The Myth of Triumphalism by Beth A. Fischer;

Author:Beth A. Fischer;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2019-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

Moscow Calls Off the Arms Race

It is crystal clear that in the world we live in, the world of nuclear weapons, any attempt to use them to solve Soviet-American problems would spell suicide. Even if one country engages in a steady arms buildup while the other does nothing, the side that arms itself will all the same gain nothing.

Mikhail Gorbachev

Our concessions were the result of … logic: we were not going to fight a war, we wanted to end the Cold War, we wanted nuclear disarmament and the liquidation of nuclear arms. That was New Thinking.

Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s foreign affairs adviser

Triumphalists claim that the US military buildup—and the Strategic Defense Initiative in particular—compelled the Soviet Union to concede the Cold War and ultimately to collapse. Faced with the prospect of having to match increases in American strength, Moscow realized it did not have the financial or technical resources to keep up. The buildup forced the USSR to the brink of bankruptcy, thus leading it to surrender and finally to dissolve. The Strategic Defense Initiative “threw the Soviet leadership into a state of despair,” historian Andrew E. Busch explains. “SDI changed the strategic environment threatening the Soviets with the choice of an unacceptable strategic defeat or an unacceptable technological and economic burden. In the end, the pressures produced by SDI contributed as much as any single factor to the successful termination of the Cold War.”1 After leaving office, President Reagan himself suggested that the buildup and SDI were pivotal in ending the Cold War. “[I]f I had to choose the single most important reason, on the United States’ side, for the historic breakthroughs that were to occur … in the quest for peace and a better relationship with the Soviet Union,” he reflected in his memoirs, “I would say it was the Strategic Defense Initiative, along with the overall modernization of our military forces.”2

This story, however, is a myth. The Soviets never sought to match Reagan’s buildup. There was no massive increase in Soviet arsenals, nor was there a large, prolonged spike in Soviet defense expenditures in the 1980s. As the CIA belatedly discovered, the Soviet Union had not been building up its arsenal at an increasing clip during the late 1970s and 1980s. The rate at which the Kremlin procured new weapons peaked in 1975 and remained stable for the ensuing decade. This meant that the rate of growth in Soviet military spending (which had declined between 1970 and 1974) decelerated even more sharply between 1975 and 1984.3

Under Gorbachev there was a brief period in which the rate at which the Soviet Union procured new weapons ticked upward. For the most part, this reflected an earlier decision to modernize the ABM system around Moscow.4 It also included increased purchases of aircraft and missiles for what was hoped to be the final push to victory in Afghanistan. In addition, the Soviet habit of hanging on to obsolete equipment meant that the overall size of Soviet arsenals grew, increasing the costs for operations and management.

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