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Anatoly Kravtsov was a Soviet army colonel in March 1983. Operating
from an office in Moscow, his job was ‘procuring surface-to-air missiles
– I’m not allowed to say which ones’. The work absorbed him and Star Wars
came as a complete surprise.

As a soldier, he had no idea what effect the US proposal to develop
an impregnable defence system against Soviet missiles would have at the
negotiating table of the Cold War warriors: ‘I was blindfolded in the political
sense,’ he recalls. But as an engineer, he had no doubts that the proposal
was nonsense. ‘You couldn’t possibly develop a system to catch all the missiles
– we had so many and could have built more.’

And even if American scientists thought they had developed such a system,
Kravtsov and his colleagues questioned how they would guarantee the security
promised. ‘You could test elements of the system, but that’s all,’ he says.
‘Even with surface-to-air missile systems – simple in comparison with SDI
– we knew that model tests couldn’t replace full-scale tests.’

To emphasise his point, Kravtsov cites two episodes that he claims highlighted
the vulnerability of the Soviet Union’s own air defence system: Mathias
Rust’s landing of a light aircraft in Red Square in 1987 and the shooting
down of a South Korean Boeing 747 in 1983. ‘Rust was tracked then lost,’
he says, ‘and it took us two and a half hours to shoot down the Boeing.’
There was only one purpose for SDI, he says with hindsight: ‘It was an
excuse for military complexes on both sides to milk their governments.’

Similar sentiments, albeit couched more diplomatically in an era of
warm dialogue between Moscow and Washington, come from Yevgeni Velikhov,
a vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow who was at
the heart of Soviet politics throughout the 1980s and remains an influential
figure in East-West relations today. While Velikhov still condemns SDI as
a bad idea, he now seems convinced that Reagan’s motives at least were genuine.
‘At the time, I didn’t appreciate the sincerity of Reagan himself,’ says
Velikhov. Sincerity? ‘Yes. Today, after many discussions over the years,
I’m good friends with him . . . and I think he was sincere with his antinuclear
stance and with his idea of defence. But of course, at this time, the idea
was terribly wrong.’

SDI was technically flawed and politically destabilising, says Velikhov.
‘It is impossible to build a defence against the strong nuclear forces of
the Soviet Union – or of the United States. It only accelerates the arms
race and . . . stops the arms control process.’

But this analysis, which Velikhov says formed the basis of an article
he wrote for The Washington Post a few months after Reagan’s speech, was
met with incredulity in the US. ‘Kissinger told me: ‘You are wrong; you
are Russian; you are Soviet; you’re always wrong. And completely illogical
because you say Star Wars is nonsense, (that it is) technically impossible
to stop a real first strike, but in parallel you say it is very dangerous.
It is one or the other; but not both’.’ Velikhov still responds to such
arguments with an analogy involving a toy gun. ‘If you go into a shop and
buy a cheap, plastic revolver that is technically useless, you’ll not kill
anyone. But drawing that gun in front of a guard at a post is very dangerous.’

Velikhov was already well versed in the arguments for and against turning
space into a battleground: ‘My first collision with Star Wars was not in
1983. It was much earlier, at the beginning of the 1970s.’ Russian scientists,
and in particular Gersh Budker, were then beginning to talk about using
particle accelerators in space to generate neutron beams that would allow
conflicts to be sorted out away from the Earth, he says. They thought they
would be doing the world a service. ‘Budker was not only a very brilliant
physicist, he was a dreamer,’ says Velikhov, recalling how Budker wanted
to see war moved out into space, so that there would be no war on Earth.
Velikhov describes it as ‘a big dream, but not reality’, and not even the
Soviet military establishment was convinced.

Much more serious, says Velikhov, was a proposal at the end of the 1970s
from a more influential member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Vladimir
Chelomey, the physicist credited with the design of the SS-11 and SS-19
intercontinental ballistic missiles. He came up with an idea of a network
of orbiting satellites that would discharge missiles into the paths of attacking
warheads, a concept that remains an essential ingredient of the strategic
defence plans of the US. ‘Chelomey proposed (a Soviet version of) Brilliant
Pebbles to solve all the problems of strategic defence,’ says Velikhov.
‘It took almost two years to stop this because he went directly to (Leonid)
µþ°ù±ð³ú³ó²Ô±ð±¹.’

Velikhov was a member of the commission subsequently convened by the
former Soviet leader to assess Chelomey’s proposal. ‘We analysed all the
problems of Brilliant Pebbles, the problem of early warning, the problem
of control and command. It was my preparation study – and for 1983 I was
very ready.’

Something in the air

The year before, he says, he had had an inkling that ‘something was
happening in the United States – that was my feeling’. But after meetings
with Edward Teller and other scientists close to the Reagan administration,
he was reassured by a general consensus that no plans for the development
of space weapons were being hatched.

At the same time, he was chairing the Committee on International Security
and Arms Control (CISAC), a joint commission of the National Academy of
Sciences in Washington and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, established in
1980. He recalls that 1983 ‘was a very important year for us (because it
saw) the completion of an agreement not to put weapons in space’. The agreement
won broad support in the US Congress and, after some modifications, from
Yuri Andropov, Brezhnev’s successor, says Velikhov. He notes that both parties
subsequently called for moratoria on the development of antisatellite weapons,
and he still reflects proudly on what he sees as a remarkable achievement
for a nongovernmental initiative.

But Velikhov claims that by March 1983, only days before Reagan’s speech,
his doubts about the chances for the peaceful exploitation of space resurfaced.
He says he again asked scientists in Washington whether the president was
about to propose ‘something like a big antiballistic missile system in space.
They said: ‘No, no. It’s nonsense’.’

Velikhov puts his apparent prescience in March 1983 down to nothing
more sinister than common sense. The president’s re-election campaign was
getting under way, and some new policies were needed to take to the nation.
‘One possibility for his administration was to go for real, drastic disarmament,’
says Velikhov. But Reagan’s closest advisers, notably Caspar Weinberger,
the Secretary of Defense, and Richard Perle, the Assistant Secretary, were
‘completely against any agreement with the Soviet Union, and not ready
for any radical steps’, he recalls. The alternative was the idea of strong
defence. ‘There were only two choices,’ he notes. So he was not surprised,
he says, when Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative on 23 March.

Military hawks in Moscow immediately called for the development of a
comparable defence system for the Soviet Union. Velikhov says he opposed
this strategy, and wanted to publish an analysis of its flaws: ‘But, at
this time, publication was impossible because everything was classified.’
Instead, Dimitri Ustinov, the Soviet defence minister, appointed him to
chair a commission to evaluate the threat posed by SDI and propose a response.
Although the commission’s conclusions were not published and remain classified,
says Velikhov, he was still determined to air his views. The result, a co-authored
book entitled Space Weapons: In the Name of Strategic Stability, earned
him the enduring reputation of traitor among Soviet officials less keen
to build bridges with their counterparts in the US, he says, even though
the book drew only on ‘the first physical principles, not on any sensitive
or classified data’. The aim was to demonstrate a very simple idea, he says:
‘Between two opponents with strong nuclear forces, it’s impossible to build
defences because countermeasures are so simple. And we gave some examples
of countermeasures.’

Despite opposition, this work led eventually to the strategy, promulgated
by Mikhail Gorbachev after he became Soviet leader in March 1985, of ‘antisymmetrical,
or asymmetrical’ defence. The Soviet Union was not going to compete with
the US in a symmetrical way, matching military development for military
development, which had been the traditional approach, says Velikhov: ‘We
make a step, America makes two, we make three, America makes four.’ Instead,
it would do only enough to negate the current level of development of the
threat. This might have meant designing reflectors against laser weapons,
for instance, or building enough missiles to overwhelm a more diffuse defence
system, although Velikhov regarded this latter option as comparatively expensive
and one that was eventually circumscribed by international agreements on
the reduction of nuclear stockpiles.

Tactical politick

The approach had two main benefits, says Velikhov. It was a cut-price
but effective response to an indeterminable threat, and it minimised any
political advantage that the Reagan administration might draw from an escalation
in Soviet weapons development. In the end, claims Velikhov, it proved even
more frugal than he had imagined.

‘Because the threat never developed, we didn’t need to make any real
countermeasures,’ he recalls. ‘We needed only to spend some time and money
on understanding the scientific part of the job, not on the production.’
In the past, he notes: ‘The main mistake in Russia had always been that
we responded to threats by building as fast as possible something big and
expensive.’ He cites as an example the antiballistic missile defence system
built around Moscow to protect the city.

Velikhov sums up as ‘nonsense’ the huge spending on high-energy lasers
that dominated the Star Wars programme. He totally dismisses the notion
that the free-electron or X-ray lasers could ever serve as strategic weapons
(‘Blinded by the light’, this issue). Moscow did not respond with a similar
programme to develop lasers for space, he insists: ‘We developed lasers,
but mostly for tactical purposes . . . which is what the Americans are returning
to today.’ By this he means the comparatively low-energy lasers capable
of destroying sensors and blinding military personnel on terrestrial battlefields.

‘We continued to work on the land-based interceptors and achieved good
results . . . and on radar,’ he says. One of Moscow’s problems, he adds,
was the ‘excessive secrecy’ surrounding developments in the Soviet Union
that the Pentagon used to its advantage. US claims that the Soviet Union
already had lasers capable of destroying satellites could be countered only
by taking American officials on guided tours of the alleged weapons sites,
which was something Velikhov began organising from 1986. ‘Military glasnost
was very important to destroy this crazy picture of a very strong Russian
Star Wars preparation.’

Velikhov claims that Gorbachev accepted his counsel until the Soviet
leader ‘moved to the right’ at the beginning of the 1990s. By then the US
had already started to reduce its spending on Star Wars as political changes
in Eastern Europe and an economic recession began to dominate the world
stage.

Cash contortions

Moscow has watched Washington get through $32 billion on SDI since
1983, while investing little itself in a response, according to Velikhov.
Thus the idea that SDI was simply a ploy to hasten the economic demise of
the Soviet Union makes him chuckle: ‘It was a good idea, but really we were
quite capable of bankrupting ourselves. It wasn’t necessary.’ He is equally
dismissive of Washington’s financial management in view of the way it spent
so much on SDI and achieved so little: ‘There’re easier ways of scratching
your left ear than by bringing your right hand round the back of your head,’
he says from within a demonstration of the physical contortion.

His main concern now is to help guide the American administration away
from its commitment to the scaled down version of SDI, known as Global Protection
Against Limited Strikes. Instead, he advocates an international commitment
to an alternative defence strategy known as the Global Protection System,
which Moscow proposed last year and Washington is currently evaluating.
Both systems offer protection against missile attacks. The main difference
is that GPALS would be run by and for the US and its allies, says Velikhov.
In GPS, ‘command and control would belong to the international community’.

He also insists that GPALS threatens to undermine the Antiballistic
Missile Treaty of the early 1970s, which restricts the strategic deployment
of antiballistic missile systems. GPS, on the other hand, could be given
a legal status outside of this bilateral treaty between Russia and the US.
‘If we’re speaking of joint control and command and joint development, it
is not under the ABM Treaty because joint means joint – it is not against
America, not against Russia. We’re not against the French, not against the
Ukrainians.’ Who, he asks, could blame Ukraine for being reluctant to give
up the nuclear arsenal on its territory? At the moment, who can it turn
to for protection? ‘Would NATO protect Ukraine against Russia? I don’t think
so,’ he says. ‘In such cases, Ukraine needs protection and if it is international
protection, Ukraine I think may be happy.’

Another drawback of GPALS, says Velikhov, is that it is fuelling resentment
in Moscow. Despite the Pentagon’s claims that the system is designed only
to counter the odd rogue missile launched by accident or by terrorists with
modest arsenals, it is providing Russia’s military hawks with ammunition
to press for more spending on weapons development.

Velikhov regards last June’s bilateral talks at Camp David on reducing
nuclear stockpiles as a big step in the right direction. And he remains
optimistic about the prospect of future agreements between the nuclear
superpowers. Before the meeting at Camp David, he says: ‘I discussed with
President Yeltsin . . . this idea of the Global Protection System.’ And
on returning from Washington late last month, Velikhov was encouraged that
there seemed to be some progress on GPS. Although American officials were
not ready to discuss the initiative, he notes: ‘I spoke with the new people
in the Pentagon and they said: ‘Another month’.’ He feels the US and Russia
must reach a compromise before the next review conference for the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1995. Otherwise, he says, there is little hope
of persuading nations without nuclear missiles to stop seeking them.

As Velikhov strides the international stage offering compromise and
cooperation, some compatriots in Moscow are trying to ensure that his promises
do not look empty.

In the Russian parliament, another army colonel is trying to come to
terms with the political changes that have overwhelmed his world. Alexander
Piskunov is on extended leave to serve as a deputy for Plesetsk in the Archangel
district, a region on the White Sea coast that encompasses his military
base. Piskunov’s job was to test space reconnaissance systems and strategic
missile forces; he expects to return to the base in 1995 when his five-year
term as a deputy is up, but hopes that the job he did for more than two
decades has become redundant by them.

As deputy chairman of the parliament’s Committee on Defence and Security,
Piskunov is charged with reducing Russia’s military forces from 2.4 million
to 1.5 million people by 1995. He is enthusiastic: ‘We’ll achieve the target
sooner . . . within 18 months.’ The days of military forces being used as
political pawns are over: ‘There’s no longer any need for lines of soldiers
along the borders. We can’t afford them . . . and there are better ways
of providing stability and security for Russia.’

The change is remarkable and welcome, he admits. He used to have nightmares,
he says, about nuclear war. ‘Of course, I considered that I might have to
fire the missiles . . . and Chernobyl has shown how terrible it could be.’
But would he have pressed the button if his commanders had instructed him
to? ‘That’s a hypothetical question.’