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It Is Like A Western Movie: A Showdown Is In The Making

October 22, 2018

It Is Like A Western Movie: A Showdown Is In The Making

It has taken the US military/security complex 31 years to get rid of President Reagan’s last nuclear disarmament achievement—the INF Treaty that President Reagan and Soviet President Gorbachev achieved in 1987.

The Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was ratified by the US Senate on May 27, 1988 and became effective a few days later on June 1. Behind the scenes, I had some role in this, and as I remember what the treaty achieved was to make Europe safe from nuclear attack by Soviet short and intermediate range missiles, and to make the Soviet Union safe from US attack from short and intermediate range US nuclear missiles in Europe. By restricting nuclear weapons to ICBMs, which allowed some warning time, thus guaranteeing retaliation and non-use of nucular weapons, the INF Treaty was regarded as reducing the risk of an American first-strike on Russia and a Russian first-strike on Europe, strikes that could be delivered by low-flying cruise missiles with next to zero warning time.

When President Reagan appointed me to a secret Presidential committee with subpoena power over the CIA, he told the members of the secret committee that his aim was to bring the Cold War to an end, with the result that, in his words, “those God-awful nuclear weapons would be dismantled.” President Reagan, unlike the crazed neoconservatives, who he fired and prosecuted, saw no point in nuclear war that would destroy all life on earth. The INF Treaty was the beginning, in Reagan’s mind, of the elimination of nuclear weapons from military arsenals. The INF Treaty was chosen as the first start because it did not substantially threaten the budget of the US military/security complex, and actually increased the security of the Soviet military. In other words, it was something that Reagan and Gorbachev could get past their own military establishments. Reagan hoped that as trust built, more nuclear disarmament would proceed.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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