Transcript: Chapter 17

Narrator: For all their disagreements, Reagan shared with the anti-nuclear activists an abhorrence of nuclear weapons. If the bomb made Helen Caldicott worry about On the Beach or Carl Sagan about "nuclear winter," it made Ronald Reagan worry about Armageddon -- the Biblical prophecy of the end of the world.

Michael Deaver, Deputy Chief of Staff: I heard him on more than one occasion talk about Armageddon. And I think he believed in all of the prophecies in Revelations. When they talked about the metal horses or the iron horses and so forth, he would refer to those as the tanks. There was no difference in other words he said you could take those descriptions of what was going to happen and show that that was exactly what we were moving towards today ourselves unless we did something about it.

Morris: He was a passionate anti-nuclear idealist, Reagan. I don't know if this is understood as much as it should be. The very notion of mass destruction by nuclear weapons was deeply abhorrent to him.

Narrator: In July 1979 Reagan had visited the Air Defense Command, deep under Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. The trip reinforced his aversion to the conventional wisdom of the nuclear age -- that there is no defense against a missile attack, only the threat of retaliation.

Martin Anderson, Senior Adviser: On the plane coming home, I was discussing this with Reagan. He said, "Look, the president has two bad choices: if a nuclear missile is fired at the United States, you can either do nothing, let the missile land and explode and kill a lot of people; or, you can retaliate, and, you're told the missile is coming in, you get 10, 15 minutes before it hits. So, you'd push your own button and punish the aggressor. You know where the missile's coming from and maybe set off a nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union and have an Armageddon, destroy most of our civilization. And he said, both choices are bad choices. There has to be another way and we need to really explore the whole question of missile defense.

Narrator: The most controversial initiative of his presidency reflected the Ronald Reagan who had faith in America and in his own ability to rescue, and to prevail.

Reagan: I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive.

Narrator: To Reagan, defense was a moral imperative. But a daunting task to those who had to work out the details. Perhaps there would be satellites in space with computer-guided lasers that would zap enemy missiles. Most scientists dismissed Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI as unworkable. He was known to have a rich imagination.

Anthony Lewis, Columnist: I think Ronald Reagan really believed in SDI. I think he had this view that, I mean it was like the way he used to talk about events that had actually happened in the movies as if they really had happened. I think he was - like, you know, Star Wars - the movie.

Reagan: All right, Haydon, focus that inertia projector on them, and let 'em have it.

Narrator: The "Star Wars" in which Reagan starred was filmed in 1939.

Reagan: The inertia projector. It's a device for throwing electrical waves capable of paralyzing alternate and direct currents at their source.

Film Character: The inertia projector. It not only makes the United States invincible in war. But in so doing, promises to be the greatest force for world peace ever discovered.

Narrator: It was sometimes difficult for Ronald Reagan to distinguish fantasy from reality.

Lou Cannon, Biographer: He believed in this so strongly that he began to think that SDI was in existence when it wasn't even on the drawing board. That, that he so passionately, passionately wanted there to be a nuclear defense.

Morris: In a loose way it was a religious notion, the City of God surrounded by an inviolable barrier. The weapons of the heathen will bounce off our shield and shatter into fragments. We will be inviolable here beneath this shield. Shield, shield, he used the word shield a lot.

Narrator: Reagan presented SDI as a benign shield. The soothing rhetoric may have disguised another motive.

James Baker III, Chief of Staff : I think President Reagan saw SDI as being yet another pressure on the Soviets, as something that they could not withstand and I think he was right. Whether it would work or not, it was a heck of a challenge to the Soviet empire, which was having a very difficult time competing economically and otherwise.

Alexander Bessmertnykh, Foreign Ministry, USSR: The first reaction was really frightening. I mean people were just enormously frightened by that, by that program.

Pavel Palazchenko, Foreign Ministry, USSR: In part, I think, because it probably revealed in their minds the impossibility for the Soviet Union to really compete in that area because of our technological inferiority at that time.

Narrator: SDI became an expensive research project. Reagan's dream of making missiles obsolete was for the future. He still had to cope with their threat. Before he took office the Soviet Union had deployed highly mobile missiles that could wipe out Western Europe in minutes. NATO had decided to counter them with a new generation of US missiles but also to negotiate limits on all the missiles. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who had little interest in negotiating, suggested a negotiating position: if the Soviets pulled out all their missiles, NATO would not deploy any new ones. This so-called "zero option" was a very hard line. Reagan bought it.

Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense: The president said that that would be very good if we could get that and I said, "Yes, one of the arguments you're going to hear, Mr. President, is that ah the Soviets will never agree to this, and therefore, we shouldn't even propose it because that means we can't get an agreement."

Allen: Why should the Soviets have any incentive to remove what they already had in place? And the whole arms control community, the professional arms controllers, believed strongly that this was unfair. It would be unfair, unjust to ask the Soviets to do this. Besides everyone knew that the Soviets had this fundamental sense of insecurity, so we shouldn't exacerbate that sense of insecurity. That's exactly what Reagan wanted to do, was to exacerbate (laughs) the feeling of insecurity. It was very simple.

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