The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons

Interview with Mikhail Gorbachev by Jonathan Schell,The Nation, February 9, 1998

Mikhail Gorbachev presents the world with the paradox of a man who rose like a cork from the bottom to the very top of an immense, repressive political system but, once there, adopted policies that brought the system crashing down around his ears. Its downfall had not, however, been his goal. He aimed merely to reform the Soviet Union, not abolish it. On the other hand, he did wish to abolish nuclear weapons. It is one of the ironies of the cold war that he reached the unintended goal but fell short of the intended one. There remains, as Alan Cranston once commented to me, at least one consistent principle in all his actions: a turn away from violence as a political instrument. If anything about the fall of the Soviet Union surprised the world more than the fall itself, it was the peacefulness with which, under Gorbachev,s leadership, it occurred.

      As a public speaker, Gorbachev retains some of the woodenness of his Communist predecessors. In person, there is more sparkle in his eyes, more warmth in his smile. Yet he struck me as a solitary figure. As General Secretary of the Communist Party and Soviet President, he had been surrounded by colleagues who proved unready to follow him and eventually betrayed him in the coup attempt of August 1991. Even while estranging the Communist Party, however, he did not succeed in retaining the support of the public. To a remarkable degree, he has propelled himself along his tumultuous course on his own steam. Only abroad has his popularity remained high. Now, as president of the Gorbachev Foundation, he tours the world advancing the causes in which he believes. Among them is still the abolition of nuclear weapons.

    "When did you first have the idea of proposing the abolition of nuclear weapons? I asked.

      "It was connected with my arrival in the Kremlin, he answered.

"The provincial elite, to which I belonged"and even the Moscow establishment"knew little about these weapons. Only when I became a member of the Politburo did I start to become involved in decision-making on matters of defense, and even then there were defense matters that were handled exclusively by the General Secretary, the Minister of Defense, the Chairman of the State Security Committee, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and sometimes the Prime Minister. It was really a small group. When I saw the monster that we and the United States had created as a result of the arms race, with all its mistakes and accidents with nuclear weapons and nuclear power"when I saw the terrible amount of force that had been amassed"I finally understood what the consequences, including global winter, would be.

      "I can assure you that by the time I became a member of the Politburo, the very tiny group of men who really made the decisions had a full understanding that nuclear war was impossible. And, frankly, NATO's strategy of initiating local nuclear war was, I think, bluffing. It was clear to all that a nuclear war could not be won. So when I went to London in 1984 as the number-two man in the party, I said quite a few things that later comprised what I called the new thinking., I said that nuclear war was impossible, and that conclusion was later reflected in the proposal of January 15, 1986, to abolish nuclear weapons.

      "Did you encounter much resistance to this proposal within your government? I asked.

  "Not to the idea, not to the statement. But I must admit that most of the military men thought this was just another propaganda bluff, another deception. What hadn,t our government proposed in earlier days? There had been all sorts of peace programs,, peace initiatives,, designed only to put the other side on the spot. My position was:This plan is one that we should seek to implement. It was linked in my mind with a proposal that Khrushchev had espoused years before"the idea of a world without weapons, of general and complete disarmament. It may have been utopian, but it had an impact on the minds of many people, who were afraid of those mountains of weapons, conventional as well as nuclear. So we seized on that idea, but introduced it in more pragmatic form, calling for conventional weapons to be controlled, so that nuclear weapons would not be replaced by all sorts of new conventional arms.

      "At that stage, we didn,t encounter the kind of resistance we later encountered when we began to discuss specific steps with the Reagan Administration. There was, of course, resistance on the American side as well. Each side wanted to drive such a hard bargain that we were afraid to lose a single kopeck or cent. For a person looking at it from without, this kind of negotiation must have looked ridiculous. The real watershed was the summit at Reykjavik. It turned things completely upside down. It upset all those decades of calculations and unserious negotiations. Of course, we had had the SALT I, the A.B.M. and the N.P.T. treaties. Though still minor, they were important. But none of them actually put an end to the nuclear arms race. None of them provided for the actual destruction of nuclear weapons. These things became possible only after Reykjavik. Initially, my partners said on the first evening after the summit that it was a failure, but I said, No, it is a breakthrough., Secretary of State George Shultz took a corresponding line, and the way to real reductions was opened.

      "You were one of the few people who have had the unusual experience of possessing the final responsibility for a decision to use nuclear weapons,I observed. "Would you have given the order to use nuclear weapons in retaliation for a nuclear attack?

      "Well, let me tell you right off that this did not concern me, not because I lacked the will or the power. But I was quite sure for some reason that the people in the White House were not idiots. I thought that they definitely knew what any nuclear war would mean, even if the weapons did not actually strike the Soviet Union or America. More likely, I thought, was that nuclear weapons might be used without the political leadership actually wanting this, or deciding on it, owing to some failure in the command and control systems. They say that if there is a gun, one day it will shoot. That fear motivated me to seek an end to the arms race, in spite of my belief that no one would consciously use nuclear weapons.

"I recall that when I was trained in the use of the nuclear button, or nuclear suitcase, I once was briefed about a situation in which I would be told of an attack from one direction, and then, while I am thinking over what to do about that, new information comes in"during these very minutes"that another nuclear offensive is coming from another direction. And I am supposed to make the decisions!

      Gorbachev laughed. "Nevertheless, I never actually pushed the button. Even during training, even though the briefcase was always there with my codes, and sometimes it had to be opened. But I never touched the button.

      I mentioned Cranston,s remark that nonviolence seemed to be a constant theme of his career, and invited him to comment.

      "We had been through the long experience of the utopian model of society that was imposed on our people by Stalin. It left the country with a hard choice. Despite the fact that the Communists were so consistent"amazingly consistent"in pursuing this line, this policy of building the Communist model of society, and did not hesitate to use force and repression, we saw that force and violence were defeated by the logic of history, by the logic of things. We saw that the country had reached a historical impasse. The gap, which first emerged during the years of the civil war between the socialist system and democracy"the divorce of socialism from democracy, and the resulting attempt to impose a dictatorship"had led to the drastic situation we were now facing. In other words, the most important obstacle we faced was our own experience. Yes, indeed, you can destroy your enemy. You can destroy your ideological foe. You can actually destroy many, many people, or send them to camps, or anything you want. But historically, this does not win. This does not provide victory.

      "Marx said that the capitalist system contains within it its own gravedigger, the proletariat. Rephrasing Marx, we can say that our system developed educated people, who were then the gravediggers of the Communist system. The utopian model of Communist, totalitarian dogma was rejected at the cultural level, and cultural rejection is the strongest form of rejection.

   "The shestidesyatniki"the so-called men of the sixties"and I refer to myself as a shestidesyatniki"had a new vision, shaped by the atmosphere of those times. My credo was: We need radical reform without bloodshed, without violence. I arrived at that conclusion for domestic politics, but it was also a conclusion that I drew in the new thinking, on international affairs"in the understanding that we lived in an interdependent world and that the presence of nuclear weapons, a colossal threat to humankind, could run out of the control of politicians. So this resulted in an understanding that in the world, too, the use of violence is useless. Yes, you can achieve some temporary successes by using violence. But cooperation, interaction, partnership, trying to harmonize your interests with the interests of others"these are what really works. We cannot reject the interests of others, but need to balance our interests with their interests. And of course you cannot do that with war. You can only do it through political methods. So gradually all of this jelled into a certain way of thinking. All of these things are connected. They are links in one chain.

      "It was this same belief that led me, right at the beginning, at the funeral of Chernenko [Gorbachev,s predecessor as General Secretary], to tell the Eastern European leaders, Now you are actually independent. You are free. You are responsible for your country., They thought that was another propaganda declaration by the General Secretary. But I never went back on that declaration. It was a decisive step.

      "Let,s suppose that there is a treaty to abolish nuclear weapons, I said. "Should it include measures of enforcement? What should they be?

      "That question is very serious. You should not take this whole issue out of context. We will never be able to solve the nuclear question unless at the same time we develop a system of international organizations"unless we develop an effective U.N., an effective Security Council and systems of regional security"in short, unless we have an active political process. We should act preventively, pre-emptively. Force is used when a situation is already out of control. Why do we use force? Because we have grown accustomed to it, and have failed to develop institutions that will harmonize interests. Of course, we cannot rule out the possibility that there might be some local conflicts in which the situation goes out of control. Therefore the international organization should have certain decision-making powers and mechanisms for enforcement. But the most important thing is to place control on the whole weapons process. We are moving toward a new world. Yet nothing is being done right now to truly take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the end of the cold war.