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    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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