Ideologues take control
The early Reagan years alarmed the Bulletin's editors,
along with millions of other people in the United States and Western Europe. Reagan, who
may have believed more ardently than any previous president in the ultimate abolition of
nuclear weapons, nevertheless expanded and accelerated a weapons buildup that Jimmy Carter
had begun. Reagan also seemed to enjoy tossing incendiary rhetoric into the
dry-as-straw East-West barn. In his first presidential news conference, he asserted
that Soviet leaders "reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie,
to cheat."
While the comment would not have raised an eyebrow if a historian had uttered it, it
seemed recklessly provocative coming from the commander-in-chief of the most powerful
nation on earth. Two years later, Reagan trumped his any-crime-any-time comment by
calling the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire" in a speech redolent of Old Testament
rhetoric about the final showdown between the forces of Good and Evil.
To manage domestic affairs, Reagan surrounded himself with moderates and pragmatists.
But in foreign affairs, many of his key advisers were anti-Soviet
ideologues--hardliners who believed that the United States should throw out the idea of
nuclear parity. Eugene Rostow, for instance, became director of the Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency. Previously, he had been co-chair (with Paul Nitze) of the
Committee on the Present Danger, a Carter-era organization dedicated to persuading the
nation that the Soviet Union was dangerously ahead of the United States in nuclear
weaponry.
In 1983, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), resurrecting the
long-dead fantasy of unfurling an anti-ballistic missile umbrella over the United States.
The president's March 23 speech came as a surprise to almost everyone, including
some of Reagan's closest advisers. The space-based SDI plan was quickly dubbed
"Star Wars," after the movie trilogy of that name.
Reagan's Star Wars plan, if developed and deployed, would surely violate the ABM Treaty,
critics said. It would lead to a resumption of an all-out nuclear arms race. And--as
a final irony--it almost surely would not work in the event of an all-out attack.
The Bulletin's first unsigned clock editorial appeared in the January 1984 issue:
"As the arms race--a sort of dialogue between weapons--has intensified, other forms
of discourse between the superpowers have all but ceased. There has been a virtual
suspension of meaningful contacts and serious discussions. Every channel of
communications has been constricted or shut down; every form of contact has been
attenuated or cut off. And arms control negotiations have been reduced to a species of
propaganda."
The minute hand was moved up to three minutes to midnight.
Breakthrough
Western Europe had been seen as a potential nuclear
battleground virtually since the beginning of Nuclear Time. In the 1950s, U.S.
bombers with nuclear weapons had been stationed in England and tactical nuclear weapons
had been deployed with NATO troops, all to discourage the Soviet Union from gobbling up
Bonn and Paris and London and Rome without a burp. In the 1950s, the West European
nations were generally comfortable basking in the shade of the U.S. nuclear
umbrella. The threat of nuclear retaliation, went the conventional wisdom, kept the
Russian bear in hibernation and away from the Fulda Gap.
When the Soviets caught up, in a rough sort of way in the 1960s, nuclear intimidation was
no longer a game of solitaire. If the NATO nations, led by the United States, used
nuclear weapons to fend off a Soviet invasion, the Soviets could now strike the United
States. Given that, would the United States actually come to the aid of Europe if it
meant possible national suicide?
This "coupling" debate, always surreal, had waxed and waned through the 1960s
and 1970s. Britain developed nuclear weapons in part to maintain its "special
relationship" with the United States. In contrast, Charles DeGaulle had so
little confidence in U.S. nuclear commitments that he insisted that France have its own
independent nuclear retaliatory force.
In the late 1970s, in an attempt to enhance deterrence and tighten the coupling between
between Europe and the United States, the West European members of NATO obtained a U.S.
promise to deploy 464 ground-launched nuclear-tipped cruise missiles on NATO soil, as well
as 108 nuclear-armed Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missiles.
In theory, the missiles would counterbalance a nasty-looking Soviet force of 243
triple-warhead SS-20 missiles aimed at NATO targets. They would also be bargaining
chips. Deployment--even the threat of deployment--would give the West additional leverage
in pushing for a treaty that would sharply constrain such weapons worldwide.
In the early 1980s, as deployment of the new missiles loomed and NATO and Soviet rhetoric
became more alarming, popular opposition in Western Europe became a force to be reckoned
with. In the fall of 1981, more than 250,000 people turned out for a protest in Bonn; the
following month, some 400,000 protested in Amsterdam.
Deploying Pershing missiles that could hit Soviet targets in five to 10 minutes was
utterly mad, said the protesters in Europe and in the United States. It would make
the Soviets even more edgy, ultimately leading to an unintentional but devastating nuclear
war. ABC-TV's two-part movie, The Day After, linked Pershing deployment to
a civilization-ending war. It played to huge audiences on two continents.
The fact that the United States and the Soviet Union eventually signed an
Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in December 1987--which eliminated all such
weapons (including Pershing IIs and SS-20s) rather than merely cutting their
numbers--struck many people, including the editors of the Bulletin, as near-miraculous.
But it wasn't quite that. Public opinion in Western Europe and the United States had
made it plain to the Reagan administration that people were fed up with having to live at
Ground Zero. Public pressure to do something about the nuclear arms race had become a
potent political movement.
As surprising as Reagan's agreement to the INF Treaty may have been, it was even more
startling to learn that the Soviet Union, long victimized by constipated and unimaginative
leadership, finally had a top man--Mikhail Gorbachev--with the wit and the imagination and
the courage to finally end the Cold War. The editorial in the January-February 1988
Bulletin said:
"For the first time the United States and the Soviet Union have agreed to dismantle
and ban a whole category of nuclear weapons. They have crafted provisions that
enable each to be confident that the other will comply with the treaty's terms. The
agreement they have fashioned can serve as a model for future accords. That
agreement would not have been possible without the leadership displayed by General
Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan. We applaud them."
The minute hand was moved back to six minutes to midnight.
The great melt
The Berlin Wall came down at the end of 1989,
symbolizing the end of the Cold War. Gorbachev had long realized that the Soviet Empire,
which had rested on a foundation of fear and intimidation for more than four decades,
could not be sustained. His goals were to shore up Soviet society, to repair the
collapsing Soviet economic machine, to introduce democratic reforms, to end Soviet
isolation from the Western world, and to bring new life--"new thinking"--to the
desperately outdated Communist Party.
Meanwhile, new thinking was far advanced in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany,
Romania. Men and women who had danced tepidly to Moscow's balalaika since the end of
World War II would do it no longer. Revolution was in the air from the North Sea to the
Black Sea. And Gorbachev was not about to send tanks into Eastern Europe, as his
predecessors had, to keep the East Bloc nations in line. The editorial in the April
1990 Bulletin remarked:
"Now, 44 years after Winston Churchill's 'Iron Curtain' speech, the myth of
monolithic communism had been shattered for all to see, the ideological conflict known as
the Cold War is over, and the risk of global nuclear war being ignited in Europe is
significantly diminished. . . ."
The minute hand was moved back to 10 minutes to midnight.
The coup that failed
The old era ended abruptly. Few had anticipated it; even
fewer seemed to have a clear notion of what would--or should--come next. From a
Washington perspective, change was good as long as it didn't get out of hand. The Reagan
and Bush administrations had come to see Gorbachev as an ally, as a friend, as a bulwark
against chaos in a troubled Soviet Union.
Back home in Russia, Gorbachev didn't have a prayer. He was said to be chiefly
responsible for every problem and disgrace tormenting the Soviet Union--ranging from the
nation's decline as a world power to its free-falling economy to an increase in public
drunkenness to the imminent dissolution of the Union itself.
By the the beginning of 1991, the general secretary was foundering, although official
Washington seemed not to know it. The end came in late August, when reactionaries
mounted a near-bloodless coup. The coup failed to install a government of revanchist
communists, but Gorbachev was finished, although he remained in office through the
remainder of the year.
Discredited and virtually deposed, yes. But Gorbachev had not been a failure.
Beginning in 1985, when he took over as general secretary, Gorbachev had forced democratic
reforms onto the moribund Soviet system. Although the reforms helped foment the
turmoil that led to his downfall, they had become so ingrained by August 1991 that a
successful right-wing coup was not possible. As unpopular as Gorbachev had become, the
rightist alternatives looked worse to most Russians.
Shortly before the coup attempt, Gorbachev had signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty,
the Reagan-era successor to SALT and the first nuclear arms agreement that mandated steep
rollbacks in so-called "strategic" weapons. And in September and October,
as the Soviet Union sputtered to an end, Presidents Bush and Gorbachev announced a series
of unilateral but parallel initiatives taking most intercontinental missiles and bombers
off hair-trigger alert, and withdrawing thousands of tactical nuclear weapons from forward
bases. The Bulletin editorial in the December 1991 issue said:
"The 40-year-long East-West nuclear arms race has ended. The world has clearly
entered a new post-Cold War era. The illusion that tens of thousands of nuclear
weapons are a guarantor of national security has been stripped away. In the context
of a disintegrating Soviet Union, large nuclear arsenals are even more clearly seen as a
liability, a yardstick of insecurity. . . .
"We believe that Presidents Bush and Gorbachev have guided their respective nations
to a historic intersection of mutual interests. Continuing boldness and imagination
are called for. Men and women throughout the world must vigorously challenge the bankrupt
paradigms of militarism if we are to achieve a new world order. The setting of the
Bulletin Clock reflects our optimism that we are entering a new era."
The minute hand of the clock was pushed back to 17 minutes to midnight.
Off the scale
The new man in Moscow was Boris Yeltsin, a self-styled
radical democrat. As president of the Russian Federation, he presided over the formal
demise of the Soviet Union. Russia, he said, would adhere to the letter and the
spirit of arms control agreements negotiated by the old Soviet Union.
To symbolize the dramatic nature of the changes marked by the the 1991 clock move, the
Bulletin's Board of Directors had moved the minute hand "off the scale," to 17
minutes to midnight. By Bulletin standards, that represented an unprecedented burst of
enthusiasm and optimism.
In May 1946, Albert Einstein, one of the Bulletin's more notable godfathers, looked toward
the future and said: "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our
modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."
The goal of the Bulletin--founded 50 years ago in December--has been to render that
wonderfully apt Einstein quote obsolete. The Bulletin has been--and still
is--committed to changing the way people think about war-and-peace issues. Its
"Clock of Doom," as Eugene Rabinowitch used to call it, has been a major part of
that effort.
The clock quickly became the symbol of the Bulletin. But it also came to symbolize
something far larger than a magazine published in Chicago, just blocks from where the
first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction took place. The clock became an
icon of the Nuclear Age, a centerpiece of pop culture, an image so clearly on target that
if the Bulletin had not invented it, a Nehru or a Cousins or a Kennedy would have come up
with it eventually.
The Bulletin Clock is not just the property of a magazine. It belongs to everyone who
cares about the future of humankind.
--Mike Moore is senior editor and former editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists.--
Copyright 1995 by the Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science
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