194 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
and practical difficulties. It was quickly translated and published
abroad.^21 Velikhov, a scientist of global renown, genuinely thought it
foolish for the USSR to emulate the Defense Initiative.^22 He had the
guarantee of Soviet public approbation. The Western press ignored his
book. Published by Soviet state outlets, it was treated as mere propa-
ganda.
The Politburo did not rely on the judgement of scientists alone.
Vitali Kataev in the Party Defence Department kept the programme
under review using reports from the KGB and GRU about the publi-
cations of Abrahamson’s research units.^23 America, in Kataev’s opinion,
would not be ready to deploy the results until the year 2000 at the
earliest. There was therefore no immediate threat.^24 He also thought
the American economy incapable of bearing the full costs of the pro-
gramme. He questioned whether the Americans could really put six
hundred ‘objects’ into permanent, reliable operation in outer space.^25
The technology would have to work perfectly if America was to be
secure against attack. Kataev thought this wholly unrealistic, and he
claimed that the Defense Initiative ‘ideologists’ understood this as well
as he did.^26 Using American official sources, he estimated that even if
the Initiative achieved a level of ninety-nine per cent effectiveness, any
Soviet nuclear offensive attack would still result in twenty million
American deaths. If the effectiveness reached only a level of ninety
per cent, the death rate would reach between seventy-five and ninety
million.^27
Soviet leaders believed that the Americans were trying to draw the
USSR into a new stage of the arms race and bankrupt the Soviet
budget. This was what Shevardnadze told his people in the ministry,
and most of them agreed with him.^28 KGB Chairman Kryuchkov later
claimed that ‘specialists’ concurred that the Strategic Defense Initiative
was ‘the greatest deceit’.^29 The Party Defence Department’s Oleg Bakla-
nov considered it a gargantuan ‘bluff ’ without chance of success.^30
Gorbachëv was buffeted in two directions. While hearing in one
ear that the Initiative was a mere pretence, he received messages in the
other that the American research could end up being used for sinister
purposes. Soviet politicians and their scientific advisers simply could
never be sure that specific technologies lacked the potential to be used
for attacking the USSR; and whatever Reagan said about the purposes
of research, there was no surety that his successors would not refuse to
sanction a bellicose adaptation of the programme. It would also be
imprudent for Gorbachëv to discount the possibility that the Ameri-