Addicted to war

And the other thing that happened under Kennedy and McNamara was the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is where your father comes into the story.

It's one of the places where the story is personal to me. Because my father was an officer devoted to the purposes of the Pentagon, I've never been able to think of the people in the Pentagon as anything but driven by high ideals. In the early '60s he was appointed the first director, the founding director, of the Defense Intelligence Agency. [The DIA is the Pentagon's unified military intelligence service, which McNamara hoped would improve the military's intelligence-gathering efforts.]

And the reason for that was a history of intelligence failures in the Pentagon.

Well, the intelligence establishment was at the mercy of the individual turf priorities -- so Air Force intelligence was always seeing enemy threats based on what the Air Force wanted, for example. The immediate cause of McNamara and Kennedy establishing the DIA was the so-called missile gap, which was a belief in the late '50s into 1960 that the Soviet Union was leading the United States by some considerable margin in the number of deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles. It was a complete myth. But it served the purposes of the Air Force. And shortly after the United States launched its first spy satellite, photographs from space demonstrated conclusively that the Soviet Union did not have a massive ICBM force. In fact it had four missiles.

It was such an egregious example that Kennedy and McNamara began to take control of intelligence away from the services. The Defense Intelligence Agency was McNamara's attempt to wrest control of intelligence the way he'd tried to wrest control of the nuclear arsenal. And ultimately I'm not sure he was successful in this effort, either.

It's interesting because intelligence failures have dominated our recent history. It seems that intelligence failures are one of the main stories of the Pentagon.

Well, that's true, and it's a human condition story, really. First of all when you're trying to assess what an enemy is up to you pay your military and your intelligence people to prepare for the worst case. So intelligence by definition is supposed to be an ultimate example of worst-case thinking. The trouble with worst-case thinking is you begin to project threats and imagine threats as if they're real, and you begin to create responses based on those. Pretty soon you forget that you've imagined the threat.

And that's what happened again and again and again with the Soviet Union, which is why we the Americans were constantly taking the initiative up the escalation ladder. The Pentagon was always imagining that the Soviet Union was ahead of us when it never was, with the single exception of Sputnik. That innovation was the only time the Soviet Union beat us, but we were constantly inventing and imagining Soviet threats. Even to the end, when Mikhail Gorbachev was ordering his soldiers back to their barracks rather than to defend the collapsing Soviet Union, the CIA and Pentagon were reporting that it was all a ploy.

We've seen this same thing in relationship to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. We imagine the worst, and then we treat our imagined fear as if it's rock-solid. It's an old story. It's easy to single out George W. Bush and Colin Powell for falsifying intelligence, but actually it goes back beyond that.

You also say that the Pentagon missed the most important reason the Soviet Union was splintering in the 1980s, the people's-power movement in Poland and elsewhere.

The most important factor in ending the Cold War, I would argue, was Solidarity, the labor movement formed on the shipyards in Gdansk. Nonviolent mass movements spread like wildfire in the satellite nations and then into Russia itself. American intelligence completely missed this, which is why at the same time we were funding the Contras in Central America. So we're sending money and arms to the Contras while not supporting Solidarity -- it's the classic case of missing something crucial. And why was that? It was because in the United States we could not imagine nonviolent resistance as a force for change.

We were also funding terrorists in Afghanistan.

Indeed so, funding what effectively what became al-Qaida.

In this culture, the other person who emerges as a hero here -- even though I think that you would like him not to be -- is Reagan.

Yes, the great irony of this history, and certainly not something I expected when I set out to find it, is that the person who did the most to bring about the nonviolent end of the Cold War was Ronald Reagan, the hawk of hawks. And what he did was find it possible to respond creatively to initiatives put forward by the true hero of this story, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Just as Americans didn't recognize how World War II ended, we haven't recognized how the Cold War ended. George H.W. Bush and people after him have talked about us having "won" the Cold War. We didn't win the Cold War. The Soviet Union decided to stop fighting it. And Ronald Reagan was a willing partner that enabled it. It's a very moving and beautiful story.

And this was despite the objections of his advisors.

Indeed so; Reagan was condescended to by his advisors. Only a few days ago there was an Op-Ed piece by Max Kampelman, a leading arms control negotiator for Ronald Reagan, who was reminding people that Reagan himself was a nuclear abolitionist. This is news today because Washington has completely deleted nuclear abolition as an American goal. We're resuming enhancement of our nuclear arsenal and we're looking to develop new forms of nuclear weapons. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were committed in principle -- it didn't happen for numbers of complicated reasons I explain -- to the elimination of nuclear weapons off the face of the earth. And in doing that Reagan was just like the great statesmen of the World War II era. Like Truman -- Truman himself argued that we had to find a way to get rid of nuclear weapons. Americans have to remember that.

In fact, we Americans are bound by a treaty, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, clause VI of which obligates the United States to work toward elimination of nuclear weapons.

But under the Nuclear Posture Review under Bill Clinton, we decided that there was a minimum number of nuclear weapons we had to keep.

Yes, that's the "hedge." The hedge was to protect us in case Russia experimented with fascism. What that hedge did was it gave the Russians and the Chinese a reason to maintain their weapons, so there are still thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons, and there shouldn't be. Even a hawk would agree that we don't need thousands -- the deterrence purpose could be served with hundreds, a couple hundred.

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