PD-59 was based on a key political judgment about the USSR: it assumed that America’s enemies in the Kremlin valued the Soviet Communist Party’s continued control of Eurasia more than the lives of its own citizens.52 To this end, PD-59 tried to steer away from the retaliatory killing of millions of Soviet citizens envisioned in MAD by creating a kind of wishlist of political and military targets, including strikes on the Soviet political leadership in its bunkers as well as on a host of other locations ranging from military installations to important economic assets. American leaders had always been reluctant to adopt the same stoic approach taken by the Soviets regarding nuclear war, not least because of the moral horror involved with targeting civilians. Now, however, the United States would attempt to obviate this moral nightmare by sparing innocent Soviet civilians and targeting instead the guilty members of the Party and their police, security, and military forces. Nuclear deterrence would no longer rest on the promise to exterminate the citizens of the Soviet Union, but instead to eradicate the Soviet regime, root and branch, with Soviet leaders henceforth on notice that no matter what happened in a nuclear conflict, the outcome would include their own deaths and the end of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union once and for all.
The actual execution of the strategy envisioned in PD-59 was problematic to the point of absurd.53 Targeting was bedeviled by the same problems encountered in the “no-cities” concept nearly two decades earlier; specifically, it was impossible to strike so many targets without wiping out most of the USSR in the process. The scope and number of targets slated for destruction rendered the whole idea of a “limited” nuclear war a gross contradiction. In reality, PD-59 was never actually meant to be a functioning strategy. Rather, it was a psychological gamble, an attempt to reestablish a more stable deterrent by convincing Moscow that the United States was not mesmerized by MAD, and planting in Soviet minds the possibility that American leaders were as willing as their Soviet counterparts to consider a protracted nuclear war.
The Soviets were apoplectic. After years of U.S. policies that stressed the impossibility of nuclear war, suddenly an American administration was planning and arming for one. Worse, many senior Soviet policymakers privately realized they were now facing a problem that they had largely brought on themselves through their own aggressiveness and recklessness. In later years, leading Soviet figures such as top Soviet foreign policy advisor Georgii Arbatov would admit that the Kremlin was reaping what it had so carelessly sown:
The thought of restraint, of moderation in military affairs, was absolutely alien to us. Possibly it was even our deeply rooted inferiority complex that constantly drove us to catch up with the United States in nuclear arms…. During those years we were enthusiastically arming ourselves, like binging drunks, without any apparent political need…. We, in essence, became participants in the “dismantling” of détente, actually helping the enemies of détente in the USA and other NATO countries to start the second “cold war.” The negative aspects of our foreign and domestic policies in those years had an obvious influence on the constellation of political forces and on the course of political struggles in the USA and other western nations; we strengthened the position of the right and the far right, even militaristic, circles.
“It must be acknowledged,” Arbatov concluded ruefully, “that Reagan, along with a whole cohort of the most conservative figures, came to power [in the 1980 election] not without our help.”54
But there was much more to PD-59 than electoral politics. In rethinking nuclear doctrine in 1979 and 1980, the Americans were trying to solve a puzzle that they would face again in the twenty-first century while trying to deal with ruthless regimes such as North Korea: what deters a state that does not seem to value the lives of its own citizens? Since all of the answers involving nuclear weapons led to the indiscriminate killing of millions of people, none of them were acceptable. Even the most hardened realists were uncomfortable with the moral implications of MAD, regardless of how despicable or brutal the character of the enemy regime. In 1979, Henry Kissinger foreshadowed his later call for eliminating nuclear weapons when he grimly declared that targeting civilians in a general nuclear war would produce more than 100 million casualties, and that “such a degree of devastation is not a strategic doctrine,” but “an abdication of moral and political responsibility.”55
In a sense, PD-59 foreshadowed Ronald Reagan’s early antagonism toward the Kremlin’s leaders. Both Carter and Reagan focused nuclear strategy on the eradication of the Soviet regime itself, almost personalizing nuclear war as punishment for the sins of the Politburo and the Soviet high command while attempting to spare the lives of the Russians and other Soviet peoples who may not have been willing participants in Moscow’s aggression. Although the term was not used at the time or in the same context, PD-59 represented nuclear “regime change.” PD-59 made clear that an attack on the United States might not mean the end of the world, but it would definitely mean the end of Soviet Communism. The Soviet leadership was so alarmed by this turn in American strategy that by the time of the 1980 U.S. election they actually preferred Reagan over Carter, thinking that things could not possibly get worse.56
They were, of course, wrong. They had terribly misjudged Reagan, who not only accepted the fundamental logic of PD-59, but expanded upon it.
The Second (and Last) Cold War
For most of his presidency, Ronald Reagan was misunderstood by his detractors as being overly enamored of nuclear weapons and too willing to think about using them. The truth was the exact opposite: he viscerally hated them, and wanted their complete elimination. (Journalist John Newhouse was the first to buck this conventional wisdom, when he dubbed Reagan “The Abolitionist” in a 1989 New Yorker article.)57 But Reagan hated Communism almost as much as he hated nuclear arms, and until the nuclear-free utopia arrived, the fortieth president’s innate distrust of the Soviet Union led him to stake deterrence on unarguable American nuclear superiority.
In a famous 1982 speech in London, Reagan asked whether civilization was destined to “perish in a hail of fiery atoms.” For his part, Reagan intended to forestall that outcome by making it clear to Moscow that the dangerous—and in his view, morally indefensible—days of MAD were over. In the wake of a global Soviet expansion into the Third World dating back to the last days of President Gerald Ford’s incomplete presidency and the later Soviet humiliations of President Carter, “détente” had become a term of scorn among conservative Republicans as well as a fair number of defense-minded Democrats, many of whom later served in Reagan’s two administrations. Gone was any sense of managing some sort of arms control regime with the Soviet Union; if the Soviets wanted a second, more intense Cold War and a real military competition with the West, Reagan, backed by a new slate of more energetic and anti-Soviet leaders across much of NATO, would give them one.
Reagan and his advisors sought to neutralize the Kremlin’s perception that it had gained the psychological upper hand in the arms race, and to that end his officials played a tough game of public diplomacy about nuclear war. Sometimes, these moves were over the top: Undersecretary of Defense Thomas Jones, for example, calmly told the Los Angeles Times in 1982 that “with enough shovels” to dig crude shelters before a nuclear attack, “everyone’s going to make it.”58 Reagan and his lieutenants sensed, correctly, that after the 1970s the Soviets were increasingly convinced that they were winning the Cold War. What Reagan did not understand, however, was how insecure the Soviet leaders were about the USSR’s position in the global competition against the United States, nor the degree to which his policies were inadvertently convincing the Kremlin that the United States was spoiling for a nuclear fight.
In early 1983, Reagan completed what Carter had started, and finally discarded the cornerstone of MAD. Seizing the same arguments made by the Soviets themselves in the 1960s, he embraced the possibility of national missile defenses and argued that constructing them was a moral imperative. Reagan upended the East-West nuclear competition by speaking of a future based not on deterrence