THE STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE 195can research teams were engaged in work at variance with public
policy as Reagan had described it to the world. America’s Defense
Department and other agencies might be disguising the reality from
the President. Gorbachëv commented that Reagan had an inadequate
understanding of what the researchers were doing; and Velikhov
expressed a suspicion that the Americans were working on weapons
that could hit targets in the USSR. The ‘bluff ’ might be that they were
developing a new generation of offensive armaments.^31
He and his colleagues were no more successful than the Soviet
intelligence agencies in providing definitive guidance to their political
masters. The KGB and GRU compiled copious reports about the pro-
gramme. No military topic received quite as much attention. But the
contents always proved to be weak on analysis.^32 Shevardnadze spoke
for the whole Politburo when he said: ‘People haven’t been able to
make complete sense of what the Strategic Defense Initiative really
is.’^33
Gorbachëv operated on the precautionary principle. If the Ameri-
cans were building a new anti-missile system, the USSR would work to
acquire the capacity to counteract it. While denouncing the warlike
purposes behind Reagan’s Initiative, Gorbachëv was secretly funding
research for the construction of a rival system. Velikhov’s dismissive
book about the American project disguised the fact that he and other
Soviet scientists and technologists were involved in efforts to match
the US. Gorbachëv had approved a programme of ‘asymmetrical
response’. This would involve enhancing the capacity of Soviet military
computers from 125 million to more than a billion operations per
second. It was one of the largest defence programmes that the country
had ever undertaken. The state budget was rewritten so as to include
117 new fundamental research projects: 86 would be devoted to
scientific investigation and 165 to experimental construction. Between
40 and 50 billion rubles were to be allocated to the programme in the
decade from 1986 – or according to another estimate, it was 40 billion
in the Five-Year Plan for 1986–1990.^34
This was kept top-secret as Gorbachëv licensed a robust campaign
of propaganda against the American programme. Soviet publishers
issued a stream of works denouncing Reagan and his purposes. ‘The
Star Wars programme’ became a staple of the Moscow media. Efforts
were made to translate the livelier pamphlets and secure their distribu-
tion abroad. When it proved that they were reaching few readers in the
West, it became obvious that other methods were required. Gorbachëv