The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

In the decades since, partisans have debated whether to credit the Cold War’s end to Reagan’s hostile rhetoric and arms buildup in his first term or to his turn toward détente and disarmament in his second term. In fact, it took both—Reagan the super-hawk and Reagan the nuclear abolitionist—and, at least as important, the rise of Gorbachev as his collaborator. They were the most improbable leaders of their respective nations, and the great change could not have happened without the doubly improbable convergence of their reigns. Gorbachev needed to move swiftly if his reforms were to take hold; Reagan exerted the pressure that forced him to move swiftly and offered the rewards that persuaded his Kremlin rivals and skeptics to take the risks. History sometimes moves in serendipitous patterns. If Yuri Andropov’s kidneys hadn’t given out, or if Konstantin Chernenko’s heart had kept ticking a few years longer, Reagan’s bluster would have come to naught and might even have exacerbated tensions; the Cold War could have raged on for years. Similarly, if Reagan hadn’t been president in 1985—if Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale had defeated him, or if Reagan had died and his vice president, George H. W. Bush, had taken his place—Gorbachev would not have received the push that he needed; those other American politicians were too traditional, too cautious, too sensible, to have pushed for such radical arms reductions or to take Gorbachev’s radicalism at face value.