Concerned legislators are gravely pursuing allegations that the Pentagon faked a missile test in 1984 in order to persuade Congress to spend billions on President Ronald Reagan's favored "Star Wars" defense against Soviet missile attack.
Well, yes, deceiving Congress is serious business, and it has to be pursued. But there is another allegation also to pursue; that the first purpose of this "disinformation" operation was to panic the Soviets into spending tens of billions, in an effort doomed by their technological and economic weaknesses, to counter the American drive for a space-based anti-nuclear shield.If the first allegations about deceiving Congress is true, we are in the presence of a large scandal. If the second allegation about deceiving the Kremlin is true, we are in the presence of a great Cold War scam and, conceivably, an immense success of American policy.
Both these possibilities may have some truth. If further disclosure bears them out, we would face an intriguing dilemma characteristic of the Cold War time: Whether figuratively to spurn a great international benefit because it was obtained by means regarded as disreputable at home.
Behind the hint of misconduct - vigorously denied by Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger - lies the hint that Weinberger and his Pentagon team took a huge risk and won a huge prize.
An immediate risk was that a phony intercept would sweep the United States into false confidence and an imprudent investment in "Star Wars." A larger risk was that in pretending that an American nonnuclear missile could hit a Soviet nuclear missile in space, the United States would be playing to Soviet paranoia, cranking up the arms race and providing Soviet hard-liners with fresh evidence of American hostility and aggressiveness.
Nobody who paid attention during that period will forget Moscow's resentment and rage over "Star Wars," extreme even by Cold War standards.
But it also happened that as the Soviets moved to counter the American program with their own, they put an unbearable extra load on their technology and their budget. Their economy and then their whole society began to collapse.
Out went Leonid Brezhnev. In came Mikhail Gorbachev. The rest is the chapter of history called The End of the Cold War.
The Reaganites are not - not yet, anyway - making the grandiose claim that they set a trap for the Kremlin, and it worked; Weinberger, for one, denies all. The truth aside, they seem to be locked in by considerations of secrecy and discretion, although these are hardly unbreakable.
Moreover, the claim may not be justified, or fully justified, since many other weights were pressing: not just a single missile test and the Star Wars program but Reagan's whole hard-line foreign policy, including ideological, political and military challenge around the world.
Nor is the hard-line view the only one that must be considered. There is another, moderate school; President Clinton's Soviet adviser, Strobe Talbott, was a leader of it in his previous incarnation as a Time magazine editor.
This school believes that more important in hastening the demise of Soviet communism were (1) the ways the reform impulse was playing out in the public and private realms of Soviet society and (2) the opportunities for conciliation and accommodation that the West was opening up at the same time.
Reagan himself was a hard-liner in the sense that he thought the Soviet regime was economically, politically and morally close to buckling. (Moderates, rejecting the premise of imminent Soviet/communist vulnerability, thought it could muddle through.)
Still, Reagan does not seem one to launch Star Wars, or to fake a missile test, simply as a gambit to suck the Kremlin into futile, draining expenditures on its own missile defense. He was a true believer - in space-based nonnuclear defense and then in the abolition of all nuclear arms.
In 1962 - permit a digression - I was in a group that interviewed then-Kremlin leader Nikita Khrushchev. He took the occasion to boast that the Soviet Union was building a missile to "hit a fly in space." He was wrong; never did the Kremlin accomplish that feat. But it was a revealing illustration or so I later thought, of Soviet aspirations and apprehensions alike.
In 1984 it might not have been far-fetched for Americans to imagine they could impress a new crop of Soviet leaders by "hitting a fly in space."