Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War

Political Science Quarterly
Volume 115 No. 4 (Winter 2000)

Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War
By Frances FitzGerald. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Reviewed by Robert Jervis

The story of Ronald Reagan and the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) is wildly implausible. The fervent presidential endorsement of an idea that almost all experts believed to be impractical; the spending of billions of dollars for no gain; decisions being made without consultation with cabinet officers, let alone others in the government or our NATO allies; people frequently espousing views they privately ridiculed; top officials publicly contradicting the president and each other; and improvised arms control negotiations that were saved from a successful and disastrous conclusion by top leaders maintaining positions that rested on assumptions they were undermining; and, finally, a happy ending in which first the Soviet threat and then the Soviet Union itself dissolves. It would make a good movie and Way Out There in the Blue would not be a bad screenplay.

As a book, however, its value depends on how much the reader already knows. Those who are unfamiliar with the standard accounts but are interested enough to read 500 quite lively pages on the subject will find a gold mine of information and stories, most of them frightening and true. But for those in the field, there is little new information and or sustained analysis.

The picture of Reagan is vivid if familiar. No more than anyone else can FitzGerald explain the combination of passionate commitment to certain goals and lack of interest in what his government was doing in the world, which remains even more puzzling than the contradiction between the charm he could project and his inability to form close friendships or treat his subordinates in a way that engendered loyalty. The picture of the feuds within the government, although again not basically different from other accounts, makes it clear that the dysfunctional machinery of policy making mirrored and magnified the bizarre leadership at the top.

FitzGerald does a good job of collecting the alternative accounts of the origins of SDI and showing the falsity of the most popular account that dates Reagan's conversion from his trip to NORAD headquarters in the summer of 1979, when he supposedly learned for the first time that the United States had no defense against missiles. In a few other areas, she makes interesting claims but cannot sustain them. Thus she attributes Reagan's Star Wars speech to the popularity of the nuclear freeze movement and the growth of the SDI program after its initial hostile reception to the improvement in Soviet-American relations, which reduced public fear of enraging the USSR. This may be true, but FitzGerald does not give us any evidence. She is on firmer ground in arguing that for many of its supporters, SDI was attractive because it was an excellent weapon against arms control. Looking only at the American side, FitzGerald does not try to tell us what the effect of SDI was on the Soviet Union.

Although FitzGerald's account of the Reykjavik summit is, contrary to her claims, conventional, it does bring out the basic paradoxes of the program. It never had any real chance of providing population defense and yet it not only played a large role in American domestic politics and foreign policy, but also drove the Soviets into both strong opposition and the willingness to make major concessions. It would have been a great bargaining chip if Reagan had been willing to treat it as such. But if he had been willing to take this stance, he never would have been able to mobilize the support that was necessary to give it any credibility. Furthermore, at the end of frantic summit bargaining an agreement to give up at least ballistic missiles foundered on the rock of SDI. Yet if missiles were abolished, the United States would not need such defenses and the Soviets would not have to fear them. But perhaps the ultimate twist is that the agreement that SDI prevented would have driven the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the American defense establishment into open rebellion and torn NATO apart.

A final oddity is that it is never clear whether the president—or the author—understood that in any war it was much more likely that the United States would launch a first nuclear strike (in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe) than that it would retaliate. In this context, SDI makes a little more sense.

Robert Jervis
Columbia University