westwick space strike weapons

p e t e r j . w e s tw i c k

Space-Strike Weapons and the Soviet Responseto SDI*

The Reykjavik Summit between the United States and the Soviet Union inOctober 1986 presented one of the more dramatic tableaux of the Cold War.The meeting between President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary MikhailGorbachev, arranged on short notice to discuss arms control, developed into adizzying exchange of proposals for dramatic cuts in nuclear arsenals, but in theend produced no agreement. Both sides perceived that an extraordinary oppor-tunity to abolish nuclear weapons had appeared and then been lost; at the nalpress briengs the participants faces conveyed deep disappointment, in somecases verging on tears. The negotiations broke down over the denition of oneword, laboratory, which will not surprise anyone familiar with recent schol-arship in the history of science. The Soviets wanted to conne missile defense tothe laboratorythat is, to researchwhereas the United States wanted to testand eventually deploy its Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), Reagans proposedmissile defense shield. For questions such as thiswhere exactly does the labo-ratory end, and the outside world begin?the history of science meets diplo-matic history, and the story of SDI suggests the need for research at thisintersection.1

SDI has received few historical treatments. What literature exists providesthe view from the White House, focusing especially on President Reagan, and

*This research was supported by an Olin Fellowship in International Security Studies, YaleUniversity, and by the National Science Foundation. I thank John Gaddis, Charles Hill, DavidHolloway, Paul Kennedy, Daniel Kevles, John Krige, William Odom, Pavel Podvig, and EthanPollock for suggestions and conversations; Richard Garwin for access to his les; and theNational Academy of Sciences for permission to cite CISAC documents from Garwins papers.Abbreviations in the notes: Bethe: Hans Bethe Papers, Cornell University Archives; Garwin:Richard Garwin personal les, IBM Thomas J. Watson Laboratory, Yorktown, New York;RR/SDI: SDI Collection, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California; Teller:Edward Teller Papers, Hoover Institution Archives; Townes: Charles Townes Papers, Libraryof Congress. Citations follow the form: (source, box/folder).

1. Historians of science and technology have recently renewed attention to this subject.See, for example, John Krige and Kai-Henrik Barth, Global Power Knowledge: Science andTechnology in International Affairs, vol. 21, Osiris (Chicago, 2006). For an introduction to recentliterature on laboratories, see the special issue of Historical Studies in the Physical and BiologicalSciences 32, no. 1 (2001); for a different perspective, see Robert E. Kohler, Landscapes andLabscapes: Exploring the Lab-Field Border in Biology (Chicago, 2002).

Diplomatic History, Vol. 32, No. 5 (November 2008). 2008 The Society for Historians ofAmerican Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street,Malden, MA, 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.

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neglects the science and technology involved.2 For a program consisting of veryhigh technology, literally, this political focus distorts the picture. This essay aimsto integrate the science and technology with the diplomatic and political historyof SDI, for several reasons. First, because the idea did not just pop out ofReagans head, but rather derived from decades of R&D that persuaded manypeople, besides Reagan, of the possibilities.3 Second, because its evolutiondepended on technical developments that constrained the strategy and policy. Ifone looks closely at earlier changes in nuclear strategy, one sees the crucial butsubtle role of technology: for example, the shift from countercity to counter-force targeting derived as much from developments in inertial guidance,geodesy, and reconnaissance satellites as from new political and military con-siderations.4 Third, because SDI had extensive impact on American scienceand technology, with legacies in institutions, disciplines, and technologies thatshaped strategic options far beyond the program itself.

Including science and technology in the history of SDI also yields freshinsight into a basic historical question: why did the Soviets react so strongly toSDI? From right after Reagan announced the initiative in March 1983, theyharped on it at every opportunity. Their negotiating positions reected theirxation, as they persisted in linking arms control talks to constraints on SDI.They did so even though Soviet scientists quickly pointed out that SDI would bevery costly and difcult, and likely circumvented through countermeasures suchas spinning missiles or fast-burn boosters, launching decoy missiles and war-heads, or emphasizing cruise missiles.5 If SDI would not work, why not sit backand let Americans indulge their expensive folly?

Soviet leaders recognized the dangers of overreaction to SDI. AnatolyChernyaev, a Gorbachev adviser, in May 1985 complained to his diary thatweve shortsightedly become xated on the U.S.s military space researchprograms, making their termination a condition for success in Geneva. Theyvedriven us into a corner here. At a meeting on the nuclear moratorium in March

2. Francis FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the ColdWar (New York, 2000); Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons(New York, 2005). Among the many contemporary discussions of SDI, William Broad framedthe principal scientic view, although with the result of an exclusive focus on the Livermoreweapons lab. See William J. Broad, Star Warriors: A Penetrating Look into the Lives of the YoungScientists behind Our Space Age Weaponry (New York, 1985) and Tellers War: The Top-Secret Storybehind the Star Wars Deception (New York, 1992). Nigel Hey, The Star Wars Enigma: Behind theScenes of the Cold War Race for Missile Defense (Washington, DC, 2006), does discuss some of thetechnical program, more so for Soviet lasers.

3. Donald R. Baucom, The Origins of SDI, 19441983 (Lawrence, KS, 1992).4. Donald Mackenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance

(Cambridge, MA, 1990); John Cloud, Hidden in Plain Sight: Corona and the ClandestineGeography of the Cold War (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2000);William E. Burrows, Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security (New York, 1986); CurtisPeebles, The Corona Project: Americas First Spy Satellites (Annapolis, MD, 1997).

5. Committee of Soviet Scientists for Peace against the Nuclear Threat, The Large-ScaleAnti-Missile System and International Security (Moscow, 1986; originally published in Russian,1984); Evgeni Velikhov interview, 3 October 2006.

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1986, Gorbachev asked, Maybe we shouldnt be so afraid of SDI? Of course wecannot just disregard this dangerous program. But we should overcome ourobsession with it. But Gorbachev and his advisers seemed helpless to stop theirobsession. As Soviet scientist Roald Sagdeev put it: If Americans oversold SDI,we Russians overbought it.6 One might say the Soviet response was just pro-paganda aimed at Western audiences. But from a diplomatic point of view, theSoviet xation on SDI only increased American negotiating leverage and solidi-ed SDIs utility as vaporware.7

Contemporary analyses from scholars in the West suggested several reasonsfor the Soviet response.8 One explanation was found in strategic calculations: ifone side had an even partially effective missile defense, it might be encouragedto launch a rst strike, because the defense could mop up any retaliatory missilesthat survived the initial attack. Another reason was Soviet faith in Americantechnical ingenuity. From the atomic bomb to cruise missiles, the United Stateshad continued to produce new technologies, and SDI might just be anotherone.9 There was also a sense of betrayal: after rst viewing missile defense as amoral solution to the problem of nuclear weapons in the 1960s, the Soviets hadaccepted American arguments on deterrence and signed the Anti-BallisticMissile (ABM) Treaty of 1972, which limited missile defense systemsonly tosee the United States turn around a decade later and reject deterrence fordefense. The main explanation, however, for what one commentator called theparadoxical Soviet responsenamely, the intense criticism even while Sovietsrecognized ways to circumvent SDI defenseswas prestige: the Soviets hadlong felt that they had earned strategic parity in 1945, only to see it snatchedfrom their grasp by the atomic bomb. Now, having restored parity through greatnational sacrices, they found the United States again threatening to undermineit and hence threatening their international status as a superpower.10

6. Anatoly S. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, trans. Robert D. English andElizabeth Tucker (University Park, PA, 2000), 32, 56; Roald V. Sagdeev, The Making of a SovietScientist: My Adventures in Nuclear Fusion and Space from Stalin to Star Wars (New York, 1994),273; see also Anatoly Dobrynin, In Condence: Moscows Ambassador to Americas Six Cold WarPresidents (19621986) (New York, 1995), 591.

7. Vaporware is not hardware or software, but rather something that does not exist but canstill be bargained withwhat George Shultz referred to as giving them the sleeves off ourvest, quoted in Frances FitzGerald, The Poseurs of Missile Defense, New York Times, 4 June2000.

8. David Holloway, The Strategic Defense Initiative and the Soviet Union, Daedalus 114,no. 3 (1985): 25778; Stephen M. Meyer, Soviet Strategic Programmes and US SDI, Survival27, no. 6 (1985): 27492; Mary G. FitzGerald, The Soviet Military on SDI, Studies inComparative Communism 19, nos. 3/4 (1986): 17791; Benjamin S. Lambeth, The SovietUnion and the Strategic Defense Initiative: Preliminary Findings and Impressions, RANDCorporation report N-2482-AF ( June 1986); Bruce Parrott, The Soviet Union and BallisticMissile Defense (Boulder, CO, 1987); E. M. Holoboff, The Soviet Response to Star Wars: Past,Present, and Future (Toronto, 1987).

9. Meyer, Soviet Strategic Programmes; Sagdeev, Soviet Scientist, 213.10. Meyer, Soviet Strategic Programmes; Parrott, Soviet Union; Holoboff, Soviet Response;

David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (New Haven, CT, 1983), 104. Paul Nitze,

Space-Strike Weapons and the Soviet Response to SDI : 957

All of these factors no doubt contributed, but there is an additional explana-tion for the Soviet response. The Soviets did not like to call Reagans initiativeby its ofcial name and instead referred to space-strike weapons. The Sovietmilitary coined the term explicitly to include space-based devices that couldstrike targets on earth, in addition to missiles in ight.11 This was not justrhetorical propaganda. The Soviets were deeply suspicious of offensive aspects ofSDI, and not just in the usually recognized strategic sense of encouraging a rststrike with missiles. Rather, they feared a new generation of space-based beamweapons that could instantly strike targets on Soviet territory at any time.Although some Soviet scientists doubted this threat, other scientists andanalystswhose belief in space-strike weapons resonated with institutional andpolitical interestsmanaged to inuence Soviet foreign policy. Hence theSoviet objections at Reykjavik included the offensive threat of SDI.

The potential offensive uses of SDI technologies and their role in the Sovietresponse to SDI have been almost completely ignored on the American side, inboth contemporary public debate and historical accounts.12 Although manydocuments on the subject remain classied, the combination of published Sovietsources and policies, interviews with former Soviet scientists, and Americanarchival sources illuminates the role offensive SDI technologies played in theSoviet reaction. These sources also reveal that some American analysts at thetime did recognize both the offensive possibilities and Soviet fears. U.S. foreignpolicy in the end discounted offensive uses, but the decision turned on a dis-tinction between capability and intent that the Soviets refused to follow.

The issue matters in two ways. SDI was a crucial piece in the endgame of theCold War. Some commentators have credited it with ending the Cold War, byconfronting the Soviets with a new high-tech race they could not win; othersargue that SDI aggravated tensions, undermined Soviet reformers, and pro-longed the Cold War.13 This article shows that SDIs unsettling of the Soviets,

who helped negotiate the ABM Treaty, rejected the idea that the treaty represented a commoncommitment to deterrence, or anything beyond the treatys specic obligations; see Nitze inMichael Charlton, Star Wars or Peace-in-the-Skies (II), Encounter (March 1986): 1327.

11. Aleksandr G. Savelyev and Nikolay N. Detinov, The Big Five: Arms Control Decision-Making in the Soviet Union, trans. Dmitriy Trenin (Westport, CT, 1995), 85, 94n1. A search ofSoviet statements by American analysts saw the space-strike term rst come into use in June1984, in a proposal to begin talks on space weapons. Lynn Rusten to Wolfgang Panofsky, 12March 1986 (Garwin, CISAC 6).

12. One exception is Matthew von Bencke, International Identity Crises: ExplainingSoviet and Russian Strategic Defense Policies (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley,2004), 5458, although von Bencke focuses on antisatellite weapons. See also William E.Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven, CT, 1998), 170.

13. The triumphalist view appears most forcefully in Robert C. McFarlane, Special Trust(New York, 1994); Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administrations Secret Strategy thatHastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York, 1994); and Mira Duric, The Strategic DefenceInitiative: US Policy and the Soviet Union (Aldershot, England, 2003). The contrary view: GeorgiArbatov, The System: An Insiders Life in Soviet Politics (New York, 1992); FitzGerald, Way OutThere in the Blue; Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End theCold War (Ithaca, NY, 1999); and, more generally, Raymond L. Garthoff, The Great Transition


whichever way it led, had a dimension unanticipated and underappreciated bythe United States.14 It suggests further that this issue contributed to greatercontinuity in Soviet resistance to SDI than is currently recognized. More gen-erally, this story highlights the intersection of technology and foreign policy, andthe need for scientic experts and diplomats, as well as their historians, toremain alert to the different meanings that technologies can have in differentcontexts.

the threatSoviet space-strike fears derived from technological developments in beam

weapons. SDI was pursuing so-called directed-energy weapons, such as lasers,beams of neutral or charged particles, and high-power microwaves. The idea touse a particle beam to destroy an incoming nuclear warhead had been exploredin the United States since at least 1949, and SDI sought to capitalize on advancesin beam and laser power to destroy strategic missiles or warheads in ight.15 Theperceived offensive threat arose from the very high power and precise targetingthat SDI proposed to attain. A space-based, 25 megawatt laser, say, that coulddeliver a uence on the order of a kilojoule per square centimeter (1 kJ/cm2) onan ascending missilearound the low end of capabilities pursued for SDImight deliver similar energy to a target on the ground, far above the 40 J/cm2

ignition point of common combustibles and at a level certainly sufcient to killhuman beings.16

A particular class of directed-energy devices involved nuclear weapons. SDIcoincided with talk of a quantum jump in nuclear weapons design; designers atLos Alamos and Livermore, the two main U.S. weapons labs, at the time wereworking on so-called third-generation nuclear weapons, which promised a revo-lutionary leap in military power comparable to that of the rst generationtheatomic bomb itselfand the second generation, the hydrogen bomb. These newdesigns would take a nuclear blast and channel it in particular directions. Insteadof a spherical bomb dispersing its energy in all directions, a properly shapedexplosion could deliver one thousand times the energy per unit area on aparticular targetsomething like the difference between lighting a pile ofgunpowder and shooting a rie. A particular device could also maximize certainforms of energy, whether microwaves, gamma rays, or other types of radiation;

(Washington, DC, 1994), and Richard K. Herrmann and Richard Ned Lebow, Ending the ColdWar: Interpretations, Causation, and the Study of International Relations (New York, 2004).

14. On SDI unsettling the Russians, see John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Endof the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (Oxford, 1992), 131.

15. On early concepts, see Peter J. Westwick, The National Labs: Science in an AmericanSystem, 19471974 (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 14344.

16. Harvey Lynch, Technical Evaluation of Offensive Uses of SDI, working paper of theCenter for International Security and Arms Control, Stanford University, 1987 (Townes,accession 22,004, 10/NAS-CISAC). For comparison, 40 J/cm2 is about the same uence as thatdelivered by a 20 kiloton nuclear warhead at a distance of 2 kilometers.


the X-ray laser promoted by Edward Teller and Lowell Wood from Livermorewas just one example of such a nuclear-driven device. A Scientic American articlein 1987 by Ted Taylor, a former weapons designer, described this new genera-tion of weapons and sketched out one scenario where a microwave beam,generated by a 1 kiloton bomb in geosynchronous orbit, could strike an areabigger than Moscow with enough radiation to fry electronics.17

These new nuclear designs threatened to open a new stage in the nucleararms race and helped motivate the Soviet push for a nuclear test moratorium.18

Even if the Soviets accepted that ballistic missile defense enhanced stability,which they did not, they could not tolerate a revolutionary new class of offensiveweapons in the American arsenal. The effects of all these beam weapons traveledat or close to the speed of light. To Soviet leaders with an ingrained fear ofsurprise attack, instilled in June 1941 and subsequently reinforced by nuclearbombs and missiles, the prospect of a literal bolt from the blue with a warningtime of only milliseconds would not be a welcome prospect.19 Furthermore,beam weapons did not t into existing theories of nuclear deterrence. Whereasexisting nuclear weapons were blunt instruments, directed-energy weapons weresurgical. It might be hard to justify launching nuclear weapons at New Yorkbecause Moscow got hit by microwaves, and the Soviet strategic deterrent couldbe rendered worthless.

the soviet responseSoviet scientists understood the possibilities. They had pursued military laser

systems since the 1960s, including a substantial program called Terra, on high-power lasers for missile defense, under Nikolai Basov, who had shared the NobelPrize for conceiving the laser.20 In 1976 the Soviets began a broader researchprogram on directed-energy and space-based weapons known as Fon; theprogram accelerated after 1983 and included possible space-strike devices.21

17. Theodore B. Taylor, Third-Generation Nuclear Weapons, Scientic American (April1987): 3039. See also Paul S. Brown, Requirements for the Development of AdvancedNuclear Weapon Concepts, Livermore report UCRL-JC-103507 (15 January 1990), whonotes that as with any weapon, NDEWs [nuclear directed-energy weapons] could be used inan offensive manner as well as a defensive one. The White House Science Council receivedbriengs on several third-generation designs the summer before Reagans SDI speech: WhiteHouse Science Council, Military Technology Panel (Frieman panel), agenda 23 June 1982(Townes, accession 22,004, 16/OSTP).

18. CISAC joint meeting with Soviets, minutes, 29 September1 October 1986 (Townes,accession 22,004, 10/NAS-CISAC); Evgeni Velikhov, Science and Scientists for a Nuclear-Weapon-Free World, Physics Today (November 1989): 3236.

19. On Soviet fears of surprise attack, see Holloway, Soviet Union and the Arms Race, 1012.20. P. V. Zarubin, Academician Basov, High-Power Lasers and the Antimissile Defense

Problem, Kvantovaya Elektronika [Quantum Electronics] 32, no. 12 (2002): 104864.21. D. Tikhanov, Interview with Col. Gen. Yuriy Votintsev, Vecherniy Almata, 23 June

1993, in JPRS-UMA-93-035, 22 September 1993, 89; Col. Gen. Yuriy Votintsev, UnknownTroops of an Extinct Superpower, Voyenno-Istoricheskiy Zhurnal 9 (1993): 2638, and 11 (1993):1227; Steven J. Zaloga, Red Star Wars, Janes Intelligence Review 9, no. 5 (1997); PavelPodvig, ed., Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 41820; Hey, The Star


They also had a strong tradition in plasma physics and were very advanced inpulsed-power researchthat is, the generation of very strong transient electro-magnetic elds.22 This effort included high-power microwave weapons, startingin the early 1950s and expanding in the mid-1970s, and a plasma weapon formissile defense.23 American commentators also suspected the Soviets were pur-suing nuclear-driven microwave beams, since the concept of a bomb-drivencurrent generator was rst proposed by Andrei Sakharov in 1966.24 Finally, theChelyabinsk nuclear weapons lab was pursuing the X-ray laser, apparently afterleaks to the American press about Livermores early X-ray laser tests in 1981,and successfully tested it in an underground nuclear explosion in 1987.25

The results of this research persuaded some Soviet scientists that the threatfrom SDI was overstated. By 1978, Basov and the Terra project had concludedthat lasers would not work for missile defense, and most Soviet laser expertssimilarly dismissed the space-strike possibility.26 Nuclear-weapons scientists,including leading designers such as Lev Artsimovich and Yuli Khariton, hadlikewise long provided a doubtful view of lasers and other missile defensetechnologies. Scientists in the relevant elds were well placed to advise Sovietleaders on the strategic prospects: plasma physicist Evgeni Velikhov was vicepresident of the Academy of Sciences and a top scientic adviser to Gorbachev;Sagdeev, a plasma physicist who now ran the main space science institute, wasanother key arms control adviser. Velikhov had chaired a special study for theSoviet military evaluating the feasibility of SDI technologies immediately afterReagans speech, which produced a skeptical report.27

Wars Enigma, 4051. The Soviets also used lasers for space tracking; in October 1984, at theorder of Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, a Terra laser was beamed on the U.S. space shuttleChallenger in orbit, causing malfunctions and eliciting a formal U.S. protest.

22. On plasma physics, see Loren R. Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A ShortHistory (Cambridge, England, 1993), 209; see also David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (NewHaven, CT, 1988), 35862.

23. Simon Kassel, Soviet Development of Gyrotrons, RAND Corporation reportR-3377-ARPA, May 1986; Department of Defense, Soviet Military Power 1983, quoted in JeffHecht, Beam Weapons (New York, 1984), 172; A. Karpenko, ABM and Space Defense, NevskyBastion 4 (1999): 247; Zarubin interview; William T. Lee, The ABM Treaty Charade: A Study inElite Illusion and Delusion (Washington, DC, 1997), 86. The plasma weapon used microwaves toionize an area of the atmosphere ahead of a missiles trajectory and was pursued for many yearsby academician A. Avramenko; after 1991, he proposed that Russia and the United Statescollaborate on what he now called Project Doverie, or Trust, with testing to take place at theU.S. missile defense complex at Kwajalein.

24. Dan Fenstermacher, Arms Race: The Next Generation, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists(March 1991): 2933; Peter Laurie, Exploding the Beam Weapon Myth, New Scientist (26April 1979): 24850.

25. E. N. Avrorin et al., Review of Theoretical Works on X-Ray Laser Research Per-formed at RFNC-VNIITF, Laser and Particle Beams 15, no. 1 (1997): 315. The leaks appearedin Aviation Week, 23 February 1981.

26. Zarubin, Academician Basov, and Zarubin interview, 5 October 2006.27. Evgeni Velikhov interview, 3 October 2006; Sagdeev interview; Arbatov interview. See

also the criticism of the absurd idea of UHF weapons by ABM designer Grigoriy Kisunko:ABM Designer Sees Squandering of Resources, Sovetskaya Rossiya, 5 August 1990, FBIS-SOV-90-151.


Such advice, however, clashed with the institutional interests of the designbureaus and ministries building these systems and with other internal politicalforces. Some laser advocates were also well placed: a main laser lab, calledAstrozika, was led by Nikolai Ustinov, whose father Dmitri was defense min-ister until his death at the end of 1984, at which point his son lost his job. TheSoviet missile and space agency, the Ministry of General Machine Building(MOM), under Oleg Baklanov, in particular was pushing for a vigorous Sovietspace-based program to match the American initiative. Playing up the offensivepotential of SDI technology served Baklanovs bureaucratic interests. At thistime one of MOMs main design bureaus, Energia, was proposing space battlestations bristling with either kinetic-energy or directed-energy weapons, andone such station was designed to strike targets on the ground. The ministryscentral analysis institute, a think tank known by the abbreviation TsNIIMash,was a prime source of what one Soviet laser specialistand skepticcalled thehotheads who bought into offensive speculations about SDI. One such analyst,Yuri Ablekov, spun persuasive scenarios of beam-weapon attack based onresearch in the Arzamas and Chelyabinsk weapons labs on nuclear-pumpedlasersnot the X-ray laser, but longer-wavelength devices that used nuclearbombs or reactors to optically pump the lasing material, and whose laser radia-tion could penetrate the atmosphere.28

These speculations found a receptive audience in certain parts of the Sovietmilitary, whose strategic doctrine had historically stressed a fundamental linkbetween offensive and defensive systems.29 In the late 1970s the Soviet GeneralStaff began writing about a military-technical revolution, in which informa-tion technology and precision weapons would allow near-instantaneous engage-ment at great distances. The revolution would comprise two stages, with thesecond including directed-energy weapons, and the result threatened to renderSoviet doctrine obsolete. The main proponent of this view, Nikolai Ogarkov,was chief of the General Staff until late 1984; although Ogarkov himself doesnot seem to have discussed space-strike weapons directly, his writings provideda theoretical background.30 As one Soviet general put it at a disarmament

28. Peter Zarubin interview, 5 October 2006; Karpenko, ABM and Space Defense;Sagdeev interview; Projects of Combat Space Complexes, excerpt from Rocket-Cosmnautics Corporation Energia, trans. Maxim Taraskenko (available from http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/program/soviet), accessed 12 August 2008. See also V. N. Mikhaylov,Why Should the Countrys Nuclear Test Sites Remain Silent? Pravda, 24 October 1990,reprinted in Mikhaylov, I Am a Hawk (Durham, England, 1996), 8091, on 84. Mikhaylov, aformer Arzamas physicist who would soon become minister of atomic energy for Russia,warned against the development of the third generation of nuclear weapons or the so calleddirected energy weapons. The evil jinn, as he called them, would be capable of killingstrategic targets of an adversary both in outer space and on earth.

29. Holoboff, Soviet Response, 5; Meyer, Soviet Strategic Programmes, 285; Parrott, SovietUnion, 39; FitzGerald, Soviet Military on SDI, 182.

30. Dale R. Herspring, Nikolay Ogarkov and the Scientic-Technical Revolution inSoviet Military Affairs, Comparative Strategy 6, no. 1 (1987): 2959; Andrew Krepinevich,The Military-Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment, Ofce of Net Assessment


conference in 1986, with space based weapons an attack could come in nano-seconds. Consequently, the Soviet General Staff would have no time to make keydecisions.31

Ogarkovs successor as chief of staff, Sergei Akhromeev, although more of askeptic on SDI, likewise sounded the theme of space weapons striking targets onearth.32 Another general on the staff, Nikolai Chervov, was apparently one of themain believers. Chervov propagated his suspicion as head of the General Staff sDepartment of Negotiations and Law, which helped prepare the nal form ofarms control documents.33 The scare campaign about space-strike weaponsalso inuenced the Foreign Ministry, at least until 1985, while Andrei Gromykopresided as foreign minister. Gromyko generally followed the positions of theDefense Ministry and KGB, both of which believed the SDI threat, and herepeatedly denounced SDI as mere camouage for offensive technologies.34

The upshot of all this activity was that Soviet foreign policy perceived adirect offensive threat from SDI. Their arms negotiators have portrayed themain Soviet fear of SDI not as the strategic encouragement of an ICBM rststrike, but rather as the basic possibility of weapons in space, including space-to-earth weapons.35 These fears appeared right from the start in 1983, whenthe Soviets proposed to the United Nations a treaty against the use of forcein outer space and from space against the Earth.36 In 1985 the Soviet delega-tion to the Nuclear and Space Talks in Geneva had three main instructions:ban antisatellite weapons, ban space-based missile defense, and ban weaponsdesigned for hitting targets in the atmosphere and on earth from space. Bythat time a wide range of Soviet political leaders, scientists, generals, and thepopular press had sounded off against the direct space-to-earth threat.37

( July 1992), available from http://www.csbaonline.org; Eliot A. Cohen, A Revolution inWarfare, Foreign Affairs 75, no. 2 (1996): 3754.

31. Maj. Gen. G. V. Batenin at UN disarmament meeting at Erice, Italy, 2526 April 1986,quoted in memo (no author; probably Lowell Wood) to Teller, 5 May 1986 (Teller, 139/SDI[Soviet comment]).

32. In 1985, Akhromeev declared that SDI systems are in fact strike weapons for strikesagainst targets that belong to the probable opponent in all spheres, quoted in FitzGerald,Soviet Military on SDI, 18081.

33. Sagdeev interview, 9 March 2006; Alexei Arbatov interview, 5 October 2006. On therole of Chervovs department, see Savelyev and Detinov, The Big Five, 60, 185. Chervovconsistently sounded the theme in public of space-based weapons hitting targets on land,at sea, in the air, and in space: see, for example, Chervov interview on Moscow Studio 9television, 29 June 1985 ( JPRS-TAC-85-109), 3; interview in Otechestven Front, 4 October1985 ( JPRS-TAC-85-042), 2; and interview on Moscow television, 3 February 1986 (ArmsControl Reporter, Outer Space II, chronology 1986).

34. Alexei Arbatov interview; on Gromykos following the Defense Ministry and KGB, seeAlexander Bessmertnykh in William C. Wohlforth, ed., Witnesses to the End of the Cold War(Baltimore, 1996), 128.

35. Savelyev and Detinov, The Big Five, 16465.36. Proposed Treaty on the Prohibition of the Use of Force in Outer Space and from

Space against the Earth, 19 August 1983.37. Savelyev and Detinov, The Big Five, 17071. For a chronology of Soviet statements, see

Lynn Rusten to Panofsky, 12 March 1986 (Townes, accession 22,004, 10/NAS-CISAC).


These statements were not just for public effect: a classied KGB brief onspace weapons included the possibility that SDI was a cover for attackingICBM launchers from space and that the space shuttle likewise was designedto attack ground targets.38

More evidence for these fears came from reports on SDI by the Committeeof Soviet Scientists for Peace against the Nuclear Threat, a joint study groupdrawn from foreign-policy, space, and nuclear institutes and chaired by spacescientist Sagdeev and defense analyst Andrei Kokoshin. An early draft reportfrom 1983 noted that a space-based system

could be designed not only for destroying strategic missiles of the other sideafter their launch, but also as a direct weapon of attack, moreover preciselyfor dealing a rst strike. This derives from the fact that a space BMD [ballisticmissile defense] system sufciently accurate and powerful enough to destroystrategic offensive weapons in ight could also be employed for their destruc-tion on the ground, for example, aircraft on airelds, ground-launched cruisemissiles, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in their launch positions.Moreover, . . . space BMD systems could also destroy other land and seatargets such as C3 [command and control] centers and important economictargets.

The published report the next year devoted one of its six chapters to space-based weapons knocking out targets on the ground; it noted in particular thenearly instantaneous transmission of beam weapons, which are especiallyeffective in a rst strike for blinding the enemys command centers and dis-rupting his means of communication.39 These reports, which were dismissedby some on the U.S. side at the time as Soviet propaganda, from the Sovietside were claimed to be unusually frank and sparked charges that theyrevealed state secrets.40

38. N. P. Gribin, American Policy on the Militarisation of Space, 13 February 1985, inInstructions from the Centre: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations 19751985, ed. Christo-pher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky (London, 1991), 10715. Military use of the space shuttleto bypass missile-launch warning systems, by deploying nuclear weapons from orbit or fromshallow dives into the atmosphere, was a persistent Soviet concern: see Gen. Vladimir Dvorkininterview, 4 October 2006; Roald Sagdeev interview, 9 March 2006. Some Americans held thesame fear about Soviet shuttle designs: see James E. Oberg, The Elusive Soviet Space Plane,Omni, September 1983, 12429, 143.

39. Committee of Soviet Scientists for Peace against the Nuclear Threat, Prospects forthe Creation of a U.S. Space Ballistic Missile Defence System and the Likely Impact on theWorld Military Political Situation, 1983 (Bethe, 33/30), and The Large-Scale Anti-MissileSystem and International Security, 2428.

40. Andrei A. Kokoshin, Soviet Strategic Thought, 191791 (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 183.(Kokoshin was coauthor of the reports, and hence had an interest in not admitting to propa-gandizing.) On American views of the reports as propaganda, see CIA white paper, SovietDirected Energy WeaponsPerspectives on Strategic Defense, March 1985 (Digital NationalSecurity Archive), and U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, The Soviet PropagandaCampaign against the US Strategic Defense Initiative, 1986 (Teller, 139/SDI [Sovietcomment]).


Space-strike fears percolated through the military and defense industry to thetop of the Soviet system. Gorbachev spelled them out in a letter to Reagan inJune 198541:

There is also another aspect of the program of strategic defense, whichremains as if in a shadow for the broad public. But not for responsible leadersand military experts. They talk in Washington about the development of alarge-scale ABM system, but in fact a new strategic offensive weapon is beingdeveloped to be deployed in space. And it is a weapon no less dangerous byits capabilities than nuclear weapons. What difference does it make, what willbe used in a rst disarming strikeballistic missiles or lasers. If there is adifference, it is that it will be possible to carry out the rst strike by the newsystems practically instantly.

A year later, at Reykjavik, Gorbachevs objections to SDI cited the potentialoffensive use of SDI technologies.

american perspectives: the latter-martinelli reportAs Gorbachevs letter suggested, U.S. policymakers seemed not to recognize

the connection between SDI and new offensive weapons. Third-generationdesigns certainly did not match Reagans goal of abolishing nuclear weapons.42

There were good technical reasons as well for neglecting space-to-earthweapons, in particular the fact that the earths atmosphere blocks many wave-lengths of radiation, including X-rays and much of the infrared spectrum. Therewere also the severe practical difculties of getting these large devices, somewith extensive fuel supplies and very complex optics, into orbit; providingenough such satellites to ensure ground coverage; and getting the beamsthrough the atmosphere and clouds down to the ground.

Nevertheless, some American reports perceived the possibilities, evenbefore Reagans speech in March 1983 announcing his plan for strategicdefense. A letter from Edward Teller to Reagan in 1982, which helped sparkReagans interest in missile defense, included the potential of space-basedbeam weapons to strike ground targets. As Teller put it, Used against possiblyvery large areas of enemy territory from a region of space overhead, theeffects . . . are expected to quite comprehensively devastate both civilian andmilitary equipment.43 The same year a group of scientists at ArgonneNational Laboratory described plans for third-generation weapons and added,Each of these devices in the new generation is being promoted as a defensiveweapon, although all have the potential to support rst-strike, offensive

41. Gorbachev to Reagan (unofcial translation), 10 June 1985 (RR/SDI, 1/1985).42. The Department of Energy seems to have appreciated the appearances of taking the

arms race to a new level, by seeking to classify the term third-generation nuclear weaponitself: see Hecht, Beam Weapons, 132.

43. Teller to Reagan, 23 July 1982 (RR/SDI, 1/1982).


action.44 An interagency intelligence assessment of September 1983 likewisenoted that high energy lasers in orbit conceivably could . . . be used forattacking unhardened targets on Earth.45 In early 1985 the issue trickled intothe pages of the popular press, with speculation about space-based lasersengaging in instantaneous, selective assassination or starting res that would,in the words of one SDI proponent, take an industrialized country back to an18th-century level in 30 minutes.46

The fullest examination of offensive aspects appeared in 1985, in a report bytwo analysts, Albert Latter and Ernest Martinelli, at RDA Logicon. The reportwas rmly grounded in the strategic establishment: RDA was a southern Cali-fornia think tank, a spinoff from the RAND Corporations physics department,and Latter was a long-time defense analyst who had coauthored a book withTeller downplaying the dangers of radioactivity amid the test-ban debate andhad helped invent the concept of MIRVs (multiple independently targetablereentry vehicles).47 Latter and Martinelli argued that beam weapons could notachieve Reagans goal of replacing offense with defense. This surprising pos-sibility, as they put it, results from the fact that the lasers can be employed ina manner not contemplated by the SDI. Specically, they can be targeted againstthe same entities they were designed to protect: the cities. Latter and Martinelliproceeded to calculate the thermal energy delivered to a particular area on theground by a certain number of satellite-based lasers, taking into account suchfactors as beam diffraction and atmospheric turbulence. Potential ignitionpoints for urban res included the clothing of individual human beings. Theyworked out the numbers and concluded: Would the cities burn to the ground?We think the answer is almost certainly yes. A Soviet laser system powerfulenough for missile defense can incinerate our cities without warning on a timescale of minutes per city; minutes to hours for the whole country. To deter suchan attack, the U.S. could only threaten to retaliate. Far from shifting the basisfor national security from offense to defense, SDI might only replace nucleardeterrence with beam-weapon deterrence.48

44. Concerned Argonne Scientists, Statement on National-Security Impact of IncreasedNuclear-Weapons Testing, 28 November 1982 (Bethe, 17/43).

45. Interagency Intelligence Assessment, Possible Soviet Response to the US StrategicDefense Initiative, 12 September 1983, NIC M83-10017 (available from http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars).

46. Philip M. Boffey, Dark Side of Star Wars: System Could Also Attack, New YorkTimes, 7March 1985. In this article, Teller dismissed the offensive potential of SDI systems. Seealso Brad Knickerbocker, Star Wars Defense May Lead to Space-Based Offense, ChristianScience Monitor, 23 January 1985.

47. Albert Latter and Edward Teller, Our Nuclear Future (New York, 1958); Edward Teller,Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 44345;Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford, CA, 1983), 36162.

48. Albert A. Latter and Ernest A. Martinelli, SDI: Defense or Retaliation? RDALogicon report, 28 May 1985 (Bethe, 20/300).


This was not a message the Reagan administration wanted to hear. Thereport was unclassied and apparently circulated within the strategic commu-nity, but it generated no public response. In early 1986 an Air Force colonelnoted that in the national debate over SDI all consideration has focused ondefensive applications, yet the technology which permits SDI is equallycapable of supporting offensive weapons.49 The Latter-Martinelli report didprovoke a rebuttal from the Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA), which declared,with qualiers, that the threat to the ground from space-based lasers is prob-ably greatly overestimated.50 Latter and Martinelli stood their ground, backedup by an analysis by Stanford physicist Harvey Lynch that found the DNAstudy seriously awed.51 A subsequent review by the Congressional ResearchService cast some doubt on the potential for laser beams to hit earth fromspace with lethal energy, but concluded that most or all of the weapon con-cepts that do prove feasible could in principle be used either offensively ordefensively.52

Other hawk-eyed observers in the United States perceived the importance ofthe new weapons. The Executive Intelligence Review, a journal founded by LyndonLaRouche, Jr., dedicated an entire issue in 1988 to the fear that the Soviets werepressing ahead with revolutionary electromagnetic weapons while the UnitedStates sat idle. These commentators thus outanked the Reagan administrationon the right; while some in the Reagan administration would later argue that theUnited States at the time was pushing the Soviets over the economic brink in ahigh-tech arms race centered on SDI, the issues editor, amid talk of Sovietdirected-energy advances, bemoaned the contracting economic power of theUnited States, signied by the slide into the Second Great Depression followingthe nancial crash of Oct. 19, 1987that is, it was the United States, not the

49. Lt. Col. James R. Beale, Morality to Strategy: Perspectives on Offensive Weapons inSpace (Air War College, Maxwell AFB, March 1986), iii.

50. Marvin Atkins to Albert Latter, 7 August 1985, with attached Analysis of SDI:Defense or Retaliation? (Garwin, CISAC 6).

51. Latter and Martinelli, Comments on DNA Critique of the RDA Report SDIDefense or Retaliation? 1985 (Garwin, CISAC 6), and H. L. Lynch to le, 5 March 1986,attached to W. K. H. Panofsky to R. Garwin, R. Muller, and C. Townes, 11 March 1986(Garwin, CISAC 6). Lynch expanded his short critique into a detailed quantitative analysis ofpossible offensive uses against air and ground targets: H. L. Lynch, Technical Evaluation ofOffensive Uses of SDI, working paper of the Center for International Security and ArmsControl, Stanford University, 1987 (Townes, accession 22,004, 10/NAS-CISAC). Lynch alsonoted several strategic implications of offensive uses, such as the fact that exhausting laser fuelon ground targets would leave the attacker open to a nuclear missile barrage.

52. Study Finds that SDI Could Be Offensive Threat to Soviets, Aviation Week and SpaceTechnology (30 November 1987): 23. Cf. Gregory H. Canavan, Military Uses of Space, LosAlamos report LA-11344-MS, August 1988, which addressed but discounted the offensivethreat. Yet another study by an Argonne scientist extended the Latter-Martinelli scenario bysuggesting that laser-sparked res could have disastrous climatic effects akin to nuclear winter.Caroline L. Herzenberg, Nuclear Winter and Strategic Defense Initiative, Physics and Society15, no. 1 (1986): 25.


Soviet Union, that was losing the economic as well as the high-tech arms race in1988.53

This view highlights a contradiction in American justications for SDI, onenoted by Gorbachev in 1985.54 On the one hand, SDI advocates warned that theSoviets were winning the arms race in directed-energy research; on the other,they portrayed SDI as a new high-tech competition that the backward Sovietscould not win. Some CIA and Defense Department reports embraced bothviews, stressing that the Soviets are now on a par with, or lead, the UnitedStates in most of the directed energy weapons technologies while also citing theeconomic pressures SDI might produce.55 If SDI was intended for high-techeconomic competition, however, why did Reagan offer to share SDI technologywith the Soviets?

american policy: the cisac reportThe offensive potential of space-based weapons consistently appeared as a

revelation in these reports, many of which noted the apparent absence of theissue from the policy debate. But the combination of American analyses andpersistent Soviet statements had in fact nally caught the attention of U.S.policymakers. Gorbachevs preoccupation with space-strike weapons at theGeneva summit in November 1985 made an impression on Secretary of StateGeorge Shultz and, apparently, Reagan, who sent a note to Gorbachev afterthe summit mentioning the Soviet concern that SDI could be a cover fordeveloping and placing offensive weapons in space. Shultz had received aletter from former Secretary of State Dean Rusk before the summit pointingout the Soviet fears, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle hadsimilarly advised that the State Department address the issue. Arms controladviser Paul Nitze observed to Shultz that the Soviets concern is not entirelymisplaced, citing as an example U.S. studies of a system of high-density metalrods about the size of telephone poles, the so-called rods from god, whichmight be placed in orbit and then directedwith essentially no warning, andwith devastating kinetic energyagainst Soviet missile silos. Nitze concluded,We need to get at it.56

53. Michael Liebig, ed., Electromagnetic-Effect Weapons: The Technology and Strategic Impli-cations, Executive Intelligence Review special report (Wiesbaden, 1988); Liebig quote fromforeword, on 7.

54. An Interview with Gorbachev, Time, 9 September 1985, 22.55. Interagency Intelligence Assessment (quote), Possible Soviet Response to the US

Strategic Defense Initiative, 12 September 1983, NIC M83-10017 (http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars); CIA white paper, Soviet Directed Energy WeaponsPerspectives on StrategicDefense, March 1985, National Security Archives. An analyst who helped draft the 1983report has since written that the passage on economic pressures was inserted as boilerplate andshould have been removed, because none of the economic analysts would back it up. See AllenThomson, Drafting History, comments available from http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars.

56. Reagan to Gorbachev, 28 November 1985 (RR/SDI, 1/1985); George P. Shultz,Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York, 1993), 689. On Reagans


To do so, however, the State Department needed to grasp the technicalpossibilities. It was stymied in part by secrecy, as the Departments of Defenseand Energy kept it in the dark about classied nuclear and space programs. (Inone infamous brieng, the SDI director questioned whether Shultz had suf-cient clearance to hear about certain programs.)57 Also unlike the Departmentsof Defense and Energy, the State Department did not maintain its own networkof laboratories or scientic advisory committees, and thus lacked an in-housesource of expert analysis. It now sought to acquire such expertise. The U.S.National Academy of Sciences in 1979 had created a standing Committee onInternational Security and Arms Control (CISAC), which in 1981 beganmeeting with a counterpart group from the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Themeetings provided a way to maintain contact with Soviet scientists when tenserelations were otherwise limiting contacts between the two countries.58 In late1985 the State Department turned to CISAC as a way to get technical adviceinto the formulation of foreign policy. A few weeks after the Geneva summit itarranged a meeting between senior American arms control negotiators andCISAC, spurred by the fact that four members of the Soviet Academy grouphad been sitting at Gorbachevs knee during the summit meetings. AlthoughNitze had consulted individual scientists on his own, the National Academyscientists for their part perceived that the Academy has had no signicant inputto [the] State Department in national security, and the two sides agreed thatCISAC would begin providing regular briengs to the State Department.59

James Timbie from the State Department and Wolfgang Panofsky fromCISAC soon decided on a list of brieng topics. At the top of the list was theoffensive threat of SDI.60 CISAC scientists duly briefed State Department rep-resentatives on 24 March 1986. Most of the analysis was undertaken by RichardMuller, a young Berkeley physicist who had contributed to the development ofadaptive optics, and Charles Townes, one of the inventors of the laser and along-time defense adviser, with substantial input from Richard Garwin, anothertop defense science adviser. Their brieng ran through the various offensivethreats. They judged lasers an inefcient way to start res, contra the Latter-Martinelli scenario, and also ineffective against missile silos, and they cited the

impression from Geneva, see also Jack Matlock comments in Wohlforth, ed., 2122. Sovietscientists and military analysts had apparently not learned about the rods from god proposal:Evgeni Velikhov interview, 3October 2006; Gen. Vladimir Dvorkin interview, 4October 2006.

57. This incident is described in Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 49192; Wohlforth, Wit-nesses, 57; Dobrynin, In Condence, 561.

58. Marvin Goldberger to Academicians M. A. Markov and E. M. Primakov, 23 August1980, and Thomas Malone to Charles Townes, 2 December 1980 (Townes, accession 22,004,10/NAS-Basov/Prokhorov).

59. W. K. H. Panofsky to les, 20December 1985, and notes on Academy council brieng,23 February 1986 (Garwin, CISAC 6). A small initial meeting on 18 September 1985 wasfollowed by a larger meeting on 19 December.

60. CISAC meeting, summary minutes, 20 January 1986, and Timbie to Panofsky, 10February 1986 (Garwin, CISAC 6).


various obstacles to lasers, including atmospheric shielding effects, cloud cover,and civil defense measures. More likely threats were to soft targets such asaircraft (either in ight or on the ground) or submarines in port. Perhaps themost potent use was for lasers to cause blindness over very large swaths ofterritory, either in civilians or soldiers; this discussion troubled two referees ofthe pre-circulated brieng, one of whom noted that this emotional issue couldprovoke political repercussions if made public.61 The report did note the speedof a laser attack, and also briey described third-generation nuclear weapons andthe possibility of dropping nuclear bombs from orbit with almost no warning.62

The briengs general conclusion: space-strike weapons were technicallyfeasible, but were much less effective strategically than nuclear weapons. Theirstrategic interest rested only in providing a way to strike additional soft targetsamid a nuclear war, or to expand military options in a non-nuclear war. Hence,although Shultz had proposed that the United States negotiate restrictions onspace-strike weapons while preserving the basic SDI program, the CISACphysicists saw no reason to pursue such a distinction: U.S. representatives couldcredibly maintain that the SDI does not contain program emphasis nor intentfor offensive uses.63

The CISAC study thus produced no change in policy, and on the contraryperhaps only reinforced the American position. Six months after the CISACbrieng, at Reykjavik, Gorbachev stressed the offensive threat of SDI technolo-gies. Reagan noted Gorbachevs concern that space-based weapons could beused to destroy targets on the ground, but his response followed the lineproposed by CISAC and seconded by pre-summit policy papers: he assuredGorbachev that this is not the purpose of SDI. . . . There are no weapons thatare more reliable, more effective and faster than ballistic missiles.64

The United States, in short, recognized that SDI technologies could in factbe used offensively, but saw little value in it. This position, however, assumedthat the Soviets would reach the same conclusion. The CISAC physicists hadstressed the importance of making clear the difference between what is tech-nically feasible and what makes sense, and the conclusion of their briengacknowledged that their recommended position raises intent vs. capability

61. Reviewers comments attached to Porter Coggeshall to Lynn Rusten, 17 March 1986(Garwin, CISAC 6).

62. Offensive Uses of SDI Components and Systems, CISAC brieng to State Depart-ment, revised draft 4 April 1986 (Garwin, CISAC 6; also in Townes, accession 22,004, 11/NAS-CISAC). The CISAC brieng also discussed kinetic-energy weapons; the briefers were nodoubt aware of rods from god, but they focused only on devices studied under SDI, whichwere generally too small to get through the atmosphere.

63. Offensive Uses of SDI Components; Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 689.64. Reagan response at Reykjavik afternoon session (from Russian transcript), 11 October

1986, and The Presidents Trip to Reykjavik, issues checklist for Secretary of State Shultz,7 October 1986 (Digital National Security Archive, available from http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB203).


issues.65 But what makes no sense in one context may appear sensible inanother, and at least some Soviet observers chose to judge American capabilityas equivalent to intent. Gorbachev made the point in his June 1985 letter toReagan: In matters affecting the heart of national security, neither side can orwill rely on assurances of good intentions. Any weapon system is evaluated by itscapabilities, but not by public statements regarding its mission. Later that year,Reagans letter to Gorbachev after Geneva recognized that these are matterswhich cannot be taken on faith, but continued: However, the truth is that theUnited States has no intention of using its strategic defense program to gain anyadvantage.66 The Soviet position at Reykjavik shows that they indeed refused totake American declarations on faith.

the sakharov gambitFour months after Reykjavik, the Soviets apparently changed their minds

about SDI. That, at least, is the conclusion of Frances FitzGerald as well asMatthew Evangelista, each of whom has noted that Gorbachev in early 1987decided to decouple SDI from talks on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces(INF) after insisting for years on their linkage.67 Later that year, when Reagandeclared at the Washington Summit that the United States intended to deploySDI, Gorbachev replied, Mr. President, you do what you think you have todo. . . . And if in the end you think that you have a system that you want todeploy, go ahead and deploy it. Who am I to tell you what to do? I think yourewasting money. I dont think it will work. But if thats what you want to do, goahead.68

This view raises a second key question: did the Soviets indeed retreat fromtheir early vehement reaction? Existing accounts focus on the role of physicistAndrei Sakharov, who had been banished to internal exile in early 1980 for hispolitical activism. Sakharov became a high-prole human rights cause, and afteryears of pressure, punctuated by Sakharovs hunger strikes, Gorbachev agreed torelease him from exile in December 1986. In February 1987, Sakharov stood upat a disarmament forum in Moscow, with Gorbachev in attendance, and criti-cized both SDI and Soviet insistence on linking it to strategic arms cuts.69

Sakharov spoke not only with the moral force of one who had suffered much forhis political commitment, but also as a weapons scientist whose theoreticalbreakthroughs on the hydrogen bomb had enabled the Soviet strategic buildup

65. Draft summary minutes, CISAC meeting 23 February 1986 (Garwin, CISAC 6), andOffensive Uses of SDI Components and Systems.

66. Gorbachev to Reagan (unofcial translation), 10 June 1985, and Reagan to Gorbachev,28 November 1985 (RR/SDI, 1/1985).

67. FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue; Evangelista, Unarmed Forces. HendrikHertzberg, Laser Show, New Yorker, 15 May 2000, follows FitzGerald in this argument.

68. In FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue, 436.69. Andrei Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond: 1986 to 1989 (New York, 1991), 2124; Evange-

lista, Unarmed Forces, 32829; FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue, 40911.


and earned him three Hero of Socialist Labor awards. The so-called Sakharovgambit in this telling led to the subsequent decision by Gorbachev a few weekslater to abandon his xation with SDI, and to delink the INF negotiationsfrom it.70

Gorbachev may have been impressionablebut could one physicist reallyimpel such a radical shift in national policy?71 If so, we might have somethingof a symmetry with the U.S. case, where an aging nuclear physicist with statedecorations for weapons work got the ear of the national leader and persuadedhim to a fundamental change in strategic course.72 But Sakharov, unlike EdwardTeller, was only weeks returned from seven years in exile when he made the caseagainst SDI, and had been out of the nuclear weapons business since 1968,although he did thereby carry substantial moral force.

Sakharov did not get the Soviets to quit SDI cold turkey. The focus onSakharov and the INF negotiations ignores a preoccupation with SDI that lastedat least two more years. The test of the X-ray laser in late 1987 provides oneindicator of their continued xation. The Polyus satellite debacle that same yearis another. Also known as Skif-DM, Polyus was a testbed for a space-based laserweapon: the Astrozika design bureau provided the laser, the Salyut bureau thesatellite, and Energia a new launch vehicle. The 80 ton, 37meter long spacecraftwas so big it did not t in the rocket nose cone, and had to be strapped to the sideof the rocket. Laser experts protested that the proposed laser system was uselessmilitarily, but Baklanov pushed the project as a sort of political stunt, to dem-onstrate that the Soviets could orbit a laser satellite before the United States. Atthe last minute, Gorbachev, apparently recognizing that a space laser demon-stration would establish dangerous precedents and undermine his own diplo-matic efforts to ban space weapons, intervened to forbid actual testing of thesystem in orbit. In any event he need not have worried. A faulty guidance sensorplaced the spacecraft backward when it red its engines for orbit insertion, andit promptly plunged into the South Pacic.73

70. Frank von Hippel, Recollections of Sakharov, in Andrei Sakharov: Facets of a Life(Gif-sur-Yvette, 1991), 32533. SDI backers in the United States turned it around: Sakharovswillingness to criticize SDI won his release from exile. Daniel Graham, SDI Frees Sakharov,High Frontiers Newswatch (Bethe, 20/53).

71. On Gorbachevs malleability, see John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History(New York, 2005), 230; more caustically, Valery Boldin, Ten Years that Shook the World: TheGorbachev Era as Witnessed by His Chief of Staff, trans. Evelyn Rossiter (New York, 1994),especially 7677.

72. Sakharov would later note that his early outlook on nuclear weapons was closer toTeller than to those urging restraint; see Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 319.

73. Karpenko, ABM and Space Defense; Zarubin interview; Sagdeev interview; S. P.Korolev Space Corporation (Energia), Ot Pervogo Sputnika do EnergiiCurana i Mira[From rst satellite to EnergiaBuran and Mir] (Kaliningrad, 1994), 17, 11011. See also EdGrondine, Polyus, in Encyclopedia Astronautica (http://www.astronautix.com). The UnitedStates was conspicuously silent about possible attempts to examine the Polyus wreckage on theSouth Pacic seaoor. A new article on Polyus states that the laser was left off the rst launch,which instead was to test just the attitude control and aiming systems, but that Gorbachev andthe Politburo then ruled out even these system tests. Konstantin Lantratov, The Star Wars


Continuity in the Soviet response stemmed from the internal political forcesdriving it, which did not just evaporate with Sakharovs reappearance, and alsofrom their fear of offensive space weapons, which Sakharov did not address.Gorbachev up through early 1986 was trying to appease the national securityapparatus, whose support he inherited from his mentor Yuri Andropov; andwhen the 27th Party Congress chose a new Central Committee with only aslender pro-reform majority, Gorbachev still had to build coalitions issue byissue. Hence Gorbachevs preparations for Reykjavik at rst included nodemands on SDI, but the Soviet military and defense industry insisted onrestricting SDI as a condition for cuts in nuclear weapons. Only after Gorbachevcleared out the Defense Ministry in 1987 and then reshaped the Politburo inSeptember 1988 could he operate with a freer hand. Meanwhile, Eduard She-vardnadze had replaced Gromyko as foreign minister in 1985 and was similarlyconsolidating his inuence, and gradually reducing the inuence of people likeBaklanov and Chervov.74

As for delinking itself, the Soviets had appeared to be wavering on INFlinkage even before Reykjavik, where they briey agreed to delink beforeretreating. And the reason for delinking may have been less the Soviet attitudetoward SDI and more their perceptions of the importance of the INF Treaty,which the Soviets sought as a way to keep ghting the political battle forEurope.75 If space weapons did gure in delinkage, it was not because Sovietsovercame their fears, but perhaps more because they recognized the practicaldifculties in dening terms for negotiation. What, exactly, is a space weapon?How do you distinguish between a military communications satellite and aspace-based weapon platform? Is a ballistic missile, which travels through space,a space weapon? What about fractional orbit bombardment systems, which weredesigned to send warheads on a partial orbit to attack the United States from thesouth? Or the Moscow missile defense system, whose long-range nuclear inter-ceptors would hit their targets in space? Did the Soviets really wish to renounceall these systems?76

Whatever the cause, the focus on INF delinking has obscured the continuedSoviet criticism of SDI, including their insistence on coupling the SDI issueto the START negotiations (Strategic Arms Reductions Talks). Only in 1989,before a meeting of foreign ministers in Wyoming, did the Soviets decisively

that Never Happened: The True Story of the Soviet Unions Polyus (Skif-DM) Space-BasedLaser Battle Stations, Quest: The History of Spaceight Quarterly 14, no. 1 (2007): 514, and 14,no. 2 (2007), 518.

74. Thomas W. Simons, Jr., The End of the Cold War? (New York, 1990), 6869, 80;Dobrynin, In Condence, 62026; Bessmertnykh in Wohlforth, Witnesses, 168; on Shevardnadze,see Alexei Arbatov interview, 5 October 2006. The Defense Ministry housecleaning followedthe landing of a small plane near Red Square by a young West German named Mathias Rust.

75. Simons, End of the Cold War?, 147; Yakovlev memo, To the Analysis of the Fact of theVisit of Prominent American Leaders to the USSR, circa December 1986 (Digital NationalSecurity Archive).

76. Alexei Arbatov interview.


retreat on SDI. And even then Shevardnadze acted without approval from theso-called Big Five agency heads who usually determined Soviet arms controlpositions, and who included the defense minister and heads of the Military-Industrial Commission (VPK) and KGBand these three agencies wereprimary drivers of the Soviet response to SDI.77 Several Soviet policymakers andnegotiators have insisted that they were consistent in their vehement oppositionto SDI up to and beyond 1989. General Nikolai Detinov, for example, claimedthat the Soviet position on SDI, far from evolving over time, was the only eldin arms control negotiations where the Soviet Union stood until the end onits original position.78 A report by a red team for the SDI organization itselfconrmed this view from the U.S. side: despite some reduction in the intensityof their criticism starting in 1986, through 1988 the Soviets appeared to beunanimous in their public opposition.79

Hence Gorbachev, at the Moscow Summit in May 1988, argued against SDIon the grounds that it opened the way to the development of space-basedweapons that could hit targets on the earth.80 The eventual Soviet decouplingof SDI from START a year later coincided with cuts in the American commit-ment to SDI, but also with a recognition in the United States that directed-energy weapons were far from realization. The latter development led to a shiftin the SDI program itself from beam weapons to so-called Brilliant Pebbles,small rocket interceptors which posed no offensive space-to-earth threat.

The existing focus on Sakharov and INF delinkage has neglected importantcontinuities in the Soviet position on SDI and the internal politics that drovethem. The Sakharov story is dramatic and compelling, with the aged, charis-matic moral gure returning from exile to remove the scales from Soviet eyes.As FitzGerald put it, In mythology it is the pure of heart who slay the dragons,and so it was that in the Soviet Union Sakharov dispelled the fear of SDI.81 Butthis story is, indeed, mythology. The Soviets tempered their opposition to SDI,but they did not abandon it, and this continuity derived in part from their fearof new offensive weapons.

conclusionThe history described here adds a new dimension to the picture of SDI.

Some Soviets saw no difference between the offensive and defensive potential ofSDI technologies: new beam weapons posed an offensive threat to the Soviet

77. Savelyev and Detinov, The Big Five, 159. On the role of the Defense Ministry, VPK,and KGB, see Velikhov interview.

78. Savelyev and Detinov, The Big Five, 181. This view is supported by Nikolai Sokov,Russian Strategic Modernization: The Past and Future (Lanham, MD, 2000), 47, who sees mostSoviet concessions on SDI starting in 1989.

79. Current Soviet Views of Ballistic Missile Defense: A Strategic Red Team Item ofInterest, Strategic Defense Initiative Organization report ( January 1991), iv.

80. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York, 1995), 455.81. FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue, 411.


Union, whatever use they might have in defending the United States. Althoughspace-strike weapons were not the only factor behind the Soviet response, theyadded particular twists and stiffened Soviet opposition. This issue helps bridgethe logical gap in the Soviet position, between their obsession with SDI, whicheven they realized was a diplomatic liability, and their simultaneous claims thatSDI would not work. The Soviets were not just getting worked up about adefensive shield that they could likely circumvent. Rather, they also suspected anew offensive threat from beam weapons, including third-generation nucleardevices. This aspect of SDI has escaped attention in part because the literatureis almost exclusively written from the American perspective.82 Compounding theneglect has been the fact that existing histories have focused on the high politicsof SDI and also rely too heavily on memoirs instead of archival research, thusimposing an overly coherent post facto view of events. Looking at the Soviet sideand at the work of American defense scientists reveals the role played by possibleoffensive weapons.

Although space-based weapons were still in the research phaseand techni-cal experts in both countries argued over how far they remained fromrealizationthe prospect of them alone was sufcient to shape the Sovietresponse. Some leading Soviet scientists, because of their own research, doubtedthe offensive threat, but other views and interests prevailed. In particular, theSoviet space agency and parts of the military played up the SDI threat, but indoing so scared political leaders into bargaining away valuable Soviet militaryassets in order to get rid of SDI.

One might think to use SDI as a sort of X-ray image of the body politic,distinguishing the hard bones of expert scientic advice from the eshier inter-ests that also composed foreign policy. But the bones are not so hard; differentexperts disagreed on the technological possibilities for SDI, and the policies ofboth the United States and Soviet Union depended on whether the views ofbelievers or skeptics found a forumwhether it was Teller selling Reagan on thepossibility of a defensive shield, TsNIIMash hotheads spinning space-strikescenarios, or Latter and Martinelli coldly calculating that lasers could burn citiesto the ground. The history of SDI highlights the need to examine the intersec-tion of scientic expertise and foreign policy, to trace the detailed pathwaysby which technical judgments enteredor failed to enterthe policymakingprocess. Such an approach must look not only to high policy levels but also tothe laboratories, think tanks, and advisory committees within particular agenciesand ministriesto places like RDA, the Defense Nuclear Agency, and CISAC,or to TsNIIMash, Astrozika, and Arzamas. Although these institutions hadtheir own interests, such as Energias desire to build large space platforms, they

82. Exceptions include von Bencke, International Identity Crises, and Pavel Podvig,Ballistic Missile Defense as a Factor in Strategic Relations between USSR/Russia and theUSA, 19452003 (Ph.D. diss. [in Russian], Institute of World Economy and InternationalRelations, Moscow, 2004).


often escape simple generalization; even those most closely associated with SDI,such as Livermore, displayed a range of technical judgments among their staff,and technological assessmentsand perceptions of the national interestcouldtrump bureaucratic agendas.

SDI spurred both the United States and Soviet Union to increase the par-ticipation of scientists in the foreign-policy process, in each case damping morealarmist views. Secrecy compounded the problem on both sides, as diplomatsoften did not know about highly classied nuclear and space programs. On theSoviet side, the Defense Ministry and each of the several defense-industryministries usually had a Scientic-Technical Council (NTS, in the Russianacronym), but the Foreign Ministry did not. Shevardnadze recognized that thelack of in-house technical advice put the Foreign Ministry at a disadvantage notonly in negotiations with the United States but also in internal policy debateson issues such as space weapons, where the military enjoyed a monopoly oninformation. Shevardnadze duly created an NTS for the Foreign Ministry withexperts from the Academy of Sciences, which allowed him to begin counteringthe technical arguments on SDI. This gradual process was likely more importantthan the more visible Sakharov gambit for the eventual shift in the Sovietposition.83

A similar integration of scientic expertise and foreign policy, and perceptionthat such integration was previously lacking, appears for the United States in theState Departments use of CISAC, which discounted the Latter-MartinelliandSovietview of the space-strike threat. The subsequent history revealed thetensions in this relationship: the National Academy was intended as a source ofindependent expertise, and as the State Department increasingly called onCISACfor denition of technical activities allowed by the ABMTreaty, and fora post-Reykjavik study of deep cuts in strategicweaponsthe scientists grewwaryof losing their independence and becoming a job shop for State or, worse,captive to administration policy. The relationship meanwhile exposed State tocriticism about the diplomatic inuence of politically unaccountable scientists.84

The history of SDI seems to reveal a failure of empathy on both sides.Americans failed to comprehend Soviet suspicion of space-to-earth weapons,whereas the Soviets did not believe American sincerity about a strictly defensiveposture. Although some American analysts did recognize offensive uses, theCISAC study in the end largely dismissed SDI technologies as ineffective whencompared to nuclear weapons and hence not worth accommodating in negotia-tions. But as the CISAC scientists admitted, this position amounted to a dis-tinction between capability and intent: yes, the capability for offensive strikes

83. Savelyev and Detinov, The Big Five; Alexei Arbatov interview. On the NTS system inthe ministries, see also Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race, 14243; and PeterAlmquist, Red Forge: Soviet Military Industry since 1965 (New York, 1990), chs. 1, 4.

84. CISAC, draft summary minutes, 16 December 1986, 1213 March 1987, and 910September 1987 (Townes, accession 22,273, 26/NAS-CISAC). Warren Strobel, FBI Agrees toInvestigate Nitze Role with Scientists, Washington Times, 24 November 1987.


existed, but because nuclear weapons were more effective the United Stateswould never exercise this capability. The Soviets did not follow this distinction.Their response reected their defense industrys bureaucratic politics, theirstrategic doctrine, and their historical experience of surprise attack; hence theirsuspicion of new weapons that compressed warning times to milliseconds.

The CISAC report did not account for such factors. It thus revealed thelimits to expert scientic advice: although scientists could have a damping effecton alarmist foreign policies, they may also understandably focus on technicalfactors, and also assume that others will reach the same rational conclusions.They may thus neglect the political, historical, and cultural valences that canlead to different conclusions for those in different contexts.85 Such factors indeedshaped the Soviet response to SDI.

The disconnect on offensive aspects of SDI is important to Cold War dip-lomatic history. Soviet suspicion of space-strike weapons contributed to theirinsistence on linking SDI to arms negotiations. Geneva or, especially, Reykjavikmight otherwise have produced much different outcomes, including radicalreductions in nuclear arms, which would have greatly affected the endgame ofthe Cold Warnot to mention such current issues as the security of formerSoviet nuclear weapons or continued alerting of strategic arsenals. More gen-erally, SDIs role in the end of the Cold War is a story of unintended conse-quences. SDI, and strategic weapons in general, were just a fraction of Sovietdefense spending, and the Soviets were pursuing asymmetric countermeasures,but SDI clearly occupied an outsized role in their thinking.86 Instead of claimingthat SDI hastened the end of the Cold War, by forcing the Soviets to confronttheir deciencies, one might rather say that it distracted them from the funda-mental challengesmaintaining external and internal empires amid economicdecline, oil price shocks, Afghanistan, and so onthat would eventually causethe collapse of the Soviet system. The space-strike issue, and SDI in general, notonly strengthened the institutional and political hand of hawkish elements (itmay not be coincidence that Baklanov, whose ministry propagated space-strikeschemes, helped lead the 1991 coup); they also diverted liberals and hawks alikefrom other pressing issues, and continued to do so to 1989 and beyond.87 Thatis, SDIs role in the demise of the Soviet Union was more as a diversion(although that was not the American intention) than as a frontal challengeto Soviet capabilities, and the space-strike aspectlikewise unintendedintensied the diversions effect.

85. Cf. Richard Pipes, Team B: The Reality behind the Myth, Commentary 82, no. 4(1986): 2540, in defense of the hawkish Team B intelligence study of 1976, criticizing thepositivism and universalism of science advisers as the source of U.S. reliance on deterrence.Pipes admitted exceptions to his rule, notably Sakharov and Teller.

86. Pavel Podvig, Did Star Wars End the Cold War? (unpublished manuscript).87. On SDI strengthening Soviet hawks and undermining reformers, see Georgi Arbatov,

The System: An Insiders Life in Soviet Politics (New York, 1992), 321; Pavel Palazchenko inWohlforth, Witnesses, 59; Alexei Arbatov interview; see also Dobrynin, In Condence, 544.


If the United States were indeed serious about stressing defense, it mighthave done more to placate Soviet fears. One way would have been to shift thefocus from the ABM Treaty, which generated much debate over broad versusnarrow interpretations, to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. In particular, theUnited States might have claried a clause in the Outer Space Treaty banningnuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction in space.88

This begged the question of what constituted a WMD, and in particularwhether beam weapons qualied. The Soviets before SDI had raised the possi-bility of particle beams being WMD, and had drafted a proposal to ban their useagainst biological targets. The United States did not engage the proposal, and atthe time took the view of beam weapons as surgical when compared to nuclearweapons: Most PB [particle beam] weapons, as currently conceived, would notbe classied as MDW [WMD] since they are by nature point weapons.89

For the United States to recognize SDIs offensive possibilities, however,completely ran against Reagans expressed desire to halt the arms race. Thissuggests another unintended consequence of SDI: in trying to turn nuclearstrategy from offense to defense, SDI took a new class of weapons and linkedthem exclusively to defensive usesbut only to American eyes. (It may not becoincidence that Edward Teller in 1992 began speaking again, after a ten-yearinterlude and the Cold Wars end, of offensive space weapons.)90 As a result,there was little discussion of the fact that some new technologies, such aselectromagnetic weapons, might render the United States military more vulner-able, because of its greater dependence on solid-state electronics.91

The issue remains relevant. Missile defense is still under development, withspace-based platforms again in the picture, and U.S. Space Command is pursu-ing space-based strike weapons as a new means of global engagement. Manyof these weapons derive from SDI research programs.92 Other countries, notablyChina, have recently joined Russia in asking the United Nations to ban allspace-based weapons.93 Meanwhile, some American defense analysts have

88. Outer Space Treaty, 1967.89. U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Fiscal Year 1983 Arms Control Impact

Statement, 324.90. Teller to Gen. George L. Butler, 10 January 1992 (Teller, box 435), describing a

nonnuclear approach for delivering potentially highly effective but non-nuclear strategicstriking power with many of the characteristics of ICBMs and SLBMsthis is variously knownas Advanced Strategic Strike Systems and Fire from Heaven.

91. Hans Bethe, handwritten notes on our SDI research, n.d. (circa 1985) (Bethe, 20/18);Janet Raloff, EMP: A Sleeping Electronic Dragon, Science News, 9 May 1991, 300302; JanetRaloff, EMP Defensive Strategies, Science News, 16 May 1991, 31415.

92. U.S. Space Command, Vision for 2020 (available from http://www.fas.org/spp/military);Robert Preston et al., Space Weapons, Earth Wars, RAND Corporation report MR-1209( June 2002); Bruce M. DuBlois et al., Space Weapons: Crossing the U.S. Rubicon, Interna-tional Security 29, no. 2 (2004): 5084. See also Doug Beason, The E-Bomb: How Americas NewDirected-EnergyWeaponsWill Change theWayFutureWarsWill Be Fought (Cambridge,MA, 2005).

93. Russia, China Want Guarantees against Weapons Deployment in Space, ITAR-TASS, 28 June 2002 (FBIS-SOV-2002-0628); Frances Williams, China Calls for Ban onWeaponisation of Space, Financial Times, 8 June 2001.


warned that deploying space weapons would expose other crucial space assets,such as reconnaissance and communications satellites, to attack. China playedon such fears in testing an antisatellite missile in January 2007 and in severalreported tests of a ground-based laser against American satellites.94 The differ-ence today, besides the strategic context, seems to be that the offensive possi-bilities are explicit (and indeed are one of the main attractions) and potentialAmerican vulnerabilities recognized.95 What has not changed is the need forstrategists and diplomats to grapple with all the implications of science andtechnologyand for scientic experts to ponder the effects of culture, politics,and history.

94. Bryan Bender, Space Weapons Seen as Possibility, Boston Globe, 19 May 2005; PeterSpiegel and James Gerstenzang, Chinese Missile Strikes Satellite, Los Angeles Times, 19January 2007.

95. Lowell Wood testimony to U.S. Congress, House Committee on National Security,Military Research and Development Subcommittee, 16 July 1997 (available from http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress); William R. Graham et al., Report of the Commission to Assessthe Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, 2004 (available fromhttp://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/congress). For an example of the recent recogni-tion of offensive uses in the foreign-policy literature, see Walter Russell Mead, Special Provi-dence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York, 2002), 303.


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