Authors: Dick Cheney
In the run-up to the war, General Kelly and members of the joint staff had conducted a series of in-depth briefings for me on different facets of the operational aspects of war. After the war was over, we did a series of seminars on lessons learned. They were important sessions that enabled us, for example, to learn about the capabilities of our Apache helicopters by hearing directly from a pilot who had flown one of the missions the first night of the air war in Iraq. One very significant area of advancement from previous wars was in precision-guided munitions, or PGMs. The first major use of these “smart” weapons, which can be guided with great accuracy onto a target using laser or other technology, came in Operation Desert Storm. Although most of the ordnance we dropped in that conflict were the older “dumb” or “gravity” bombs, we saw what PGMs could do. They could be precisely targeted on an enemy’s communications networks or electricity grid, enabling us to disable key functions of an adversary’s capital city, for example, with minimal collateral damage.
A FEW MONTHS AFTER celebrating the end of the Persian Gulf war, I was standing knee-deep in the waters of the Dean River in British Columbia, just about to cast my fly line and thinking about landing
a twenty-pound steelhead. It was August 19, 1991. The fishing had been slow and the water high from late season runoff, but it was starting to clear, and I’d just seen the fisherman next to me hook a magnificent fish.
“Mr. Secretary,” I heard someone call. I looked over to the riverbank to see my communications specialist waving me down. “There’s been a coup in the Soviet Union!” he shouted. “Deputy Secretary Atwood needs to talk to you.” So much for my steelhead. I waded over to the riverbank, climbed out of the water, and walked downriver with the communicator to where a solar-powered satellite phone had been set up that morning. We placed a secure call back to the Pentagon. “Dick, Gorbachev’s out,” Atwood said—prematurely, as it turned out—when I got him on the phone. “We don’t know if the coup is still under way or complete. Things are moving fast.” I needed to get back to Washington.
The Dean River is remote, which is why the fishing is so good, and it was complicated to get back to Washington quickly. Some of the guys I’d been camping with on the Dean had a homemade rig, a flat-bottom jet boat built specifically to operate on this river. They took my security agent, communications specialist, and me, along with our gear, in the boat downriver to the head of the falls, where we got out and loaded our stuff into an old school bus for the journey down the rough mountain road around the falls. From there we headed to a nearby airstrip, where a single-engine wilderness charter, with huge rubber tires that enabled it to land on extremely rough runways, waited. It flew us to Prince George, British Columbia, where an air force C-20 was waiting to take us the rest of the way back to D.C.
As the C-20 climbed to altitude over glaciers and sharp peaks, I thought about what the events in the Soviet Union might mean. For the last two years I had been spending time in Saturday sessions in my Pentagon conference room with experts on the Soviet Union from inside and outside the government. I found these sessions extremely useful as a way to gather very smart people together and step back from the rush of daily crisis management in order to think strategically about developments
inside our most significant adversary and what they might mean for American defense policy.
I got on a conference call with General Powell, Admiral Mike McConnell, and Lieutenant Colonel John Barry, my junior military assistant. Powell reported on a meeting at the White House that had just wrapped up. He said that the president had been on the phone to world leaders, and although everyone was very concerned, it was clear we shouldn’t rule Gorbachev out quite yet. Intelligence reports were indicating that this was not a completed coup. There were military units milling around in Moscow, but they didn’t seem to have their act together.
One of the key questions we focused on in the first hours after we learned about the potential coup was the location of the Soviet equivalent of the nuclear “football”—the briefcase that contained the launch codes for the Soviet nuclear arsenal. With Gorbachev apparently in his dacha in the Crimea and the Soviet Minister of Defense Yazov and Marshal Akhromeyev among the coup plotters, it was not at all clear who was in control of the nuclear weapons.
McConnell reported that only three divisions were supporting the coup, and they were all within thirty miles of Moscow. The coup leaders were facing a tough choice, he said: either give up the effort or use force to try to bring it about. Boris Yeltsin, the newly elected president of Russia, was standing up to the coup plotters and calling for popular resistance, McConnell said, and every hour that he stayed free was further indication that the coup plotters were not in control.
I had met Yeltsin on a few occasions, and he’d visited me in my office in the Pentagon in June 1991. By that time he had already left the Communist Party, but it was still startling to hear him declare, as he did in my office, that increasing the Soviet defense budget would be a “crime against the Russian people, who have suffered enough under seventy years of communism.” I was intrigued by his emergence and by his political success at getting himself elected president of Russia in 1991.
I talked to Brent Scowcroft after I had hung up with Powell and McConnell, and we agreed that this was potentially an extremely serious
event. If the coup succeeded, all our assumptions about reform in the Soviet Union and its impact on our national security planning would be upended. By now we knew that the coup plotters included some key members of the Soviet military command structure. I thought through a list of questions we needed to consider. What exactly do the coup plotters hope to achieve? If he retains power, can Gorbachev hope to resume his reforms? Is there any possibility that this event could lead to a peaceful, orderly progression to a less hostile, demilitarized democratic Soviet Union?
And there were other matters of concern. How secure was the Soviet nuclear arsenal? Could it end up in the hands of the coup plotters or a third party? Were we about to see millions of Soviet refugees flee into Eastern Europe? Would the coup plotters use military force to crush the fledgling independence movements in places such as the Baltics, Georgia, and Armenia?
Within a few days of my return to Washington, the coup had failed, and none of the worst-case scenarios had materialized. Quite the opposite—the changes it hastened were nothing short of historic. Boris Yeltsin, standing on a tank to defy the coup plotters, had seemed to capture a spirit of defiance of old ways and old thinking that was sweeping over the U.S.S.R. During the coup, Lithuania reaffirmed its 1990 declaration of independence, and Estonia and Latvia declared theirs. On August 24, the Ukrainian parliament voted for independence, and on August 25 Byelorussia did the same. August 24 was also the day Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party and dissolved the Central Committee, signifying the true end of the Soviet communist era.
On September 5 the Congress of People’s Deputies voted to respect the “declarations of sovereignty and acts of independence” adopted in the former Soviet republics, signaling that the end would not be violent. When President Bush convened the National Security Council that day at the White House, it was as though we were at the start of a new and unformed world that we might have the chance to shape. It was breathtaking to think that after so many years of facing down the Soviet
nuclear threat and countering their efforts to subjugate people all over the world, we might be watching the Soviet Union disappear peacefully. I thought we needed to move quickly before we lost our chance to influence events, and to my way of thinking our objectives for the former Soviet Union ought to be democracy, demilitarization, economic reform, and independence for the former Soviet republics. These were the same goals the pro-democracy forces inside the Soviet Union were fighting for, and I believed we needed to be firmly and clearly identified with them.
This was not a unanimous view among the president’s top advisors. Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft were both more cautious, urging that we did not necessarily want to see the breakup of the Soviet Union, out of concern for the instability that might generate. I thought we should do everything possible to push as hard as we could to lessen Moscow’s control over the former republics. First, I believed as a matter of principle that people should live in freedom. When Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Ukraine all voted for independence, I thought we should stand with them. Second, this was a case where our moral interests and our strategic interests were clearly aligned. It was right that we stand for freedom, and independence for the former republics would weaken our most dangerous adversary. I believed it was time for bold policy initiatives to cement the downfall of the Soviet Union.
The president agreed. He directed us to develop proposals that would demonstrate support for Russia’s reformers and show the world we were ushering in a new era. For me and my colleagues at the Defense Department, the obvious place to begin was with our nuclear arsenal.
In my first months as secretary of defense, I had been briefed on the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, the targeting plan for the use of our nuclear weapons. Over the years as we had added weapons to our arsenal, the planners had applied them to the same universe of targets. When we added, for example, fifty new Peacekeeper missiles, each with ten warheads, our nuclear target specialists would suddenly have five hundred new weapons they had to direct at a limited list. It seemed to me a commonsense question was in order. Tell me, I said to
the planners, how many warheads are going to hit Kiev under the current plan? It was a difficult question to get an answer to because I don’t think anybody had ever asked it before, but I finally got a report back that under the current targeting plan, we had literally dozens of warheads targeted on this single city. It was time to rationalize our nuclear targeting. Under Paul Wolfowitz’s direction, the policy shop went to work with the joint staff and our nuclear targeting specialists and began to reform our targeting system, which in turn gave us the ability to reduce the size of our nuclear arsenal.
It was a lesson that sometimes the simplest question—how many nuclear weapons are you planning to launch on Kiev?—is the most important one. I appreciated General Powell’s description of the significance of what we did. “Cheney and his civilian analysts,” he wrote, “reversed four decades of encrusted bureaucratic thinking and put nuclear targeting
on a rational basis
.” And we made it possible, working with Powell and his team on the joint staff, for the president to make bold proposals in response to the historic events unfolding in Moscow. The SIOP review made it clear we could make significant reductions in the size of our nuclear forces and still preserve our deterrent capabilities.
As we pulled our proposals together, I was mindful of avoiding the trap into which so many previous arms control negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union had fallen. Agonizingly slow, these negotiations usually led to minimal, tit-for-tat reductions. This time we all agreed we should proceed differently. We should announce our intent to make significant real cuts in our nuclear forces and invite the Russians to do the same.
In a speech to the nation on September 27, 1991, President Bush directed that the United States eliminate its entire worldwide inventory of ground-launched short-range nuclear weapons. We would bring home our nuclear artillery shells and short-range ballistic missile warheads from Europe. And he called on the Soviets to do the same. He also announced we would withdraw all tactical nuclear weapons from our surface ships and attack submarines and remove all nuclear weapons from our land-based naval aircraft. And, again, he called on the Soviets
to do the same. Then he turned to the issue of our strategic nuclear weapons, which had been the subject of a new treaty, START, signed with President Gorbachev in July 1991. President Bush said he wanted to use that treaty “as a springboard to achieve additional stabilizing changes.” Therefore, he ordered all U.S. strategic bombers to immediately stand down from their alert posture. He also pledged to accelerate the destruction of the intercontinental ballistic missile systems scheduled to be eliminated as part of the START talks and announced the termination of the development of the new mobile Peacekeeper ICBM system.
The president also announced that he would be consolidating operational command of our sea-, land-, and air-based strategic nuclear forces in one command, which is now called STRATCOM, headquartered at Offutt Air Force Base. On October 5, 1991, Gorbachev, as president of the Soviet Union, responded to our proposals with an impressive set of cuts the Soviets were willing to make in both their tactical and strategic nuclear arsenals, and he agreed to take Soviet bombers off alert as well. We had succeeded in launching a new approach to arms control—faster, deeper, and more flexible than before.
As we responded to changes in the Soviet Union by offering reductions in our nuclear inventory, we were also thinking about our overall force posture. From the end of World War II until the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1992, we had planned our defensive and offensive military capabilities primarily around meeting, countering, and defending against a Soviet threat. In late 1989 we had begun to think about cuts that could be made to reflect the emerging new strategic reality, and after months of analysis we had proposed the concept of the “base force,” which President Bush had accepted and outlined in a speech in Aspen, Colorado, on August 2, 1990. The speech came only hours after Saddam’s tanks rolled into Kuwait, and the attention of the world shifted to the Persian Gulf. Once we had liberated Kuwait, I asked Wolfowitz to take the concept laid out in our base force approach, and using some of the most important lessons we had learned from operations in Desert Storm, put together a new Defense Planning Guidance
document that would describe the challenges America faced and the strategic position we should adopt to meet them throughout the 1990s and beyond.