276 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
nuclear offensive could truly be prevented with non-nuclear weapons.
He also said it was cheaper to base defensive plans on nuclear forces.
The commission was divided about whether the Americans were
capable of succeeding. Nikolai Chervov, who headed the General
Staff ’s arms control section, made the point that it could never be safe
to base Soviet policy on the assumption that Reagan’s Initiative would
fail.^9 Shevardnadze seemed to agree. On 19 August he said: ‘If the
Americans start to develop the Strategic Defense Initiative, our hands
will be freed and we’ll withdraw from a potential agreement on a fifty
per cent reduction on strategic offensive weapons.’^10
The Americans knew that the Politburo was secretly subsidizing its
own parallel programme. This was pointed out to Soviet negotiators
when they tried to claim that America was uniquely responsible for a
new arms race. An American request to visit the USSR’s laser experi-
mental facilities at Sary Shagan in Kazakhstan was turned down.^11
Teller, one of those who had originally won Reagan over to the Strate-
gic Defense Initiative, worried about the Soviet competition. In
February 1987 he advised his colleague Frederick Seitz that too much
information was publicly available about the direction that American
research institutes were taking. Their Soviet rivals could pick up useful
clues.^12 The programme that Velikhov headed was gathering pace.
Velikhov had the ear of Gorbachëv; no other scientist matched him in
influence on questions about which paths of investigation to follow.
For all his brilliance, he let ambition get the better of judgement and
fell for a claim by scientists at the Vernadski Geochemistry Institute to
have invented a method to detect gamma rays from a distance of ten
kilometres. His friend and co-author Sagdeev told him that the pro-
fessed achievement was entirely spurious. Velikhov waved him aside
and reported to Gorbachëv that the Vernadski group had made a
certified discovery.^13
In earlier years the temptation for Soviet political leaders might
have been to emulate the American programme in all its aspects.
Moscow politics had changed and the Politburo was ceasing to treat
the Strategic Defense Initiative as reason to refuse to sign arms reduc-
tion agreements. There had always been scepticism in the USSR about
America’s chances of creating a reliable defence against nuclear attack,
and at the Politburo on 8 May 1987 Gorbachëv repeated that the true
purpose behind the Strategic Defense Initiative was to wreck the
Soviet economy by compelling a competitive reaction.^14 He decided to
stop letting the American programme bother him unduly. Certainly