On the brink

Richard Fitzpatrick reads a fascinating account of tumultuous events in the early 1980s when the Cold War threatened to erupt into all-out confrontation.

The Dead Hand: Reagan, Gorbachev And The Untold Story Of The Cold War Arms Race

David E Hoffman

Icon Books; €16.99

THE Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union underwent one of its most tense periods in the early 1980s. It’s difficult to conceive of the stockpile of arms both sides had assembled. By 1982, the superpowers’ arsenal had the explosive power of a million Hiroshimas.

Ronald Reagan was head of an administration that the Soviets feared more than any in history.

“If you remember in that year 1983, Reagan called the Soviet Union ‘an evil empire’ in March,” says David E Hoffman, author of The Dead Hand, the Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicle of the period. “A few weeks after that he announced plans for his Star Wars missile defence program. Then in September the Soviets shot down a Korean civilian airliner killing 269 people. It was a mistake on their part. Their radars, their communications systems were essentially rusting from within.

“But Reagan was saying that they were 10 feet tall, that their military threatened the west. This misunderstanding and mistrust was very, very dangerous at that time. Neither side understood the capabilities of the other even though they devoted huge amounts to intelligence and military build-up. “The information you get, for example, from satellite intelligence is one thing, but the big mystery and the thing that caused all the danger was intentions. What was going on inside people’s minds was much harder to judge.”

For the Americans, getting inside the head of Soviet leaders proved exasperating, especially as they kept dying in quick succession. After six decades of leadership by four men — Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev — the Russians went through three leaders in three years. Leonid Brezhnev, after years of ill-health, died in November 1982. His successor, Yuri Andropov, died in February 1984.

Margaret Thatcher flew to Moscow for Andropov’s funeral. She had been warned to expect cold weather so she invested in a pair of fur-lined boots. They had been expensive, she said. “But when I met Mr Chernenko, the thought crossed my mind that they would probably come in useful again soon.”

At 72 years of age, Konstantin Chernenko was suffering from advanced emphysema. He was unable to hold a salute to the military parade as it passed before him in Red Square at his inauguration. Two weeks afterwards in a televised speech, he missed a page of his text as he stumbled through it. When he met the king of Spain, aides wrote short sentences on cards for him so he would seem to be talking and not reading.

“That was in the beginning,” said one aide. “Later, Chernenko couldn’t even read the notes anymore, but just stumbled through them with no idea what he was saying.”

This was the man whose finger was on the button. The Russians were paranoid about an American nuclear strike at their leadership so they devised a computer system, the ‘Dead Hand’ of Hoffman’s book title, which could be triggered automatically in the event that their high command was taken out or, as Hoffman notes dryly, if Chernenko’s hand was too limp to launch a retaliatory strike.

A modified version of this Doomsday machine, which defaulted the decision to wipe out half the planet to a duty officer in a bunker, was tested in November 1984.

Four months later Chernenko died, and was soon succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev. “As a young man, Gorbachev was very much part of the system. Over these years — as he rises through the Communist Party, becomes party leader in Stavrapol, becoming the equivalent of a governor in a big agricultural region, moves to Moscow, becomes the equivalent of the Agriculture Minister — you don’t see Gorbachev making moves to tear down the Soviet system, but very, very quietly, he is accumulating a central insight about everything he saw around him.

“By the way, his wife Raisa was very important in this. The insight was this — he saw that living standards in his country were incredibly low considering the amount of riches the country had.

“One of the things that he concluded was that the wealth of the country was going into defence work; it was being sucked up by the military in a desperate attempt to keep up with the west. So by the time he became Soviet leader in 1985 — he’s chosen because he’s the youngest man in the Politburo.

“He’s seen to be the most dynamic — he wants to use political reform to save socialism because he hopes to save the country. But one of the things that he discovers is that it’s very, very hard to take away those resources from the military. He tries over and over again to pull back, to stop this giant monster that was consuming the resources of this rich country.

“He obviously ran into a lot of opposition, but his actions in not going toe-to-toe with Reagan on Star Wars put a break on the Cold War, and the dangerous hyper militarisation of his own country, until it finally fell apart of its own weight.”

Gorbachev wasn’t all hero, though. He kept secret a 15-year Soviet biological weapons programme dating back to 1975. The scheme, which was carried out under the guise of civilian enterprise, contravened a 1972 peace accord. The extent of the programme was the most surprising thing Hoffman uncovered.

“When I interviewed the scientists I heard these amazing stories of how they were trying to engineer viruses and bacteria that would pose a threat to whole populations.”

The Americans, for their part, had abandoned their biological weapons programme under Richard Nixon’s watch. “We’ll never use the damn germs so what good is biological warfare as a deterrent?” said the US president. “If somebody uses germs on us, we’ll nuke ‘em.”