Living

New book: How Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union stared nuclear war in the face

Stories about disasters averted often provide more drama and sheer terror than those that actually happen. So it is with Marc Ambinder’s "The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983" (Simon & Schuster, 380 pp., ★★★½ out of four), a detailed account of a nuclear holocaust that never happened.

During the early years of the administration of President Ronald Reagan, a nuclear catastrophe seemed more than theoretical. Reagan came from a different wing of the Republican Party than Richard Nixon, the president who had negotiated the first arms control deal with the Soviet Union.

Reagan believed Soviet leadership had contemplated a possible winnable nuclear war, just as there were U.S. advisers who believed the same thing. Each nation looked at the other as a rival bent on the other's destruction. If a nuclear strike could somehow accomplish that without guaranteeing mutual destruction, so be it.

By the middle of 1983, it seemed that someone in either Moscow or Washington would take that chance.

There was no single episode in which a misplaced finger on the nuclear button could have annihilated parts of the globe, but Ambinder details the multiple points that could have produced such a catastrophe – the assassination attempt on Reagan, the Soviet shootdown of a Korean airliner in 1983, and a 1983 Allied nuclear exercise called Able Archer.

Ambinder shows how the increasing tensions between a more assertive United States and a Soviet Union led by a debilitated gerontocracy rose and then gradually fell to the point where Reagan reached meaningful arms control by the time he left office in 1989. The Soviet Communist Party general secretaries from 1981 to 1985 were all feeble or ailing men in their 70s – Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko.

In 1985, however, reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, only in his 50s, took over, finally giving Reagan a negotiating partner.

Ambinder infuses this drama with a rapid pace involving multiple players in the White House, Kremlin and missile sites throughout the world, including on the fields of West Germany, where U.S. commanders expected a Soviet ground attack that could trigger the use of nuclear weapons.

Some of these players are unknown, such as Russia scholar Suzanne Massie, whom national security adviser Robert McFarlane used as a conduit to the Soviet leadership to show that the United States had no hostile intentions.

Some are better known, including British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who tempered her hawkish attitude to counsel Reagan against taking too hard a stand. "Reagan's responses suggested he understood, perhaps not as viscerally as she did, but well enough, that European countries had real skin in the game," Ambinder writes.

Ambinder draws from a wide assortment of sources, including primary sources from the administration, as well as perceptive histories such as "The Forty Years War" by Len Colodny and Tom Shachtman. At times, however, he gives some players too much credibility, such as former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, a master dissembler. Not only was Haig present when the DEFCON nuclear status was raised while Nixon was sleeping, he helped raise it.

While not as scary as Eric Schlosser's "Command and Control," which examined the 1980 explosion of a Titan II ICBM in an Arkansas silo, "The Brink" shows the consequences of nuclear buildups, sometimes-careless language and nervous leaders. Now, more than ever, those consequences matter.

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Ray Locker is an editor in USA TODAY's Washington bureau and author of "Nixon's Gamble: How a President's Own Secret Government Destroyed His Administration" and the upcoming "Haig's Coup."