Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Hardcover)

~ Paul Lettow (Author) "IN DECEMBER 1945, Ronald Reagan almost helped lead a mass anti- nuclear rally in Hollywood, California..." (more)
Key Phrases: nuclear abolitionism, missile defense effort, abolishing nuclear weapons, United States, Soviet Union, Cold War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The growing body of affirmative revisionist scholarship on Ronald Reagan and his presidency is enhanced by this comprehensively researched, well-crafted monograph. Independent scholar Lettow uses recently declassified archival material to establish Reagan's determination to abolish nuclear weapons as a focal point of his presidency. Reagan believed that the U.S. should use the arms race to bankrupt the Soviet Union, and that the development of an effective defense against ballistic missiles would then render all nuclear weapons negotiable and foster discussion of their abolition; the U.S. would then share the system with the U.S.S.R. and other countries, ensuring the safety of an eventually nuclear-free world. Lettow presents Reagan as a thoughtful leader, who developed his radical challenge to both liberal and conservative conventional wisdom on the Cold War independently. His unwavering belief that missile defense was possible reflected his intellectual conviction that the U.S. could solve the technical challenges involved. Lettow shows Reagan's advisers were on the whole significantly skeptical at the prospect of actually abolishing nuclear weapons. Reagan, meanwhile, successfully negotiated the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty and established the matrix for the START treaty. The U.S. and Russia have made additional drastic cuts in their nuclear arsenals; plans for a ballistic missile defense continue in the U.S.; Reagan's ideas and methods, in short, continue to shape the world.
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From The Washington Post

Paul Lettow has found the purloined letter of the Reagan presidency: the fact that much of his Cold War policy was driven by a desire to eliminate all nuclear weapons. This aspect of Reagan is part of the public record but has so far been hidden in plain view because it doesn't seem to fit his conservatism and seems so otherwise outlandish.

Lettow, a first-time author whose book resulted from his work on an Oxford doctorate, demonstrates that Reagan had acquired his fundamental beliefs in this area by the 1960s. He wanted to do away with nuclear weapons entirely, perhaps because he thought the biblical story of Armageddon foretold a nuclear war. He believed that the Soviet economy would buckle under the pressure of stiff competition in the arms race. And he supported missile defense as a technological and moral alternative to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction.

Lettow follows this constellation of beliefs into the White House. In 1982, Reagan signed a presidential directive known as NSDD-32, which said that the United States would muster all aspects of national power to pressure the Soviets and seek to reverse the expansion of its power. The weak Soviet economy was considered the key point of leverage.

Onto this hard-line policy Reagan grafted his goal of abolishing all nukes. Many of Reagan's aides were appalled by his "ridiculous" nuclear abolitionism. Such advisers as Secretary of State Alexander Haig and U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Director Kenneth Adelman occasionally tried to dissuade him from it or at the very least keep him from airing it publicly (both to no avail). Reagan's nuclear aversion ran so deep that his aides got the sense that, incredibly, he didn't even know if he would retaliate against a Soviet first strike.

Missile defense was a key part of Reagan's anti-nuclear worldview. He schemed to make the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) administration policy, cutting out bureaucratic naysayers and then springing his idea on the world in his 1983 "Star Wars" speech. He argued that SDI would cast into doubt the success of a ballistic missile attack, thus undermining the usefulness of the missiles and spurring negotiations toward the elimination of all nuclear weapons. The United States could then share missile-defense technology with the rest of the world as an insurance policy against any stray nukes. This view was idiosyncratic, to say the least. As Lettow writes, "Not a single individual within his administration subscribed fully to [this] concept."

But in the U.S.-Soviet dialogue that had begun in earnest by 1985, the Soviets proved obsessed with ending SDI, affirming the administration's belief that Moscow feared not being able to keep up technologically. Reagan loved a political cartoon that showed a husband and wife watching a news report on how SDI would never work. The wife turns to the husband and asks, "Well, then why don't the Russians want us to have it?" In an exchange with Reagan at their 1985 summit in Geneva, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said that Reagan's vision of a nuclear-free world guaranteed by SDI "contained many emotional elements, elements which were part of one man's dream."

He was right. But Reagan was adamant, and Gorbachev had to accommodate him. In 1986, he wrote Reagan a letter proposing the elimination of all nuclear weapons by 2000 in exchange for the end of SDI. Reagan aides countered. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger proposed abolishing all ballistic missiles as part of a deal to share missile-defense technology. Reagan loved the idea, but only as a step toward the achievement of his ultimate dream.

All this set the stage for the storied 1986 Reykjavik summit. Reagan and Gorbachev quickly began an ever-escalating negotiation that produced a proposal to eliminate all nuclear weapons. The sticking point was Gorbachev's insistence that the deal restrict SDI to the laboratory. But Reagan wouldn't budge on his devotion to SDI and walked away. According to Adelman, the president was "madder than hell" and believed that Gorbachev's objective all along had been just to kill SDI.

Some of Reagan's aides, especially National Security Adviser John Poindexter, tried to suppress the magnitude of what had been discussed. They were shocked by Reagan's willingness to go to zero. Still, many Reagan officials believed that a powerful good came out of Reykjavik: Having failed to get the Soviet Union out of its economic predicament by controlling the arms race and killing SDI, Gorbachev would have to scale back Soviet defense expenditures and attempt economic reforms.

In this effort, of course, the Soviet Union unraveled. And so Reagan achieved no small measure of vindication. His long-held belief that the Soviet economy was Moscow's weak point -- and could be exploited by an American arms buildup -- proved correct. Missile defense did not, of course, lead to the end of all nuclear arms, but by contributing to the Soviet crack-up it helped achieve the next best thing: the end of the nuclear balance of terror as we had known it for 40 years.

Lettow's book gives the reader an odd appreciation for impracticality. It was Reagan's utopian belief in the possibility of eliminating nuclear arms that spurred his creativity. That belief prompted his policy to cross ideological boundaries, making for a yeasty, original mix. But the most important ingredients to his success were the most intangible: intuition and imagination.

Working off newly declassified documents and extensive interviews with the key players, Lettow conveys this extraordinary story crisply and convincingly. Although his sympathy for Reagan is obvious, he gives a straightforward historical account that will challenge the assumptions of Reagan admirers and detractors alike. He has made a significant addition to our understanding of Reagan and the endgame of the Cold War. Score one for dreamers.

Reviewed by Rich Lowry
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Random House (February 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400063078
• ISBN-13: 978-1400063079
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #829,217 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars That Reagan was a persistent cuss . . . and so was this author, July 17, 2006

By	Marvin D. Pipher (Houston, Texas USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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This review is from: Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Paperback)

While reading this book, I had the distinct impression that it was actually a dissertation aimed at proving to a doctoral committee that beyond any shadow of doubt Ronald Reagan's primary mission in life, particularly during his presidency, was to abolish nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. Few would have believed that in the 1980s, but the author of this book more than proves it. He does so by thoroughly researching his subject and then meticulously analyzing Reagan's thoughts as distilled from his writings, interviews, broadcasts, speeches, and actions from the early 1960s through his presidency. In the process, he also clearly demonstrates that Ronald Reagan's thinking was so far beyond that of his contemporaries that even his closest advisors had difficulty understanding him or even taking his ideas seriously. Who, in the 1960s-70s, for example, seriously believed that by stepping up the arms race you could bring the Soviets to the negotiating table, let along get them to negotiate in good faith? But Reagan did.

The one fault which I found with this book was that by concentrating on his one theme, almost to the exclusion of everything else, the author presents a somewhat one sided view of what was really taking place during Reagan's presidency. For example, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), although the most powerful tool, wasn't the only tool being used by President Reagan to bring about the demise of the Soviet Union. He also supported subversion within the Eastern Block, supplied arms to those fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, pressured the Saudi's to bring down the price of oil so as to starve the Soviet economy, and curtailed technical and monetary support to the USSR to slow its economy. All of these efforts, taken together, brought the "Cold War" to an end.

All that aside, however, this is a remarkable book which sheds a great deal of light on the historical Reagan and further substantiates his legacy. And, as the author intended, after reading it, there can be no doubt that Ronald Reagan was obsessed with eliminating the nuclear threat to the people of the world; almost as obsessed, in fact, as the author was in proving it. For content, this book certainly rates five stars, but for readability it only rates three, so I'll have to give it four.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Important Book On Reagan's Dismal View of Nuclear Weapons, May 13, 2006

By	John Kwok (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Paul Lettow's "Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons" is an important scholarly account of Reagan's aims for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) - perhaps better known - if incorrectly - as "Star Wars" and his strongly felt desire to abolish nuclear weaponry. It is a scholarly account which deserves to be read by a wide readership, since it demonstrates convincingly what Reagan actually thought of nuclear weaponry. Lettow observes that Reagan's keen interest in the abolition of nuclear weaponry is one that isn't widely known, even today, and that this interest arose immediately from the 1945 nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Lettow not only does an admirable job in exploring Reagan's interest in the abolition of nuclear weaponry, but also makes a persuasive case as to why Reagan may be the most visionary leader of the late 20th Century, having created the world which we still live in.

Using both recently declassified documents from the National Archives and extensive interviews with former Reagan Administration officials and Reagan historians, Lettow makes a very compelling case for asserting that Reagan's quest to abolish nuclear weapons was the key underlying theme of his foreign policy with the Soviet Union, especially with respect to nuclear arms control. It was an issue Reagan was personally involved with, often overriding strenuous objections from key aides like National Security Adviser Robert "Bud" McFarlane, who thought that Reagan was quite naive in his advocacy of eventual abolition of nuclear weapons. Lettow also illustrates how Reagan's insistance on substantial American military spending, coupled with Soviet opposition to SDI, led not only to substantial reduction of nuclear weapons on both sides, but eventually to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. This relatively terse book may be the most important history I have read yet on the Reagan administration and its relations with the Soviet Union, especially with regards to nuclear arms control. For this reason alone, Lettow's book deserves to be read by as wide a readership as possible.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Leadership: Reagan, August 28, 2005

By	Eric J. Lindblom PhD (Buenos Aires) - See all my reviews

Leadership against the bomb (WMD) including the Reykjavik summit and Gorbachev defined SDI policy review shifts. "The soviet policy review group submitted the dreaft decision directive to the NSC in early December 1982." (p. 77) The center of the book inquires deeply into the results of that start. It was aimed toward Soviet imperialism. It was anti-elitist. That defined Reagan and ultimately undermined his constituency. Gorbachev pressured Reagan. It didn't work well. The President stood. There was START and INF, ABM and NSDD. It was a tangle. Reagan provided leadership. He stood his ground more sucessful with the Soviets than the U.S. Eric J. Lindblom PhD Harvard