁴ In 1953, "a five-person Military-Economics Branch" ¹⁵ was established to evaluate Soviet military expenditures, but only in 1954 was the CIA assigned the responsibility for "production of all economic intelligence on the Soviet Bloc." ¹⁶
Methodologically, the CIA attempted to estimate the monetary costs of Soviet defense inputs, not the military effectiveness resulting from them. Although the agency applied an admittedly unsatisfactory "residual" method (deriving micro-economic data for questionable macro-economic data) for military Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E), most of its effort was devoted to the establishment of direct costs for discrete elements of military activity; the "building-block" method. Such costs would then be applied to estimates of quantities of such an activity before being aggregated - usually in spending categories used in the US defense budget - for purposes of analysis.
Information about specific prices or processes, sometimes provided by agents operating inside the Soviet Union, often would provide useful baselines, either for estimating other closely related items or for testing the numerous prices based upon US analogs. Because the analogs were estimated in dollars, but the data from agents was in rubles, and because the burden on the Soviet economy had to be evaluated in rubles, but the comparisons with US defense spending in dollars; the Agency needed to establish a reliable (and constantly updated) conversion ratio. Nevertheless, by the "mid- to late 1950s," its analysts believed that they had as useful database at their disposal. ¹⁷
Satellite intelligence and the introduction of an automated data processing program called SCAM (Strategic Cost Analysis Model) during the early 1960s enhanced the Agency's capability to identify military quantities faster and with greater precision, but these gains were offset, according to Firth and Noren, by the proliferation of new tasks which exploded during the Kennedy administration. Consequently, less attention was given to the continuous refinement of its building-blocks, especially for defense hardware." ¹⁸
When, in 1967, the Soviet leadership reformed its wholesale prices, minor adjustments were made to the 1955 building-block data by 1970. But, as "ruble prices for Soviet military equipment in the 1960s and early 1970s began to accumulate.. .the estimated 1970 prices for defense hardware in the form of original equipment and spare parts were [shown to be] badly understated." ¹⁹ Higher estimates for these units, as well as for RDT&E caused the Agency to announce a "major reassessment" of Soviet ruble defense spending in May 1976. Estimates of Soviet defense spending significantly increased: for the year 1970, from 29 billion to some figure between 40 and 50 billion rubles; for the year 1975, from 34 billion to a figure between 55 to 60 billion rubles.
Although the revisions underscored a greater burden on the Soviet economy, but not an increase in actual Soviet weaponry; Firth and Noren claim that this reassessment precipitated "the most tumultuous period in the history of CIA military-economic analysis." ²⁰ As Anne Hessing Cahn persuasively demonstrates, however, in her study of the origins and conclusions of the CIA's "Team B;" Firth and Noren exaggerate the impact of this reassessment. The "tumultuous period,", in her view, was very much the product of repetitive alarmist propaganda, which seized upon anything - but especially the CIA's underestimates - to destroy detente and stampede the American electorate into unthinking support for Cold War II.
As Cahn demonstrates, the CIA already had come under fire from President Nixon and national security adviser Henry Kissinger for its conclusion (in 1969) that the Soviet's SS-9 missile did not possess multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs). But a general assault on detente commenced in reaction to Nixon's and Kissinger's historic diplomacy in Moscow in 1972, which resulted in the signing of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and the foundational Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Almost immediately, Senator Henry Jackson (Democrat-Washington) introduced legislation which would prohibit similar agreements in the future. Jackson had his eyes on the Presidency and a constituency of defense workers, East Europeans, Jews and members of labor unions who were skeptical of detente with the Soviet Union. In addition to his codicil concerning future arms agreements, Jackson was able to squeeze US arms contracts (benefiting his state) and a purge of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) in return for his vote in favor of ratifying SALT and the ABM treaty.
Within the administration, skepticism about SALT came from Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, who mixed bias against the Soviet Union with a personal antipathy towards Dr. Kissinger. Kissinger's "petty bureaucratic games," ²¹ which included withholding intelligence reports, infuriated Paul Nitze, who resigned from the SALT negotiating team in June 1974. Nitze quickly joined the SALT opposition.
Conservatives and neo-conservatives, led by Eugene Rostow, accused the Nixon administration of creating "a myth of détente," ²² which obscured the threat really posed by the Soviet Union. In November 1976, they reestablished the Committee for the Present Danger, which had done so much to alert (propagandize?) the public to the dangers posed by the Soviet Union some 25 years earlier - and continued their onslaught until Ronald Reagan was elected President.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's banishment from the Soviet Union in February 1974, and his speech before the AFL-CIO in June also undermined sympathy for detente; as had Andrei Sakharov's open letter to the US Congress in September 1973 (which supported the Jackson-Vanik amendment that tied the granting of Most Favored Nation trade status for the Soviet Union to its liberalization of it emigration). The prospect of Eurocommunists coming to power and ostensible Soviet gains in Africa also provided significant cause for alarm.
Finally, opposition to its role in Vietnam (its Phoenix program alienating liberals, its pessimistic estimates about winning that war alienating conservatives) and its involvement in Watergate seriously eroded trust in the CIA, thereby enabling Albert Wohlstetter's 1974 article in Foreign Policy ²³ (alleging "perennial underestimation of Soviet deployments" ²⁴) to receive a greater hearing than it otherwise merited. It contributed to the decision by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB, loaded with conservatives viscerally opposed to detente) to recommend the appointment of a team of outside experts to "perform an alternative threat assessment." ²⁵
Although appointment of such a team had been rebuffed by Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William Colby in November 1975, four events, however, brought a reversal of that decision in late 1976: (1) Colby's subsequent resignation, (2) the relentless insistence by the PFIAB, (3) the appointment of George Bush as DCI, and (4) the CIA's own reassessments (cited by Firth and Noren). ²⁶
'Team B' actually consisted of three teams; one tasked with assessing Soviet air defenses, another to examine Soviet missile accuracy, and a third (originally tasked to examine Soviet anti-submarine warfare capability) to assess Soviet strategic objectives. The outside "experts" on each team had access to the same intelligence information available to the CIA's analysts. Findings, comparisons, discussions and a final evaluation would result.
Subsequent information would expose Team B's analyses to be so egregiously mistaken as to lay bare its biases for posterity. But that was after the fact. In the late 1970s, propaganda about the findings, and not disinterested analysis of them, carried the day. As such, the Team B's findings, especially as trumpeted by the Committee for the Present Danger, were to contribute a signal disservice to the country.
Where were Team B's experts wrong? Just from Cahn's study we find the following: (1) they overestimated the range of the Backfire bomber, (2) they overestimated the number of Backfires to be deployed, guessing 500 by 1984, when 235 were fielded by that year, (3) they faulted the CIA for viewing deterrence as an "alternative" to war fighting rather than "complementary to it," ²⁷whereas Raymond Garthoff subsequently demonstrated (having access to Voyennaya mysl) that Soviet plans were based upon a 1973-74 directive "that it would not be the first use nuclear weapons." ²⁸
They (4) overestimated the Soviet's ABM capabilities, and (5) its laser and charged particle beam capabilities, (6) incorrectly accused the CIA of consistently underestimating Soviet military capabilities, (7) mistakenly claimed that there existed no potential economic constraints on Soviet strategic forces in the foreseeable future and (8) irresponsibly claimed that "the Soviet Union is nevertheless preparing for a Third World War as if it were unavoidable." ²⁹ Subsequent information would demonstrate that Team B grossly overestimated the accuracy of the supposed silo-busting SS-19 missile. The exaggeration supported a subsequent canard, "the window of vulnerability." ³⁰
Nevertheless, as former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Robert Gates, reminds us, the Soviet Union posed a genuine threat. His book recounts the numerous initiatives undertaken by the Soviet Union or its Cuban proxy in Angola, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Rhodesia, and Libya during the mid-1970s, the deployment of SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles in the European theater in 1977, Cuba's involvement in Grenada, Nicaragua and EI Salvador in 1979 followed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that December. ³¹
According to Gates, "What was clear, and not much argued, was that the Soviet Union's increasing military power was emboldening it to act and to take risks in advancing its interests and ambitions around the world." ³² Yet, his own account is anything but clear about an emboldened Soviet leadership. Not only does he claim that "the men in the Kremlin looked at the world and saw a Chinese challenge everywhere," ³³ he also concludes that "the Soviets believed they couldn't afford not to react in Ethiopia after a succession of setbacks in the Middle East - Sudan, Lebanon, and Egypt, and the expulsion from the port of Berbera, Somalia." ³⁴ Finally, Gates acknowledges that "on several occasions in the 1970s, I heard the President and senior members of Congress ask our military chiefs whether they would trade forces with the Soviets. The answer was always negative." ³⁵
Worse still, Gates ignores CIA provocations against the democratically elected Marxist President of Chile, Salvadore Allende. Although the Agency's direct involvement in the coup in 1973 has yet to be established, we know that, in October 1970, Thomas Karamessines (CIA deputy director of plans) conveyed the following orders from Henry Kissinger to the CIA station chief in Santiago (Henry Hecksher): "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date." ³⁶ This curious silence about Chile allows Gates to ignore the strong possibility that Allende's overthrow contributed "to greater Soviet emphasis on military instruments." ³⁷
Emboldened or not, Gates credits President Carter for his "contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War," ³⁸ the widespread "perceptions of 'Carter's weakness' notwithstanding." ³⁹ Carter imposed economic sanctions, continued virtually all of America's weapons programs and authorized numerous covert actions against the Soviets and Cubans in the Third World. Most important, however, was his human rights offensive against the Soviet Union, which resulted in the Helsinki Final Act. Consequently, "he was the first President during the Cold War to challenge publicly and consistently the legitimacy of Soviet rule at home." ⁴⁰
If, indeed, "Carter prepared the ground for Reagan," ⁴¹ why the 'perceptions' problem? Unfortunately, this is not an answer which Gates can provide. Seeing no enemies to his right, Gates makes no mention of Team B, the Committee for the Present Danger or the other propagandists and alarmists who did much to create the perception of Carter's weakness. He fails to mention that Reagan smeared President Carter's Soviet policy, comparing it to the appeasement of Hitler and he also overlooks Reagan's campaign assertion that America "is in greater danger today than it was on the day of Pearl Harbor." ⁴²
Gates associates the election of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Francois Mitterrand with the 'reawakening' of the West to the Soviet threat. However, he provides very little evidence demonstrating any positive impact upon an enfeebled Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov or Konstantin Chernenko.
This reawakening was fueled, in part, by erroneous CIA data which claimed that Soviet defense spending was increasing at the rate of 4 to 5 per cent per year during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Not until 1983 did the CIA's Office of Soviet Analysis (SOVA) acknowledge that the rate of increase during that period had been only 1.3 per cent. Frances Fitzgerald blames Team B for inducing these "overly high estimates." ⁴³
The SOVA report also claimed that "Soviet spending on weapons procurements had remained flat, and spending on offensive strategic weapons had declined by 40 per cent." ⁴⁴ In a subsequent report, in 1985, SOVA analysts claimed that "the Soviets had made a deliberate decision to curtail their spending on strategic forces in the mid-seventies, when they attained strategic parity with the US." ⁴⁵
Nevertheless, a reawakened America under the Reagan administration - according to Gates - began "turning the tables" in 1981 in Poland, Central America, Afghanistan, Libya and Cambodia. Claiming that, "nothing in foreign affairs took as much time and energy as the Polish crisis" ⁴⁶ during 1981, Gates credits both the Carter and Reagan administrations for deterring a Soviet invasion. His evidence is weak, however, and consists largely of crediting the US for speaking out "strongly at key moments" while emphasizing to the Soviet leaders "the extraordinary costs of intervention." ⁴⁷ Ignored by Gates, but equally persuasive, is the assertion made by Eduard Shevardnadze that the internal disagreements attending the invasion of Afghanistan made the Soviet leadership more cautious about intervening in Poland. ⁴⁸
Unfortunately, Gates's conclusion here follows the pattern one often finds in the literature of Reagan enthusiasts: it proffers an explanation of American initiatives, but provides sorely pitiful evidence demonstrating their actual impact upon the Soviet leaders.
Thus, hardly more aggressive in Afghanistan and Central America than in Poland in 1981, Gates's account does not demonstrate Reagan's turning the tables in 1981-82 - except for a massive increase in defense spending (decided upon before discussing it with the military) ⁴⁹ and excessively hostile rhetoric ⁵⁰ As Raymond Garthoff has noted, "the Reagan administration did not formalize its policy [toward the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe] until late 1982." ⁵¹
Gates also downplays the calamitous contention, backbiting and confusion within Reagan's administration - the consequence of their leader's astounding indifference to policy issues⁵²- which guaranteed the transmission of conflicting, and thus incoherent, policies of animosity toward the Soviet Union. (In fact, much of Gates's book is devoted to settling scores with George Shultz.)
But the animosity came through, loud and clear. Which is why, in May 1981, KGB boss, Yuri Andropov, informed the members at a major KGB conference that the "new American administation... was actively preparing for nuclear war." Consequently, at the instructions of the Politburo, the KGB and the GRU "would cooperate in a worldwide intelligence operation codenamed RYAN: a newly devised acronym for Raketno Yadernoe Napadenie - Nuclear Missile Attack." ⁵³ For virtually two and one-half years, the highest priority of Soviet intelligence would be to look for evidence that the US was preparing for a surprise nuclear attack.
Readers of From the Shadows will not learn whether the CIA knew about RYAN from its inception or only after being informed by British intelligence that the US nearly had precipitated "a nuclear crisis" ⁵⁴ in late 1983. But it does not suffice for Gates to dismiss the crisis to "Andropov's seeming fixation" ⁵⁵ about a nuclear strike, especially given Andropov's position as leader of the country and the order he had given to Department 8 of the KGB to prepare to carry out "terrorist attacks on British, American and NATO targets in Europe." ⁵⁶
For 1983 was an exceptionally critical year in Soviet-American relations and Gates seriously misinterprets it. In a year when President Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as the "evil empire," announced his Star Wars initiative, jumped to incorrect conclusions and heaped inflammatory abuse on the Soviet Union for shooting down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (ten years later, the International Civil Aviation Organization determined that the Soviets actually believed they were firing at an intruding American reconnaissance aircraft), invaded Granada, and placed new nuclear weapons (ground-launched cruise missiles in Great Britain and Pershing II missiles in West Germany) in Europe; it is quite incorrect, especially in light of two recent studies to the contrary, ⁵⁷ to attribute the Soviet preparations for war (during the NATO "Able Archer" exercise in November) to the Soviet leadership being "out of touch" ⁵⁸ or their "growing desperation." ⁵⁹ Blame for this hair-trigger tension must be placed squarely on the reckless rhetoric and behavior of the Reagan administration, Gates included.
As Frances Fitzgerald demonstrates (and Gates fails to mention), Reagan's Star Wars speech was prompted by the need to regain both the political initiative over a growing international nuclear freeze movement and to reassure the American public, whose support for increased military spending had plummeted from 80 per cent to 20 per cent during Reagan's first two years.
Not only had missile defense enthusiasts been given a cold shoulder and seen their technological arguments discounted during those first two years, but the political nature of the speech also became manifest when Reagan "insisted the speech suggest that the initiative would render not just ballistic missiles but all nuclear weapons 'obsolete.'" ⁶⁰ Were that not ridiculous enough, consider that some 30 months later, in Geneva, Reagan was overheard asking George Shultz to tell him again "the difference between a ballistic missile and a cruise missile." ⁶¹
Just as domestic politics prompted the Star Wars speech, the public's growing concerns about deteriorating Soviet-American relations throughout 1983 prompted the administration to put Star Wars on the shelf for most of the 1984 election year. Once safely reelected, the Reagan administration embraced the program as if a "mass conversion" ⁶² had occurred.
American exceptionalism, Reagan's naive faith in total population defense, the Pentagon's eagerness to secure the lesser objective of protecting its offensive deterrent forces, the ideological fixation with controlling space, the belief that dollars spent on defense were changing perceptions of the military balance (if not the reality), belief that Star Wars could scuttle arms control talks and, finally, faith on the part of George Shultz, that "fear of potential US breakthroughs in space weaponry might provide an incentive for the Soviets to make deep negotiated reductions in offensive arms" ⁶³ at such arms control talks - all of these incompatible beliefs and objectives explain why Star Wars became the "very core" ⁶⁴ of America's long-term policy by 1985.
Its track record to date seemed irrelevant. But, as Matthew Evangelista correctly concludes, by March 1985, "none of the Reagan administration's expectations for the SDI's impact on the USSR had come true. There was no massive, economy-busting increase in Soviet military expenditures, no concessions on arms control, and no interest in 'sharing' SDI with the United States." ⁶⁵
Although the Soviet military urged the infusion of rubles to further develop its own missile defense program, prominent scientists, such as Roald Sagdeev and Evgenii Velikov, were urging the political leadership to pursue arms control and cheap, asymmetrical countermeasures as early as 1983. ⁶⁶
Gates, like many Star Wars enthusiasts, cites serious concern about SDI on the part of the Soviet leadership as proof that "it was the broad resurgence of the West symbolized by SDI - that convinced even some of the conservative members of the Soviet leadership that major internal changes were needed in the USSR. That decision, once made, set the stage for the dramatic events inside the Soviet Union of the next several years." ⁶⁷ Sagdeev disagrees, claiming that Soviet military-technical people "were confident of their accomplishments." ⁶⁸ Supporting Sagdeev' s claim was the actual development of the cheap asymmetrical countermeasure, TOPOL-M, along with Gorbachev's warning to Reagan about it during their first summit at Geneva in 1985.
A more reasonable explanation for Gorbachev's heightened concern about Star Wars has been advanced by Susanne Sternthal (among others). She concludes that "rather than submitting to the domestic constraints imposed by a hawkish Politburo and a coddled military, or to the international structural constraints reinforced by the West's hardened stance and Reagan's SDI challenge, Gorbachev tried to reconfigure both environments." ⁶⁹
His appeal to "common human values" over Marxist-Leninist class conflict and to economic power over military might were not merely tactical moves to outflank SDI and his military, but genuine "new thinking" influenced by transnational organizations and key intellectuals within the Soviet Union. ⁷⁰ Such thinking was the culmination of evolutionary changes within the Soviet Union, which commenced with Stalin's death. ⁷¹
Gates and others have concluded that Gorbachev's failure to immediately rein in his military constituted evidence of his early support for such large expenditures. A more plausible explanation recognizes that his whirlwind diplomatic initiatives abroad, especially insofar as they were dismissed a propaganda by the Reagan administration, had little direct impact on early defense spending decisions. To that extent, obduracy by the hardliners in the US may have prolonged the Cold War.
Recall that under Brezhnev's policy of consensus, both the military and the defense industry had accumulated deep seated influence. ⁷² Gorbachev decried the decision making process that encouraged it:
"According to the procedure that emerged during the period of stagnation, agencies calculated something, planned something as best they could, obviously, proceeding from their narrow interests, and sent the results to our table. The Central Committee apparatus usually simply copied those and sent them to the Secretariat and the Politburo. And we usually just rubber-stamped them... Sometimes the most important decisions were made in 5-10 minutes. Who, then, determined policies of the Politburo? It was the bureaucracy." ⁷³
Thus, notwithstanding Gorbachev's talk about mutual security before he assumed power in March 1985, his immediate repudiation of the Brezhnev doctrine after assuming power, unilateral nuclear testing moratoriums, his replacement of Mr Nyet, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, with Eduard Shevardnadze that July, his proposal in September to reduce nuclear arsenals by 50 per cent in return for the scrapping of SDI, his reintroduction of the phrase dreaded by the military, "'reasonable sufficiency" ⁷⁴ in October, the Geneva Summit in November, his wholesale personnel changes effectuated by the end of the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress (February-March 1986), his unilateral moratorium on deployment of SS-20 IRBMs in April 1986 and the sobering impact of Chernobyl on both him and his military leaders that same month; it was not until Matthias Rust flew "a small Cesna aircraft" undetected from Finland to the Kremlin gates in Moscow on 28 May 1987 that Gorbachev was able to remove the Defense Minister and force approximately 100 generals and colonels into retirement. ⁷⁵
Savoring his ascendency over the military, Gorbachev told his adviser, Anatoly Chernyaev, "Let everyone here and in the West know where the power is - it is in the political leadership, in the Politburo." ⁷⁶ Soviet defense expenditures were frozen in 1987 and 1988. ⁷⁷ In January 1989, Gorbachev announced a 19.5 per cent cut in expenditures for weapons and a 14.2 per cent cut in the total military budget - to become totally effective by 1991. ⁷⁸
For all of his 'intelligence', Gates either misses or misreads many of these developments. Fitzgerald, whose critique of Gates is second only to her exposure of Caspar Weinberger, notes that in a 4 February 1986 memo to Shultz, Gates claimed that on "fundamental policies and objectives" Gorbachev " remains generally as inflexible as his predecessors." ⁷⁹ She adds, "as for Gorbachev's report to the Twenty-Seventh Congress, Gates does not even pretend to have paid it any attention at the time." ⁸⁰
Although she adds little to our understanding of Soviet behavior, Fitzgerald substantially improves our knowledge about the Reagan administration's Soviet policy. She details the debacle they barely avoided at Reykjavik in October 1986 (thanks to Reagan's refusal to bargain away SDI), describing how it was transformed by the "American propaganda machine" into a public relations windfall. Yet, she makes it clear that an extremely well-prepared Soviet delegation had blind sided US negotiators who "went to Reykjavik with proposals designed to block an agreement." ⁸¹
Even before Reykjavik, however, SDI was receding into the still unworkable National Missile Defense program of today. In the summer of 1985, Kenneth Adelman (head of ACDA) admitted to a British audience that "the real aim of SDI was to create a point defense for American ICBMs, and that the rationale of population defenses was merely public relations for the program." ⁸² Retreating further, in May 1996, one of Reagan's associates, Martin Anderson, attempted to justify SDI as a program "to protect the US against an accidental launch or a small-scale nuclear attack." ⁸³
By early 1987, SDI virtually ceased being an obstacle to improved Soviet-American relations. A month after Reykjavik, Reagan made a televised address to the nation to deny the reports that the US had traded arms to Iran as ransom for American hostages. As both liberals and conservatives subsequently acknowledged, the Reagan administration, shaken by the developing Iran-Contra scandal, sought to salvage its legacy by seeking improved relations with the Soviet Union. ⁸⁴ Thus, when Gorbachev threw off the last vestiges of concern about SDI in February ⁸⁵ the path was cleared for the Washington summit in December, which resulted in the signing of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, and Reagan's Moscow summit the following May.
Thus, on the matter of reading and misreading the Soviet Union, Firth and Noren credit the CIA for doing a "good job overall sizing Soviet defense programs," ⁸⁶ but found it "less successful" ⁸⁷ when analyzing the defense burden. They believe that the "agency's participation in the process has saved the US taxpayer many billions of dollars." ⁸⁸ Cahn, of course, disputes that last assertion, at least for the period she examined. Gates claims that he "was never comfortable with our estimates of Soviet military spending" and "instinctively" believed that the burden was as high as 25 to 40 per cent of the Soviet Gross National Product. ⁸⁹ He subsequently retreats from this very telling assertion, however, by conceding that "the already huge Soviet deployed forces in the 1980s did not grow as quickly as we had predicted. "⁹⁰
There is some merit to Gates's attempt to credit Nixon's efforts to open the Soviet Union to the West, the Helsinki Declaration under President Ford, President Carter's human rights campaign, US covert action in the Third World under Carter and Reagan for their role in "intensifying the Soviet crisis and in forcing actions and decisions in Moscow that led ultimately to the collapse." ⁹¹ More persuasive, however, is his belated recognition of the immense domestic role played by Mikhail Gorbachev. ⁹² But, as we have seen, he is quite mistaken when he credits America's military buildup, especially Reagan's Star Wars program, or when he minimizes Gorbachev's role in ending the Cold War.
With painstaking detail, Fitzgerald has demonstrated how right-wing ideologues, who "had not been substantially represented in Washington since the 1950s," ⁹³ used a charming actor and often congenial politician (who shared their conclusions, if not their facts) to be the torch bearer for their agenda. In office, she tells us, President Reagan "played almost no role in working out the policies of his administration." ⁹⁴ Finally, "'it was Gorbachev who changed the Soviet Union, and Reagan's 'embrace' of him as an individual was surely the most important contribution the United States made to the Soviet revolution until after the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact." ⁹⁵
Fitzgerald's exposure of the politically inspired misreading of the Soviet Union and its nuclear weapons is a very persuasive extension of Cahn's analysis. As she concludes, "to look back over the public record of the late 1970s and 1980s is to be struck by how little of what was said about these subjects had anything to do with reality" ⁹⁶ - "or the best intelligence estimates about it." ⁹⁷ Instead it was "a matter of domestic politics, history and mythology." ⁹⁸
NOTES:
1. Formally known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).
2. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (NY: Doubleday 1995) p. 407.
3. Nikolai Sokov, Russian Strategic Modernization: Past and Future (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2000) p. 47.
4. Ten more were deployed in 1999.
5. Benjamin S. Lambeth, 'Contemporary Soviet Military Policy', in The Soviet Calculus of Nuclear War (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath 1986) p.32.
6. Sergei N. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (State College: Penn State Press 2000).
7. William J. Tompson, Khrushchev: A Political Life (NY: St Martin's 1997) pp.159-60.
8. Peter Almquist, Red Forge: Soviet Military Industry Since 1965 (NY: Columbia UP 1990) pp.118, 121; but most recently and persuasively by Sokov (note 3) p.5.
9. Raymond L. Garthoff, Deterrence and the Revolution in Soviet Military Doctrine (Washington DC: Brookings 1990) pp.80-89.
10. Firth and Noren, Soviet Defense Spending (title under review) p.xii.
11. But neither did US officials expect Soviet military aggression. See Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford UP 1992) p.6.
12. Firth and Noren (title under review) p.26. But Robert Gates observed a subsequent bias by CIA analysts "opposed to nearly any view or proposal offered by the Department of Defense," Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows (title under review) p.33.
13. Ibid.
14. Assessing the Soviet Threat: The Early Cold War Years (ed.) by Woodrow J. Kuhns (Center for the Study of Intelligence Website 1997) p.5 (of the Preface).
15. Firth and Noren (title under review) p.10.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid. p.24. By the late 1950s, the Agency had identified approximately 260 types of units for aggregation, by the 1990s, the number almost reached 1,800. pp.14-15
18. Ibid. p.56.
19. Ibid. p.53.
20. Ibid. p.58.
21. Cahn (title under review) p.22.
22. Ibid. p.27.
23. Albert Wohlstetter, "Is There a Strategic Arms Race?" Foreign Policy (Summer 1974).
24. Cahn (title under review) p.107.
25. Ibid. p.1l2.
26. Ibid. pp.121-2.
27. Ibid. p.165.
28. Garthoff, Deterrence (note 9) p.83. This was the basis for the 'Tula Line'.
29. Cahn (title under review) pp.164-9. 30. Ibid. pp.146-7.
31. The reader of the study by Firth and Noren will find no mention of the CIA's 1979 estimate, which concluded that Soviet "weapons provided since 1975 had transformed Cuba's forces from essentially a home defense force into a military power with 'formidable offensive capabilities relative to its Latin American neighbors as well as all but the larger Third World countries.'" Gates (title under review) p.78.
32. Ibid. p.171.
33. Ibid. p.81.
34. Ibid. p.78.
35. Ibid. p.171.
36. The National Security Archive, US-Chile Documents, CIA, Operating Guidance Cable on Coup Plotting, October 16, 1970.
37. Andrew Bennett, Condemned to Repetition? The Rise, Fall and Reprise of Soviet-Russian Military Interventionism, 1973-1996 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1999) p.127.
38. Gates (title under review) p.176.
39. Ibid. p.178.
40. Ibid. p.l77.
41.Ibid. p.179.
42. Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue (title under preview) pp.109-10.
43. Ibid. p.537.
44. Ibid. p.330.
45. Ibid.
46. Gates (title under review) p.239.
47. Ibid.
48. Bennett (note 37) p.221.
49. Raymond Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington DC: Brookings 1994) p.33.
50. Richard Pipes, on Reagan's National Security Council Staff, went so far as to assert that the "Soviet leaders would have to choose between peacefully changing their communist system in the direction followed by the West or going to war," a statement subsequently repudiated by the administration. Ibid. p.12.
51. Garthoff, Great Transition (note 49) p.30.
52. Henry Kissinger, recounting his discussions with President Reagan, has observed; "It's very unusual to have a president who is not interested in policy at all." Fitzgerald (title under review) p.175.
53. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (NY: HarperCollins 1990) p.583.
54. Gates (title under review) p.273.
55. Ibid. p.270.
56. Christopher Andrew with Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (NY: Basic Books 1999) p.392.
57. Matthew Evangelista, Unanned Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell UP 1999) and Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev. Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (NY: Columbia UP 2000).
58. Gates (title under review) p.273.
59. Ibid. p.258.
60. Fitzgerald (title under review) p.206.
61. Ibid. p.534, note 177.
62. Ibid. p.242.
63. Ibid. p.257.
64. Ibid. p.243.
65. Evangelista (note 57) p.245.
66. Ibid. pp.238-9.
67. Gates (title under review) p.266.
68. Evangelista (note 57) p.337.
69. Susanne Sternthal, Gorbachev's Reforms: De-Stalinization through Demilitarization (Westport, CT: Praeger 1997) p.16.
70. See Evangelista, Unanned Forces (note 57).
71. Persuasive evidence for this conclusion is presented by Robert English in Russia and the Idea of the West (note 57).
72. Sokov (note 3) pp.22-6.
73. Ibid. p.26.
74. It had been used both by Khrushchev and Brezhnev when they attempted to put a limit on defense spending.
75. Sternthal (note 69) pp.87-8.
76. Ibid. p.88.
77. Ibid. p.89.
78. Ibid. p.131.
79. Fitzgerald (title under review) p.331
80. Ibid. p.332.
81. Ibid. p.364.
82. Ibid. p.379.
83. Ibid. p.378.
84. Ibid. p.467.
85. Evangelista (note 57) p.328.
86. Firth and Noren (title under review) p.194.
87. Ibid. p.196
88. Ibid. p.206.
89. Gates (title under review) pp.318-19.
90. Ibid. p.563.
91. Gates (title under review) pp.535-8.
92. Fitzgerald notes that, in an Oct. 1988 speech, Gates claimed that "the dictatorship of the Communist Party remains untouched and untouchable." p.466.
93. Ibid. p.16
94. Ibid. p.17
95. Ibid. pp.475-6.
96. Ibid. p.16
97. Ibid. p.18.
98. Ibid.

Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President of the Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA).

waltuhler@aol.com