Power, Lost and Found: America At Century’s End 535over 100 percent. Among the weapons acquired with this spending were an
upgraded B-52 bomber, new cruise missiles, B-1 bombers, the Stealth bomb-
er, and Trident and MX missiles. Many of these missiles were so-called MIRVs,
or Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles, a collection of nuclear weapons on
a single missile with multiple warheads, so it could strike several targets at
once, not a single warhead with a single bomb.
The most telling legacy of Reagan’s military buildup, though, was the
Strategic Defense Initiative [SDI], dubbed “Star Wars” by critics and then even
supporters alike. Reagan envisioned SDI to be a shield over the atmosphere,
like the force fields in the movie Star Wars, to prevent nuclear weapons from
Russia or elsewhere to penetrate American airspace, and thus keep the U.S.
safe. Indeed, pro-SDI groups even ran a TV commercial in which a small girl
with crayons drew a force field and then watched as bombs fell from the sky,
hit it, and bounced off. Most scientists were skeptical of, if not laughing at,
the idea of developing the SDI, but Reagan was able to funnel tens of billions
of dollars to American defense companies to conduct “research” on a program
that almost everyone knew would never become reality. To Reagan’s support-
ers, however, his defense spending increases and programs like Star Wars were
invaluable, because they forced the Russians to spend money to keep up with
the U.S. and that led to a breakdown in the Soviet Union and the end of the
Cold War, as well as provide public funding to private military contractors.
The truth is not so simple, however.
fRoM cold waR to collapse of coMMunisM: ReaGan and
GoRBachev
Just as the Republican Richard Nixon improved relations with Russia and
China with his policy of deténte, an even more conservative president, Reagan,
would work closely with the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to
reduce nuclear weapons and “end” the Cold War. Gorbachev came to power
in the Soviet Union in March 1985 and Russia would not be the same. He
had risen, like all his predecessors since Vladimir Lenin, through the ranks of
the Communist Party, but he understood that Soviet-style communism was in
crisis, just as the suppressed CIA analysis in the mid- 1970s had argued. The
Russian economy was a mess, and the Soviet Army could not even defeat the
rebels in Afghanistan. Without serious reform, the Soviet Union might not