How the Cold War Ended

Doug Morris, Contract Sales, Inkan Limited and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; Alex Guerasimenko, Grade 12 Student, North Toronto Collegiate Institute; Reverend Canon Kimberley Beard, Rector, Christ Church, Brampton and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; Allan Fotheringham, National Syndicated Columnist and Author; The Hon. Barbara McDougall, Advisor, Aird & Berlis LLP; Anne Fotheringham, Owner, Fotheringham Fine Art, Director, The Canadiana Foundation and Director, The Empire Club of Canada; Noreen Taylor, Chair, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Chair, Charles Taylor Foundation and Founder of the Charles Taylor Prize of Literacy Non-Fiction; and The Hon. Michael H. Wilson, Chairman, UBS Canada and Former Minister of Finance, Government of Canada.

Introduction by John Koopman

In the early '70s, pursuing detente, President Richard Nixon made a state visit to the Soviet Union. Brezhnev did everything in his power to ensure that President Nixon was impressed by the economic and military power of the Soviet Union. Nixon was appropriately awed by what he saw, and Brezhnev could not resist going one step further and invited Nixon into his private office.

There was a red telephone on his desk. "Is that the hot-line to Washington'"' asked Nixon. "No, my friend," replied Brezhnev, "as a matter of fact it is my hot-line to Satan."

Breznev picked up the phone and had a brief conversation with Satan. After the call the operator called back and informed Brezhnev that the charge for the call would be two rubles.

After Nixon got back to Washington, his Secretary of Slate, Henry Kissinger, negotiated a similar line for the White House.

President Nixon could hardly wait to use the hot-line and make a call. In front of the whole cabinet he picked up his new hot-line and had a conversation with the Devil. After the conversation the operator called backed and told Nixon the cost of the call would be $200.

President Nixon exploded. "But the same call only cost Brezhnev two rubles!"

"Maybe," said the operator, "but for Brezhnev. that was a local call."

President Reagan described the Soviet Union as "the evil empire." Even Margaret Thatcher admits she blanched when she first heard President Reagan utter those words. But if ever an empire was evil, the Soviet Union was evil.

In the midst of detente we all read a lot of balderdash about the moral equivalency of generally right-wing Cold War dictators and the left-wing tyrants who ran the communist world. I am not an apologist for the former right-wing dictators, at this very moment most of them are in the process of answering to God for their deeds, but even in Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile, or the Philippines under Marcos a man was free to practise his religion, quit his job, join a labour union, travel freely within the country or even leave the country if he wished. In the former Soviet Union, or in Korea today. a man has none of these freedoms.

Mr. Reed recently wrote a book entitled "At the Abyss"--an insider's history of the Cold War. His book is a compelling account of the Cold War brinkmanship, told by a man who was at the eye of the storm throughout the Cold War.

The Cold War was a fight to the death. It was a war fought with nearly every weapon imaginable, and some I could not imagine until I read Mr. Reed's book.

However, we got through the Cold War without the use of nuclear weapons, and as much as Mr. Reed's book is about how this war was fought, it is also a tale of the heroism of uniformed soldiers on both sides of the Iron Curtain whose professionalism ensured that nuclear weapons were never used.

Mr. Reed's life--to use an American expression--is Hamiltonian in scope. He graduated first in his engineering class, he designed two thermonuclear devices. he held senior roles in Ronald Reagan's state campaigns and administration. He went on to be a manager of intelligence at the Pentagon, a secretary of the Air Force, a special assistant to President Reagan for national security, and a consultant to then Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell.

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Mr. Thomas Reed to the podium of the Empire Club of Canada.

Thomas Reed

Thank you John. That is really very nice. I appreciate the introduction but I really enjoyed being able to stand and sing "O Canada" in my ancestral home, because my grandfather was born in Toronto and for reasons known only to 14-year-old boys he fled to the silver mines of Colorado. Because he died fairly young, he didn't leave a whole lot of records as to which of you are my cousins, but nonetheless I really enjoy being here.

John has told you about my having written a book. I didn't intend to write a book. He outlined for you the things I had the good fortune to do or the places I was at during the Cold War, but the astonishing thing is that designing nuclear weapons just seems like a physics experiment. All the way to working at the White House it is just another day at the office. The coffee isn't made, the phone rings and your boss wants something done in 15 minutes. Yes, he is the president but he still wants it in 15 minutes and the marine guards at the door simply don't tell you or blow trumpets when you go to work and say today is an historic day. It is just another day.

And so it wasn't until it was all over that it occurred to me that I ought to write something down. The first triggers were reading the quicky books about the Cold War. I thought they were interesting but they don't happen to be accurate. That didn't happen. I was there. The activating moment was when I was giving a speech--a talk about the Cold War--to some kids in our local high school. Two youngsters raised their hands and said: "Mr. Reed, tell us about the Cold War. Tell us about Vietnam. Our grandfathers flew there." I thought then that time was really going by and I had better write some of this down.

And so I started the process. The original idea was modeled on Tom Brokaw's book "The Greatest Generation." I wanted to write about the greatest generation of the Cold War and talk about Jim Stockdale and Edward Teller. I acquired an agent, an editor and typed it up into a really readable tale, but when I got through I was absolutely astonished by a couple of things.

Number one--the absolute integrity and great caution of the officers and civilians on both sides of the Iron Curtain. I have to this day the greatest respect for my peers in the nuclear weapons establishment of the Soviet Union, the officers of the strategic rocket forces, to say nothing of course for the scientists at Los Alamos and the officers and men of the U.S. Armed Services.

Secondly, we all, I concluded, have some very clear memories of Cold War events that simply never happened. For instance, we all think we know what happened to good old Joe Stalin because Tass, the Soviet news agency, told us. Stalin died of a stroke in his suite in the Kremlin on March 5, 1953. It turns out that's absolute bunk. He was murdered by his security chief, Lavrenti Beria. The weapon fittingly was rat poison. It took three days for Stalin to die a most agonizing death and Beria's so-called guards saw to it that no doctors got in other than the medical assistants to lift Stalin up off the floor onto a sofa until the man was gone.

Other legends, Eisenhower. I remember Dwight Eisenhower. He was president when I first entered the U.S. Air Force and our impression at that time was he was a hero from World War Two. He came home, he ended the war in Korea and then he started to play golf and nothing else happened. But that's not what happened. It turns out historians are now coming to appreciate that Dwight Eisenhower was one of the true geniuses of the Cold War. When he came home, Korea was raging. The conventional military view was that that was the opening gun of World War Three. The bad guys were going to get busy in Asia and when all of our troops and ships and aircraft were concentrated in Korea the Red Army was going to roll across Western Europe to the Channel. Well the last year of the Truman administration assembled a budget that was going to restore the United States to World War Two footing so as to contend with the Red Army It was going to expand the army, the air force and the navy to huge sizes and the budget would have eaten a quarter of the GDP.

Eisenhower had the fortitude to say no, that's not what we are going to do. He developed an approach called "the new look" and the new look was to rely on thermonuclear weapons to deter the Soviets from bad actions; beyond that a modest expenditure of 5 per cent of GDP on conventional forces and let the western economies prevail. His view was that it was the arsenals of democracy that really prevailed in World War Two and he felt that that's what would win out against the Soviet Union. The American economy, the Canadian economy and the western economy were expanding and would prevail over a collapsing and hopelessly inefficient Soviet system. He figured that out in the mid-fifties and of course that's the way it turned out at the end of the eighties.

We don't understand and we have no comprehension of the toll that the Cold War took on the people of the Soviet Union. John told you a story about how a call to Satan is a local call in Moscow. Absolutely. But worst of all was the toll of the nuclear program because the Soviets were totally unconcerned about the lives of their people and environmental matters. They wanted nukes and they wanted a lot of them and they wanted them fast.

Here is an example. The Soviet Union produced plutonium at a place called Mayak. In the United States we did that at Hanford with a lot of safeguards. We kept track of what was going on and nobody was injured and life was pretty tranquil. At Mayak the Soviet Union was cranking up plutonium in a hell-for-leather arrangement.

The way you make plutonium is you run a reactor and after a few weeks or months you take the fuel rods out and put them in big vats of acid. A lot of fancy chemical engineering happens and pretty soon the plutonium settles to the bottom of the tank. The Soviet Union had a couple of big settling tanks at Mayak. They weren't too good at calculating critical masses or understanding pyroforic explosions and so one day in the fall of 1957 those two tanks blew up. Now we are not talking Three Mile Island here. We are talking Chernobyl times ten thousand. When the Mayak reactor tanks blew up, seventy or eighty tons of radioactive debris that came right from the core of the reactor were scattered downwind in the Soviet Union. A quarter of a million people had to be evacuated from 200 towns and those who were not evacuated have children and grandchildren to this day with all sorts of terrible birth defects and so forth.

And the frightening thing was because this happened in 1957, before satellites, before sophisticated intelligence, we never heard a thing in the West. It was not until 1993 when my associates and I were sitting with the scientists of the Soviet weapons labs that one of them turned to me and said: "You know, we need to tell you about the day that Mayak blew up." And that was more than a third of a century later.

Cuba. We all remember Cuba. We remember it was a dicey time but none of you have any idea how dicey it was and how close we came. It turns out that the Soviet Union at the time of the October Crisis already had 98 nuclear weapons on the island of Cuba. And even worse the general in charge had the authority to use them. He had met with Kruschev before he left Moscow in July. Kruschev had said: "Here's the plan. Here's what we are going to do. You are in charge. Stay in touch. But if you lose communication because you are at the end of a very unreliable communication link and you come under attack use your judgment." General Pliyev had the authority to use nukes.

I have no doubt that if we had become imaginative and started attacking air fields in Cuba, if we had started attacking the rocket stands that were under construction even though the intermediate range rockets were still on boats, General Pliyev would have used the nuclear weapons at his disposal to respond. He would have used anti-ship missiles to blow away big pieces of the U.S. fleet. He would have loaded his IL-28 bombers with nuclear bombs to take out the air fields in Florida. The U.S. response would have been immediate. General Curtis LeMay was not known for his sense of humour. Cuba would have been a smoking ruin in a matter of an hour. The nuclear genie clearly would have been out of the bottle and all that was precluded at the last minute because the Kennedy brothers had sense enough to make deals, side deals, about missiles in Turkey and protecting Castro and so forth. But we were literally minutes away from that nuclear exchange.

The Tonkin Gulf. We all remember the Tonkin Gulf episode. The U.S. destroyers "Maddox" and "Turner Joy" were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin on August 4, 1964, by torpedo boats that came out from the coast of North Vietnam. As a result of that attack the Tonkin Gulf Resolution made its way to the floor of the Congress the very next day and was passed with unseemly haste. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution became the legal basis for the war in Vietnam.

Now that is a very interesting story with only one fault. It never happened. How do we know that? It turns out by those strange accidents of history the man flying air cover for the "Maddox" and "Turner Joy" was a man who became a hero in Vietnam the hard way--Jim Stockdale. But in 1964 then Commander Stockdale was flying off the "Ticonderoga," the aircraft carrier 15 or 20 miles behind the "Maddox" and "Turner Joy," and he was to provide air cover. "Maddox" and "Turner Joy" at night radioed that they were under attack. They saw something on their radar scopes, probably returns off waves or something. Stockdale took off; he and his wingman flew out to the "Maddox" and "Turner Joy." They saw the wakes of the destroyers at night in the very phosphorescent sea but they did not see any torpedo boats. They went down to 500 feet and flew back and forth. Stockdale told me of getting salt water on his windshield looking for the torpedo boats because if they were there he needed to find them and he needed to sink them to protect the destroyers. There were no torpedo boats. He went back to the carrier and landed on the "Ticonderoga." He went directly to the communications room and sent a message to the national military command centre in Washington that no torpedo boats were out there. He said, "Don't do anything rash until you look for debris in the morning," and he went to bed thinking the crisis had been averted.

Wrong. The next morning the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was on the floor of the Congress anyway, put there by Robert MacNamara, and there was every indication the legal work drafting had been done as early as May.

Vietnam was a terrible place. Most people in the western world can recite the casualties. Fifty-eight thousand Americans were killed in Vietnam. I did not understand, however, until I became Secretary of the Air Force the breadth of that disaster. In America and the West, we were used to thinking if we go to war in such a place we would lose a few dozen aircraft. In Korea, a war that went on for three years, the UN powers, mainly the U.S., lost 139 aircraft. In Vietnam the United States Air Force alone lost 2,257 aircraft. The United States Navy lost a similar number of aircraft. The United States Army lost a similar number of helicopters. In this little book I wrote, I described it as a train wreck in the sky. It was an absolute disaster, not only on the ground, but in the air because we were totally unprepared to conduct an Asian war.

The good news is that we learned lessons, which is the mark of an intelligent society. The young officers who were flying into this terrible flak had the idea of smart weapons. They first developed laser designators to shine on bridges, so that late in the war they could release their weapons far out. These were the first generation of smart weapons. It is fitting that the officers, who did that, rose to take charge of the U.S. Air Force. The Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, John Jumper, was then a major and led one of the first raids in Vietnam with laser designators.

And so the 1970s unfolded. The 1970s were a terrible time in the West. In 1970 the Soviet Union clearly acquired nuclear superiority in terms of throw-away numbers of warheads. The U.S. was suffering from the aftermath of Watergate, the Vietnam War had caused terrible dissensions and difficulties in both of our countries, and in the U.S. the solution was thought to be detente. The Soviet Union was a superpower and the conventional wisdom was that they were really strong, they had got all these nukes, they were only spending 15 per cent of their GDP on defence, so they are going to go on forever. We had better make peace with them. Detente was a scheme of building trade relations one strand at a time in hopes that that would stabilize western civilization.

Now the interesting thing about the election of 1980 was that it was a change of sea-state. In writing this book I went back and talked to a lot of the Cold War presidents and their national security advisors. I had the good fortune of meeting or knowing all of them back to Eisenhower. It is interesting that over and over if you asked former presidents how they envisioned the Cold War ending, they would talk about their vision of the world and so forth, but when you got down to the third cup of coffee it really was: "Well Tom, my objective was to try and get through my watch without a nuclear war. My objective was to let containment work and sooner or later the Soviet Union was going to collapse but my job was to see to it that we didn't get into some terrible nuclear exchange because that would have been so ghastly."

None of them really knew how it was going to end and that is not to malign our predecessors: it was a tough job. In 1980 a man was elected to the presidency of the United States at a time when the economic chickens were coming home to roost in Russia. A man was elected to the presidency whose prime objective in seeking the presidency was to end the Cold War. In January of 1982 when he restructured his National Security Council and we came to work for him he turned to us and basically said: "I really want to end the Cold War. You fellows decide how it is we are going to do that. How are we going to prevail?"

We talked about such things as Whittaker Chambers' writings half a century before about whether when this century ended we were either going to be all free or all communist and his view was that we were going to prevail.

And so we put together a road map of how we were going to do that. We started with Reagan's direction that the Soviet economy was not 10-feet tall, unlike the savants who were saying they were spending 15 per cent of their GDP on defence. Outsiders were more of the view that it was more like 50 per cent--the President of the Rand Corporation, Jim Schlessinger and economists--and Reagan basically agreed with those people. And so we put together a plan--a war plan. It is how we were going to win. It had five parts and just to touch on them briefly:

One part was economic meaning there were no more credits. If Russians wanted to buy wheat they had to pay for it with cash.

Secondly military. Military technology. Not only were we going to proceed with trade, but develop smart weapons and ultimately the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) (Star Wars), which would be a very difficult technical challenge.

Thirdly, political, which was a polite word for the covert operations arm of the CIA to bring about change to stop bad things.

The diplomatic aspect of the war plan was to support our allies, not just by writing polite memoranda. We were going to be tight with our friends in the English-speaking world and we are going to support our other allies that were taking on the Soviet Union. Afghanistan of course was the prime example. We decided to support Afghanistan with troops, training, and ultimately with hardware that turned Afghanistan into the Soviet Union's Vietnam.

And lastly information warfare. The information age was just dawning and our conclusions were that we wanted to use the voice of America not just to broadcast weather reports. We wanted to talk to the Soviet people.

And of course, the ace up our sleeve was the great communicator himself. As we wrote down the plans for how to do all this and execute it as a document called Nsdd32, he announced his war plans, his goals, his plans to prevail, not in the Congress of the United States, but in Westminster. He wanted to go to the cradle of parliamentary democracy to make a speech because he was talking to the Russian people. He then reiterated those principles in what was known as the Evil Empire Speech. And again while that was made in Florida he was talking to the Russian people.

And what is really fun now is to talk to the people who were kids then in Kosakstan, Uzbekistan, Russia and Ukraine. In 1982-83 the Evil Empire Speech just flashed through the Soviet Union. The younger generation heard that the American president was not going to abandon the people behind the Iron Curtain.

The interesting thing about this war plan was the definition of victory because if you were going to get into a war it would be nice to think about how you were going to get back out again. The definition of victory in the Cold War, the Reagan definition, was not tanks rolling down Red Square. It was not setting Berlin on fire or Prague on any other place. The definition of victory was written by Thomas Jefferson. It was "to force the Soviet government to seek the consent of the governed." We knew once the Politburo started allowing elections it would be game over. And of course that's the way it turned out.

So it all ended in 1991. We all remember the coup, an important moment in history. We remember Gorbachev sitting down in Crimea under house arrest in August of 1991. Yeltzin was outside Parliament standing on a tank with a bull horn. The Vice-President Yanaev, who was inside the Kremlin holding a press conference, looked shaky and as if he needed a drink. And in Washington we were sweating bullets because the question was: "Who's got the cheget?" The cheget was the nuclear briefcase that contained a laptop that allowed the Soviet chief, whoever he was that day, to release nuclear weapons and to direct their use. And we're sitting in Washington fretting about how one of these guys was going to get control of the cheget and fire off a nuke.

It turned out we did not need to worry about that. Most amazingly, the Soviet general staff was concerned about this issue also. In August of 1991, the Soviet general staff met and they concluded a couple of things. One, the Americans were not going to do anything dumb at this time. They trusted us. And secondly, they did not trust their own political leaders. They did not think it was a good idea for various contending Politburo leaders to possibly have control of the nuclear button. And so in August of 1991, the Soviet general staff simply unplugged the Soviet president's nuclear briefcase. You can imagine how many court-martials would have ensued if that had not worked out. But they did the right thing and so the Cold War ended.

Perhaps after a lovely luncheon here we should end with a story on a lighter note about another philosopher. In the sixth grade a teacher asked the students to write essays about famous people. And a little girl in sixth grade picked Socrates. She wrote the life story of Socrates in three sentences. Socrates was a philosopher. He went around giving people advice. They poisoned him.

Thank you.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by Anne Fotheringham, Owner, Fotheringham Fine Art, Director The Canadiana Foundation and Director, The Empire Club of Canada.