← The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
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- [00:00]
Lecture Narrator
Foreign.
- [00:09]
Jeremiah Regan
Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
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Juan Davalos
And I'm Juan Davalos. We're back with American Foreign Policy Lecture 7, the Nuclear Threat.
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Jeremiah Regan
Nuclear weapons represent a substantial change in the way of war and the threats that human beings pose to one another. But I'm going to take umbrage with Christopher Nolan calling Oppenheimer the most important or most consequential man in world history. Yes, nuclear weapons give vast power to those who possess them. But if we look at classical philosophy, the Bible, early American political theory, or common sense, we know that human beings are always looking for ways to get things from other human beings. And one of the ways that you get things from other human beings is to harm them physically or kill them. Nuclear weapons are an expansion upon that principle or that human tendency, but it's not a creation of a new human tendency. And you could look at the evolution of warfare, from swords and spears and axes to slings and bows, that's a change. The invention of gunpowder, steam power, and ships, all of these change the paradigm for what is necessary for human beings to defend themselves from others. And nuclear weapons are an acceleration of that trend. But they are just another marker in the way that human beings can destroy one another.
- [01:28]
Juan Davalos
Yeah, it does create a change in the way nations, especially nuclear nations, relate to each other. Because once America develops the nuclear bomb and then the Soviets and then other countries follow after that. You have this idea that every nation now wants to have nuclear weapons and they want to have them in a large quantity. And that leads to the nuclear race between the US and the Soviets. And it really has a huge effect on foreign policy because of the threat that it poses. It is a threat that is massive. You know, if we would get into a nuclear war, which thankfully hasn't happened yet, it would be life changing.
- [02:14]
Jeremiah Regan
And it's something that once Pandora's box is opened, it can't really be closed again. We're not going to uninvent nuclear weapons, just like we're not going to uninvent gunpowder. And you can hardly blame other nations for wanting to protect themselves and their citizens by having equivalents in their armaments. So the question becomes, how are these things regulated and by whom? And that is the same kind of question human beings have faced since the advent of politics.
- [02:39]
Juan Davalos
And it demands, I think, much more serious thought in foreign policy and the responsibility a nation has to respect the sovereignty of other nations, because a lot of the incentives that other nations have to get nuclear weapons is to protect themselves from empires coming and meddling with their internal affairs.
- [02:58]
Jeremiah Regan
These kind of questions are very complicated and very important, and we're blessed to be able to work with scholars who have dedicated their lives to becoming knowledgeable about these things and then sharing it with you for free. But as you know, it is not free for us to make these courses or even this podcast. We don't accept any federal or state funding, no government money at all. Another way to think about that is we don't send the government to take money from you without your consent. We politely ask you for it. So if you feel compelled to help us continue educating Americans to continue providing access to this type of deep learning, please consider supporting us at Hillsdale Edu course to make a tax deductible donation. That is Hillsdale Edu course.
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Juan Davalos
Now let's turn to lecture number seven of American foreign policy, the nuclear threat.
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Lecture Narrator
Now, we gotta talk about something we've already brought up, but go into a little bit more detail. And that is nuclear weapons. Now, for four years, the United States had what is referred to in hindsight as the nuclear monopoly. That is, from 1945 to 1949, nobody else had these weapons. Ronald Reagan liked to say, as proof of America's good intentions and essential benevolence as a great power, that, look, when we had the nuclear monopoly in four years, we didn't use it to conquer any other country or to get an unfair advantage.
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Historical Audio Clips / Quotes
Our military power was at its peak and we alone had the atomic weapon. But we didn't use this wealth and this power to bully. We used it to rebuild. We raised up the war.
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Lecture Narrator
Now, the Soviet Union first tested a bomb, as I said, in 1949. I say this not to disparage anyone. I just point out as a fact that one of the reasons the United States created the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, was so called to connect the dots. That is to say, it is believed that the United States had sufficient information in advance of the Pearl harbor attack to have known that the attack was coming, but didn't put all of those pieces of information together in a central place where it could all be analyzed and the dots could be connected and the full picture seen. It's not like the United States wasn't collecting intelligence. Before the founding of the CIA, there were intelligence agencies throughout the government, principally in the military departments. It's that there wasn't one place where it was all gathered and looked at by the same pairs of eyes. Again, I mention this not to cast aspersions, but it is a fact that the CIA was meant to see things coming. And one of the first big intelligence failures of the Cold War era was that it estimated that a Soviet bomb was would take any number of years to materialize. And in 1949 the Soviets detonated one well before the CIA predicted that would happen. At any rate, the nuclear monopoly, so called, was broken. Now the United States still had a great advantage. It had a four year head start, it had much larger nuclear infrastructure, it could build bombs faster and it had a larger stockpile. It also had great advantages in delivery capability. Now this is important because it's one thing to build a bomb. I'm not saying that's easy. It's actually somewhat difficult, right? But your bomb is only as useful as your delivery system. If you can't get it to the place that you want to hit, you can't effectively use it. And so having a bomb isn't decisive unless you have the planes that can drop it or the missiles that can carry it. It would go too far to say that nobody had missiles in 1949. We know that Germany had developed the V2 rocket before World War II ended, but nobody had missiles, missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads across the globe. That wouldn't emerge for more than another decade. So throughout the 50s, the policy of the United States was one of using its nuclear superiority as a hedge against Soviet conventional superiority. And this is also stated pretty clearly in NSC 68 and it's made official policy by the Eisenhower administration. The Soviet Union, by virtue of being an unfree country, could maintain a very large conscription based army and could spend up to a third of its gross domestic product on the military. Public opinion might not have liked it, people might have privately grumbled, but nobody was going to protest publicly lest they end up in a Siberian Gulag. And public opinion really didn't have much of an impact over government decisions. Now the Eisenhower administration had a doctrine for this given by its Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. Incidentally, the man after whom Dulles airport outside Washington D.C. is named and whose brother happened to be Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA. How'd you like to be their mother? In a speech in the early Eisenhower administration, John Foster Dulles announced the doctrine of massive retaliation. That is to say, we acknowledge our conventional inferiority. Anything the Soviets might try to do conventionally, we reserve the right to respond with nuclear weapons. And we reserve the right essentially to take even the smallest provocation and make it the occasion for an all out retaliation. Now again, this is not a course on nuclear strategy. That could be an Entire course in and of itself, massive retaliation gets modified by the Kennedy administration as flexible response, and so on down the line. I don't want to go into every twist and turn of nuclear strategy. The point is though, that throughout the Cold War, the United States and the west maintained a deliberate policy of conventional inferiority because they thought conventional parity would be too expensive or and sought to make that up at first with the nuclear edge, but later on also with a technological edge, with superior firepower, innovation, better weapons, better systems, and so on and so forth. For the most part, the history of the Cold War is the history of containment. Holding it remained the strategy. There were ups and downs. There were times when the United States was more aggressive about containment, and there were times when the United States was much less aggressive. And I would say that the level of US policymakers commitment to containment, or we might say to the measures required to maintain containment, depended on the fortunes of American foreign policy overseas. And they depended on the outcome of some big events. Two big events in the early 1960s were the second Berlin crisis. Remember, the first was the attempted siege of West Berlin by the Soviets in 1948 that was relieved by the Berlin airlift. The second Berlin crisis was when Nikita Khrushchev built the famous Berlin Wall, brick.
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Historical Audio Clips / Quotes
By brick until no contact, but a friendly wave by night by tunnels. Somehow a few still managed to make their escape, though others failed and fell, riddled with East German bull.
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Lecture Narrator
The next great crisis was the following year, the Cuban Missile Crisis. A famous incident in Cold War history and American history that a series of.
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Historical Audio Clips / Quotes
Offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.
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Lecture Narrator
Now, Cuba, as I'm sure you all know, is an island about 90 miles south of Florida in the Caribbean. A rather large island. Cuba had been for some time dominated by a dictator, but a non ideological dictator. The type of dictator commonly referred to as a kleptocrat. Klepto being a word that means theft or thief. Right. So the kind of person who steals from the treasury, who enriches himself, but otherwise lets people go about their business? More or less. Yes, he harasses political dissidents, often takes political prisoners. But this is also not the kind of person who builds concentration camps for ideological reasons or goes on mass murder campaigns against his subjects. This is not a nice man, necessarily, not a good man, not a man whose regime you'd want to live under. But it is someone whose regime you would prefer to live under than to live under that of a communist dictator. Well, he is in fact overthrown by another tyrant Fidel Castro, who becomes the communist tyrant of Cuba, and the Kennedy administration opposes. Castro wants to see that revolution reversed, tries various things to reverse it using the CIA.
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Historical Audio Clips / Quotes
This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba.
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Lecture Narrator
Some of these attempts have a kind of grimly humorous aspect to them. They became revealed years later in the 1970s when Congress exposed a lot of CIA abuses, including attempted assassinations of Castro. My two favorites of which are they tried to pass to him exploding cigars. He was a big cigar smoker that was supposed to take him out, did not. And also he liked scuba diving. And they gave him apparently a wetsuit laced with some kind of poison. And that didn't kill him either. Anyway, if you doubt me because you think these stories are too ridiculous, look up the reports from the Church Committee hearings yourself. Well, in 1962, the Russians, working with the Cuban government, began the installation of medium range nuclear missiles in Cuba that had very short flight times to targets on the eastern seaboard, including Washington, well in advance.
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Historical Audio Clips / Quotes
The Strategic Air Command had been put on super alert. Global disbursement and redeployment increased in flight readiness.
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Lecture Narrator
This severely tipped the nuclear balance of power or balance of terror in the Soviets favor and against us. And the Kennedy administration considered it intolerable. But they had a problem. How to stop it. Well, one way was simply to attack the island, invade it or bomb it. But that would have been considered, if not necessarily under international law, certainly in international public opinion, an unprovoked attack, a kind of American Pearl harbor against Cuba. Another option was a naval blockade. You surround the island and you don't let any ships get in. Remember we talked about blockades and how the American founders were very worried about the possibility of a blockade going all the way back to the immediate post revolutionary period. Well, the problem with the blockade is that formally under international law and under the UN Charter, it's an act of war. The United States didn't want to be seen starting a war, so they came up with a clever solution. They executed a naval blockade, but they gave it another name. They called it a quarantine.
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Historical Audio Clips / Quotes
Ships moved out to establish a quarantine line through which no foreign vessel could pass on scene, while a second task force, including attack carriers such as the Enterprise, went into position for instant reaction should the defense of Guantanamo become necessary.
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Lecture Narrator
The short answer is it worked and the Soviets backed down. Although interestingly, part of the story that we didn't know until some 25 years later is that the Kennedy administration negotiated A secret deal with the Soviet ambassador. In exchange for the Soviets not delivering the missiles to their newly built installations in Cuba, the United States would withdraw medium range nuclear missiles from Turkey. Robert Kennedy, who is the one who made the deal with the Soviet ambassador, neglected to tell the Soviet ambassador was that the missiles being withdrawn from Turkey were considered obsolete by the American military establishment and were scheduled to be pulled out of there six months later. Anyway, the next major event in the Cold War is of course Vietnam. Again the subject perhaps of its own course that we can't go into now. The south was struggling against continued Northern military pressure and simultaneously against a Northern backed insurrectionary war in South Vietnam. And so the United States committed forces again, in keeping with the containment theory, prevent Soviet expansionism and in keeping with a newer theory known as the domino theory, the notion that if you let one non communist state fall to Communist invasion or subversion, it's like the first domino going down in a chain of dominoes and many may quickly fall thereafter. Well, we know the outcome of the Vietnam War. The United States troop commitment peaked around 1968, as did its casualty count. The history of the Vietnam War, as I said, is very complicated. The US Policymakers who fought it in the Kennedy, but especially in the Lyndon Johnson administration and later in the Nixon administration, thought that they were upholding the principle of containment, preventing further expansion of communist powers. I would submit to you, and here I only follow other military historians from whom I learned the following arguments, that the Vietnam War was really two wars at once. One was a conventional war of uniformed armies. Fighting uniformed armies, the South Vietnamese Regular army in alliance with the United States army, fighting the North Vietnamese Regular Army. But it was also an insurgency war, an undeclared war fought by insurgents, the so called Viet Cong in the south against South Vietnamese government institutions to delegitimize the South Vietnamese population. The American side really only fought the conventional war. The formal strategy, under General William Westmoreland, I'm sure you've heard this phrase before, was so called search and destroy, find large concentrations of the North Vietnamese army and destroy it. In other words, he was fighting a kind of World War II type strategy. Big battles, hopefully encirclement battles where you could destroy enemy positions or take lots of prisoners of war and neglecting the insurgency. A shift in strategy came later in the war with the appointment of Creighton Abrams as the commanding general to quell an insurgency and pacify a local population. And that was largely successful. Now you can't disentangle Vietnam from Watergate, but before I get to Watergate, I think we need to say something about the Nixon administration. When the Democrats ended up nominating Hubert Humphrey, who was a staunch supporter of involvement in Vietnam, the split in the party blew wide open, resulting in the mayhem in Chicago in the summer of 1968. Great Books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being and we can help with the Hillsdale Dialogues. Each week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at podcast hillsdale.edu. that's podcast hillsdale or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you find your audio. Hillsdale College is a small Christian classical liberal arts college that operates independently of government funding and we want you or your son or daughter to apply. At Hillsdale, students grow in heart and mind by studying timeless truths in a supportive community dedicated to the highest things. Hillsdale College College significantly less than other nationally ranked private liberal arts colleges and receives regular recognition as a best value and nearly all students receive financial aid. Our robust core curriculum, vibrant student life and 8 to 1 student to faculty ratio make for an education like no other. For more information or to fill out an application, visit hillsdale.edu info. That's hillsdill.edu info UFO Now Nixon won a squeaker in 1968 in part because of a third party run by George Wallace which further split the Democratic Party. Nixon also interestingly to an extent ran to the left of Hubert Humphrey on foreign policy. Now this is extraordinary for a number of reasons. First of all, Nixon himself was a hard line anti communist in his youth and known to be such and made his name as a strong anti communist. He was one of those crying who lost China in 1949. He was one who consistently accused his political opponents in the 40s and 50s of being soft on Communism. But he was openly arguing in 1968 that if elected President he would find a way to make peace in North Vietnam. Peace with honor as he called it. Having won the election, Nixon and his right hand man, National Security Advisor and future Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, set about trying to make peace in Vietnam but finding it difficult. To make a long story short, they felt that they had to escalate the war to put more pressure on the North Vietnamese before they could Bring the North Vietnamese to the table. The ultimately more significant legacy of Nixon's foreign policy is the so called policy of detente with the Soviet Union. What does detente mean? It's a French word that roughly translates to something like relaxation or relaxation of tensions. Now, detente was ultimately, you might argue, a diplomatic success. The two superpowers started talking again. The Vietnam War was eventually ended by treaty, although that didn't have a happy ending, as I'll get to in a second. The United States and the USSR eventually signed some landmark arms control agreements. Detente did, however, make the conservative wing of the Republican Party and to some extent the Cold War hawk wing of the Democratic Party unhappy. They thought it amounted to weakness. They thought it was too close to that old rejected policy of acquiescence or even isolationism. Well, we know that Nixon ran into trouble over Watergate, was almost impeached, and resigned rather than face impeachment.
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Historical Audio Clips / Quotes
To anyone who reads his way through this mass of materials I have provided, it will be totally, totally, abundantly clear that as far as the President's role with regard to Watergate is concerned, the entire story is there.
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Lecture Narrator
This happened about a year after the settlement of the Vietnam War. In the fall of 1974, an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress was elected and set out cutting off US Aid to South Vietnam, hastening the collapse of that country. This is again another counterfactual, and I can't prove this one way or the other. All I can tell you is that a lot of scholars of the Vietnam War and American involvement in the Vietnam War believe that the pacification effort, the counterinsurgency effort that became the focus of U.S. strategy after 1970 had succeeded and that if some measure of U.S. aid had continued to South Vietnam the way it continued to South Korea, the country would have survived without falling to a communist advance as it did in 1975. Now, detente split the Republican Party not as badly as Vietnam split the Democratic Party. I would point out to you that very swiftly did the anti war Democrats overtake and all but purge the hawkish Democrats, So that after 1968, when you had the pro Vietnam War Hubert Humphrey as the nominee, only four years later did you have the anti Vietnam war candidate, George McGovern as the nominee who lost 49 states. But detente split the Republican Party. It made Nixon suspicious to his conservative wing. We know that Nixon had to leave office because of Watergate. We know that Gerald Ford was not reelected and that on a kind of anti Watergate, anti Republican, anti Nixon wave, Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976. And even that was a close election and arguably could have gone Ford's way had Ford not pardoned President Nixon, an action that was at the time extremely unpopular. Carter represented a major shift in American foreign policy. Carter is a decent man, an honorable man, went to the U.S. naval Academy, was by all accounts a fine naval officer, even through his quick thinking and ingenuity, once prevented a nuclear meltdown. It's the kind of man you want to have around in a crisis, you would think. But it turns out that his foreign policy ideas were not really suited to the tumultuous times in which he found himself. On the foreign affairs front, his administration came to be defined by three events. The first was the Nicaraguan revolution. So prior presidents had been, if not happy, at least willing to tolerate the kind of kleptocrat that I was talking about a bit earlier, an anti communist, non democratic, even somewhat brutal dictator, for the sake of stability, for the sake of the maintenance of the alliance and. And for the simple reason that in their view a communist dictator would be infinitely worse than an ordinary kleptocrat and that it made no sense to contrast kleptocrat versus communist versus democracy if democracy was not a viable option. Well, the Carter administration thought that supporting those kinds of kleptocrats was a betrayal of core American principles. So you can see we're coming back to one of the earliest themes of this course. To what extent do the universal principles of the American founding and the Declaration of Independence require us to act on them on the international stage? That says we are hypocrites if we don't insist on the same standards from our allies that we demand for ourselves. And so in this case, the kleptocrat of Nicaragua was named Somoza. I suppose that doesn't really matter. But the Carter administration progressively weakened him and distanced itself from him. And eventually, with Soviet money and some Soviet weaponry and Soviet technical assistance and advice, a group of Nicaraguan communists called the Sandinistas seized the government in 1979. A major blow to the United States prestige, certainly. And the second communist revolution in the Western Hemisphere since the Cuban Revolution. Now the next one, which was geopolitically very consequential, although less so for Carter, but I'm going to mention it next was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Carter professed himself to be shocked by this.
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Historical Audio Clips / Quotes
This is a callous violation of international law. The United Nations Charter. It is a deliberate effort of a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people, we must recognize the strategic importance of Afghanistan to stability and peace.
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Lecture Narrator
It's plausible, perhaps a bit charitable, but at least plausible, to interpret Carter's shock at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan simply to him taking seriously the premises of detente, that the superpower relations had got to a point of equilibrium where both sides could live with one another and neither would take any kind of provocative action. So before we blame Jimmy Carter over much, let's try to think back to the fundamental premises of an administration of a different party that had come before him. Now, the third thing is, of course, the Iranian hostage crisis, which really ultimately defines Jimmy Carter's presidency in a negative way. Here was another kleptocrat, not a nice man, the Shah of Iran, who had been a staunch US ally and a bulwark of American influence in the Middle east, both against communism from his north and east, but also attempts by the USSR to subvert and influence other Middle Eastern regimes to Iran's Western. Suddenly it was Iran, that is, was in the hands of fiercely anti American Islamists who declared the government an Islamic Republic and took 52Americans hostage in a crisis that lasted for a total of 444 days and led to the election of Ronald Reagan, among many other factors. Now that I've mentioned Reagan, let's think back. I said how detente split the Republican Party. Well, one of the things you're definitely not supposed to do in American partisan politics is run in a primary against a sitting president of your own party. People do it, but you're not supposed to do it. So we talked about how Teddy Roosevelt ran against his former Vice President, William Howard Taft, when Taft was an incumbent president. Gene McCarthy ran against Lyndon Johnson in 1968, a president of his own party. Well, Ronald Reagan did the same thing to Gerald Ford. And Ronald Reagan was never a single issue candidate. He always had a number of issues, but one of his main issues was, was detente. The allegation that the Ford administration, as heir to the Nixon administration, was too soft on Communism, had, if not abandoned containment, essentially made it meaningless, and was willing to go along and get along. And a lot of Reagan's ire, and certainly the ire of Reagan's supporters was settled on the shoulders of Henry Kissinger, who was still in the administration as President Ford's Secretary of State. Now, Reagan didn't win the nomination away from Ford in 76, but he came extremely close and put himself in a commanding position to win the nomination in 1980, which of course he did and went on to win the presidency. Now at this point, the new Reagan administration wanted to essentially erase every vestige of detente. They thought that the early Cold War period, the American foreign policy had the right idea and the right posture. The point is, Reagan's first term marked a sharp return to a much more confrontational policy with the Soviet Union. Everything short of war type of policy. There is no real other word for it, just a factual description. Here we began taking provocative action against the Soviet Union. Military exercises close to their borders, so called psyops or psychological operations, an arms buildup, much harsher rhetorical tone. You know, Reagan is famous for his so called evil Empire speech or the speech to the British Parliament where he said that Marxist Leninism will end up on the ash heap of history.
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Historical Audio Clips / Quotes
What I'm describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term, the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self expression of the people.
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Lecture Narrator
In fact, Reagan famously said when asked what his position or strategy in the Cold War was, he said, we win, they lose. That's not detente either. Well, in hindsight it's clear to see a pretty bifurcated difference between Reagan's first and second term. Reagan's first term seemed to have been all about confrontation, arms build up, harsh rhetoric, psychological operations, military exercises. The famous Strategic Defense Initiative in which Ronald Reagan promised to build a defensive shield against nuclear weapons.
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Historical Audio Clips / Quotes
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.
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Lecture Narrator
Now that sounds like common sense, maybe to you viewers, as it does to me, as it did to the majority of the American people at the time. But it also was a direct attack on a doctrine that was considered at the heart of Cold War stability. And since I haven't mentioned that before, this may be the place to talk about it now. Nuclear weapons, of course, have unprecedented destructive power. And by the time you get to 1960, much less 1980, each side in the Cold War has arsenals of such size that many speculate they could destroy the entire world. That's probably not true, but it also might not be that relevant when they certainly had the power to destroy almost every city in each other's countries. So the question was, what do you do in a situation like that? Well, the theorists who worked on nuclear Issues came to conclude that defense was impossible and that defense was in fact harmful because the attempt to build a defense gave either side that had a sense of invulnerability that caused their behavior on the international stage to become more reckless. So better than any kind of defense was a doctrine that came to be known as Assured destruction and then formalized into Mutual Assured Destruction or mad. That is to say, if a nuclear war starts, everybody's going to die. Both sides will launch their entire arsenal and destroy the other and there's no possibility of a winner. Mutually Assured destruction, Right. The phrase now suddenly snaps into focus and makes sense. A popular 1983 movie called War Games illustrates the point via a computer playing Tic Tac toe endlessly against itself. We all know tic tac toe. Unless you're playing against your three year old, no one's going to win. It's an unwinnable game. That's the idea. Nuclear war was said to be an unwinnable game. And so one of those arms control treaties that I talked about that Nixon signed with the Soviets in 1972 was the ABM, or Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, which forbade, with certain exceptions, the development of of missile defenses to protect against nuclear war, thereby enshrining mad, or Mutually Assured Destruction. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, announced in a speech in 1983, belittled by the press and his critics as Star wars, unquote, after of course, the famous movie from six years earlier was a direct attack on the idea of mad.
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Historical Audio Clips / Quotes
I hope that we can set this nation and the world on a new course for peace consistent with our obligations under the ABM Treaty. Recognizing the need for close consultation with our allies, I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long term research and development program for defense against strategic nuclear weapons.
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Lecture Narrator
Now, it didn't violate the ABM Treaty because the ABM Treaty did not proscribe research and development. It would only have violated the ABM Treaty had Reagan actually built and deployed it. And Reagan himself said that if SDI worked, he would share the technology with the Soviets and with the rest of the world. And I believe he was sincere about that. But the Soviets didn't see it that way. They saw it as a threat. Now, one of the things you can learn from NSC 68 that turned out to be a very true prediction is it says one of the advantages the west has over the Communist bloc is our free economies are vastly more productive. We already outshine them in terms of GDP in the aggregate and per capita, and will continue to do so as their planned economies fall behind what a free, productive, innovative economy can do. This was even truer in the early 80s than it was in 1945. And so Reagan launched an arms buildup. He rebuilt the military. He increased the size of the navy, he increased the size of the army. He spent large amounts of federal money on research and development, on new technological systems. And the Soviets knew he was doing this and feared it because they felt that they didn't have the resources to keep up, despite the fact that the Soviet Union, then, as Russia today, has some of the world's greatest scientists. But the greatest minds aren't enough. You need to have the resources, the productive capability, and the industrial capacity to do these kinds of things. And they felt that they didn't. And they felt that SDI would be something that the United States would roar out in front of. They wouldn't be able to catch up. And eventually we would use it as a shield from behind which to attack them. Well, the story at least has a happy ending. Reagan's rather belligerent first term, and I use that word advisedly, gave way to a much more conciliatory second term, in part because hardline Soviet leaders died off in Reagan's first term. In fact, he faced three different Soviet leaders in quick succession. Leonid Brezhnev, Yurian Dropov, and Konstantin Chernenko. Reagan later recounted having said to Nancy Reagan in the White House and put in his diary, how am I supposed to get anywhere with the Soviets when they keep dying on me? Well, eventually they appointed as leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a much more moderate Soviet leader. In fact, perhaps the most moderate Soviet leader that had ever been in the chair. And Gorbachev proved himself to be a lot more amenable to discussions and relaxation of tensions with the west and eventually to arms control treaties, such as the INF treaty that I mentioned earlier. We go into the ups and downs of the summitry. I think it's worth mentioning briefly. The one failed summit they had was in Reykjavik, Iceland, where Reagan and Gorbachev discussed for two days limitations on all kinds of nuclear weapons. And Reagan was elated, thinking he was going to make a historic agreement unlike any the world has ever seen. At the very end of it, Gorbachev sprang on him. Of course, all this is contingent on your giving up SDI as a sort of last Colombo. Everybody know the old TV show Colombo, oh, One More thing. And the one more thing is really the most important thing. And Reagan was outraged and said, no, it wasn't contingent on sdi. I'm not giving up sdi. And if that's what you insist on, then everything is off. And Gorbachev said he wouldn't budge. And Reagan ended the summit and left right there. Well, still the story has a happy ending. A year later, they got the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. Two years after that, that Berlin Wall that we talked about fell. That is to say, the East German soldiers patrolling it lost the will to patrol it. And once the peoples on both sides realized it, they flooded the wall and it was over. The Cold War was over. Within a few years, all of those nations, those captive nations, would be free. Germany would be reunified, and before calendar year 1992 was over, the USSR itself would formally be dissolved. But then the problem became what to do next. And that divided both parties once again and the entire American establishment and the elites and American public opinion. And in a way, with other ups and downs, we're still living in that what next? Era today, 30 years later.
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Juan Davalos
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. If you want to continue learning, please visit Hillsdale. Edu Course. There you will find over 40 free online courses, including Ancient Christianity, the Genesis Story, Classic Children's Literature, and many more. The courses include additional readings, study guides, fully produced videos, and you can chat with your fellow students on a dedicated forum. Upon completing a course, you will also get a certificate. All our courses are free because we believe that what you'll learn will enrich your life and and that a virtuous citizen is the best defense for liberty. So pursue the education necessary for freedom and happiness at Hillsdale. Edu Course today. That's Hillsdale. Edu Course. Thanks for listening.