SPOKES IN THE WHEEL 345appointed by the Defense Secretary and the National Security Adviser
published a report titled Discriminate Deterrence. This was clearly an
attempt to obviate Reagan’s purposes once he had left office. The
co-chairmen were Fred Iklé and Albert Wohlstetter. Their fellow sig-
natories included other sceptics about total denuclearization such as
Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. The report recommended
the need to budget for modernized conventional forces that could
strike deep into enemy territory. It also called for greater attention to
preventing attacks from outer space and for the boosting of America’s
capacity to make ‘discriminate nuclear strikes’. The American military
budget had to be increased. Foreign policy based on long-term
benign relations with Moscow would be unwarranted; and the rising
economic power of Beijing, Tokyo and even New Delhi made for un-
certainty in global strategic planning. America had to remain flexible
about its choices. The Warsaw Pact continued to pose an acute threat
and could mount a surprise attack. The USSR might undertake one
without help from its allies.^38
The historian Paul Kennedy criticized Discriminate Deterrence on
several grounds. As the author of a best-selling book on ‘imperial
overstretch’, he worried that the report underestimated the dangers of
America’s global strategy. Under Reagan, America had become a mas-
sive debtor nation. Discriminate Deterrence assumed that American
technological brilliance would compensate for every difficulty. Ken-
nedy thought this unduly optimistic. He queried the report’s statistical
accuracy and lamented its inattention to the low quality of general
educational standards. For Kennedy, Discriminate Deterrence fell short
of being an integrated agenda for future success.^39
He could have added that it totally rejected Reagan’s objective of
abolishing all nuclear weapons, which could bode ill for continuity in
policy when his successor came into office. Even so, Gorbachëv made
no change in his foreign and security policy. Ligachëv confined his
grumbles to internal political conditions. He detested the growing
depreciation of communism’s historical achievements. When Gor-
bachëv went off on a trip to Czechoslovakia in March 1988, Ligachëv
licensed the Sovetskaya Rossiya newspaper to publish a letter by an
obscure Leningrad chemistry teacher, Nina Andreeva, objecting to the
critical campaign against the achievements of the 1930s. She showed a
distinct trace of anti-Semitism and pro-Stalinism. Not until Gor-
bachëv returned from abroad did the media dare again to advocate
reform. Ligachëv disingenuously denied complicity in the affair. When