history paper

Ohio Valley History Conference, October 19-21, 2017

Warm End to the Cold War
The INF treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1987, was part of the closing chapter of the Cold War. Some credit President Ronald Reagan policies with ending the Cold War, and he certainly did play an important role by backing his diplomacy with firm rhetoric and action, but as John Lewis Gaddis put it, “the Reagan Doctrine had been pushing against an open door.”[footnoteRef:1] The consensus seems to be that democracy, capitalism, and the benefits of liberty and opportunity for the individual won out in the historical competition against communism and totalitarianism. In the end, Mikhail Gorbachev realized this and what is rare in the history of mankind, accepted the defeat of the ideology of his country. Had he not, it is possible to imagine that when the Soviet Union collapsed as it did in the years from 1989 to 1991, it could have taken much of the world with it.  [1:  John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 236.] 

	The treaty was well crafted and faithfully carried out by both sides. As an escort on inspections in Western Europe and an inspector in the Soviet Union, I was conscious of taking part in history. At the end of each inspection the two team chiefs signed documents certifying the results in a ceremony commemorating its historical importance. I remember wondering just how significant the treaty would be, and what it would mean.   
Judging by the rapport we had with the Russian inspectors, it did not seem that the Cold War was still going on, but it was by no means clear that the good will engendered by a single agreement would last.  We had no way of knowing then, but we know now that the INF Treaty was part of the closing chapter of the Cold War. 
My military occupational specialty in the army was “Russian voice intercept operator.” In January of 1987 I was stationed in Germany in a tactical military intelligence unit when informed that I had been selected, along with fifteen other Russian linguists stationed in Europe, to attend a class on the INF Treaty in Munich. We studied the language of the treaty in Russian and worked on simultaneous interpretation. The native Russian instructors of the course chose two of us for assignment to the Pershing Operational Test Unit (POTU) in Heidelberg, to prepare for and participate in the inspections.  
Our primary responsibility at POTU was to brief and escort the Russian inspection teams at all Pershing and ground-launched cruise missile sites in Western Europe, and represent the Commander-in Chief of U.S. forces in Europe, and his base commanders, at those sites. Our unit also made us available to serve as inspectors on On-site Inspection Agency (OSIA) teams. OSIA was the organization, based in Washington, D.C., charged with implementing the treaty. 
There were five types of inspections. Baseline inspections were established to count and verify during the first ninety days of the treaty that the numbers of missiles, launchers, and equipment on the inspected sites reflected the numbers declared in the treaty. Elimination inspection teams verified the destruction of those items, while inspectors on close-out inspections determined that bases declared closed contained no treaty-limited items. The host party was given little time to prepare for short-notice inspections, in order to ensure that no items subject to treaty could be moved or hidden. Short-notice inspections were designed to verify the number of treaty items on active sites or to determine if the base had been closed, that they stayed free of them. Teams assigned to portal inspections, the fifth type of inspection under the treaty, maintained a constant twenty-four-hour watch over production facilities throughout the treaty period to assure they produced nothing banned by the treaty. 
Baseline, short-notice, and close-out inspections were carried out by ten-person teams, elimination inspections could consist of as many as twenty inspectors, while the portal inspections allowed up to thirty. The teams consisted of a team chief (an experienced field-grade officer with Russian language skills), a deputy team chief, two interpreters, missile specialists, and other operational specialists (for example, members of the Department of State, and perhaps unofficially, intelligence operatives and analysts).[footnoteRef:2] Each party to the treaty also provided an equivalent escort team, under whose care the inspectors remained for the duration of the inspection process from entry into and exit from the host country.  [2:  To affirm my recollections of procedures and technical aspects of the treaty, I used the official OSIA history: Joseph P. Harahan, On-Site Inspections under the INF Treaty (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993).] 

	Members of the inspection teams were issued diplomatic passports, and given all the resources necessary to complete their mission, including a dedicated support network and airplanes. The host country - and our discussion will include inspections in the Soviet Union, Germany, England, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Sates (there were also sites in Eastern Europe) - provided a dinner, often an elegant one attended by officials of the host country, for the Soviet and U.S. teams the night before each inspection and an excursion or other activity for them the day after, along with comprehensive police protection. 
On most inspections, the base commander ushered the inspecting and escort teams around his site together as a group. The missile technicians on the inspecting team weighed and measured with portable equipment they carried with them all missiles found on the site, usually housed in storage facilities, as well as any suspect containers (should there be any). Team chiefs supervised the counting of all treaty-related missiles and equipment. We were permitted to enter any building or storage facility on the site large enough to contain treaty items to determine their status. I and the other interpreter on our team worked with the team chiefs and our two Russian counterparts when issues or questions arose, and to translate small talk. 
Each party was allotted twenty short-notice inspections each year for the first three years, until all missiles and launchers had been eliminated and all bases subject to the treaty had been closed or converted to other uses. Inspections, though fewer, continued for the next ten years. Treaty-limited items were permanently banned, as long as the signatories remained in the treaty. 
The inspection process started when one side notified the other side’s central treaty headquarters, the National Risk Reduction Center (NRRC). In the case of short-notice inspections, after the inspecting team arrived at the Port of Entry (certain designated airfields, such as Frankfurt’s Rhein-Main air base or Sheremetyevo International airport in Moscow), the host country had nine hours to get it to the inspection site.
The inspection period for all inspections except the elimination and portal monitoring inspections was limited to exactly twenty-four hours, but most were completed within eight hours or so. Counting the arrival and departure of the inspection teams, the entire procedure lasted three days; again, including a social event for the inspection teams on the first and third days. 
The social activities could range from a simple tour of Rhein-Main airbase, including the commissary and new-car dealership (both of great interest and wonder even to those of the Russian inspectors who had never experienced Western abundance before), to a day-long excursion from Rome to the ruins of the ancient city’s port, Ostia (after the inspection on Sicily of Comiso Air Base). In the Soviet Union, we were once taken on a guided tour of a World War II concentration camp in Belarus near Minsk, and in another we visited the Soviet war memorial of the Battle of Stalingrad. 
I was present at several inspections or so each month throughout the first three years of the treaty. In addition to acting as briefer and escort at the inspections of the Pershing and cruise missiles sites in Western Europe, I travelled as a member of an OSIA team to Kapustin- Yar in the Soviet Union to witness the destruction of SS-20 missiles and was present at the destruction of the last Pershing missile at Longhorn Ammunition Plant in Texas. I also spent a month in Stan’kovo near Minsk, Belarus to monitor the elimination of SS-20 missile launchers.  
If the inspection was to take place at one of the Pershing sites in Germany, I had my own POTU civilian vehicle to get me there (the car even had a telephone, a rare thing in the days before cell phones). Finding my way to the site on my own the day of the inspection was at first a cause for anxiety in the days before GPS (and required a very early wake-up). Since I was the primary briefer, who relayed the base commander’s briefing to the Russian team, I was very conscious that a late arrival could delay the entire process.   
One of my first inspections was a baseline inspection on the joint Royal Air Force/U.S. Air Force Greenham Common air base in England. I was attached to an OSIA team which I joined at Frankfurt from where the ten of us flew in a small jet borrowed from the Air Force commander in Europe. We stayed in an old English manor house that had been converted to a guest house. Across from the manor house protesters were living in tents along the fence of the base. 
Calling their encampment the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, women had started camping around the perimeter of the base in 1981; at times some chained themselves to the fence, to protest the planned deployment of nuclear-armed cruise missiles there. On one occasion 30,000 gathered and formed a human chain around the base. There were still quite a few of them living there, even as the process to eliminate the missiles they had opposed was underway. 
At Kapustin-Yar the front sections and reentry vehicles of the SS-20s (minus the nuclear warheads, which were not subject to the treaty) were crushed, while the main parts of the missiles were detonated, two missiles at a time, with conventional explosives. After inspecting the missiles and the placement of explosives around them, we observed their detonation from a safe distance. Two SS-20s produce an impressive explosion, as can be imagined when considering that the energy released in a matter of seconds is enough to launch each of the two missiles over 3,000 miles. The solid rocket fuel, broken apart and ignited by the explosive burned in the air like thousands of flares producing a towering mushroom-shaped cloud. After the explosion, several of us donned special gear to observe the crater and its contents. 
The American elimination procedure was different. Instead of using explosives, Pershing missiles were ignited and the fuel burned in specially constructed mountings before their casings were crushed. Witnessing the release of that powerful force was also extraordinary, as the energy released produced a tremble and a supernatural shaking of the earth.  
A Russian repair facility in Minsk, Belarus, was the site for the elimination of mobile missile launchers. Every weekday for a month, excluding Sundays, we reported to a booth in a large hanger to watch welding crews cut up the missile launchers piece by piece. It was slow, time-consuming work. I remember a sign posted in that booth in which we spent so much time which read, “доверяй, но проверяй” (doveryai, no proveryai), a Russian proverb meaning, “trust but verify.”  I had always thought it was an English expression, since it was an OSIA motto, but have discovered since that Suzanne Massie, an author and specialist on Russian culture and history had introduced the phrase to President Reagan and taught him to say it in Russian. He used it in Geneva in 1985 during his first one-on-one with Gorbachev and liked to use it afterward in their conversations (reportedly so often that the Russian leader joked about how tired he was of hearing it).[footnoteRef:3]  [3:  See Suzanne Massie, Trust But Verify: Reagan, Russia, and Me (Rockland, Maine: Maine Authors Publishing, 2013), 19, 230, 231-32. Concerned about relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in 1983, this American daughter of a Swiss diplomat, and a private citizen who had studied Russian language, history and culture, sought out President Reagan to see if she could help improve them in some way. The author of Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia, Massie used some government contacts she had to reach the president, and he received her in the Oval Office and used her for four years as a back channel into the Soviet bureaucracy.   See also Jack F. Matlock, Jr, Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (New York: Random House, 2004), 92-93 and 134 for Reagan’s appreciation of her book and an interesting account of her role in the relationship between Gorbachev and the American president. In his early years in office when the Russians were very suspicious of him, his anti-communism, Evil Empire speech, and deployment of short- and intermediate-range missiles in Europe, Reagan used her to help convince her Soviet contacts and their superiors of the sincerity of his intentions to improve relations and negotiate to decrease the threat of war. Mikhail Gorbachev’s character, motivations, aversion to nuclear weapons, and his role in the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War is analyzed In Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 264-344 passim. There is also a very telling anecdote that provides insight into why Gorbachev decided to institute reforms in order to achieve successful agreements on the reduction of nuclear weapons in Matlock, 253-54.
] 

In Minsk, we lived on the missile base, got along well with, and got to know the members of the Russian escort team fairly well. I learned firsthand that the Russian economy at that time was for all intents and purposes like that of a Third World Country (a term used more frequently in those days meaning “very poor”). Our Russian friends liked to banter about how poor the people were in Poland – one country they believed to be even poorer.
My favorite inspection in Western Europe was the one that took us to Rome, where we met the Russian team before continuing on to Comiso air base on the island of Sicily. After arriving in Rome for the close-out inspection, the American ambassador to Italy invited the two teams for an ice-breaker at the American embassy, which turned out to be magnificent, palatial and surrounded by spacious, manicured grounds. The Italian authorities were very hospitable and put great emphasis on our security, illustrated by the way we were transported from place to place. 
Rome is notorious for traffic, especially during the week and this was a weekday, but escorted by five motorcycle Carabinieri and two patrol cars, we were bused from the airport on one side of Rome to the embassy on the other without being slowed down by traffic or stopping for lights. The Carabinieri were skilled at parting waves of traffic, actually striking with their batons the hoods of any cars that failed to move out of the way fast enough. Yet, despite the complications, we were not taken directly to the American embassy, but were treated to a whirlwind sightseeing tour on the way, past the Colosseum, the site of the old Forum, and other sites in the city.  On the following day, we flew by Chinook helicopter to the base, where we spent the day touring the empty missile storage facilities. 
The inspections themselves, in my experience, and history attests to this were highly successful and the teams carried out their duties at all inspections in a very businesslike and cooperative manner. There were no incidences of attempts to cheat, conceal, or block access for verification (some violations recently have been alleged, but they are outside the scope of this paper). The treaty remains in force today and permanently bans the subject missiles and equipment, but does allow for voluntary withdrawal. 
There is a cartoon in OSIA’s official history of the treaty purporting to show how thorough the treaty had been carried out, and its acceptance by the Russian people. It depicts a Soviet couple in a small cabin presumably deep in Siberia, and they are looking out the window at some distant figures in the snow. The caption reads: “Is just another American verification team looking for intermediate-range missiles, Comrade Wife!” The implication of the cartoon was accurate, but it was in one respect misleading. U.S. inspectors were not given free rein to search anywhere they chose, nor were the Russian inspectors on U.S. or allied territories, and they certainly did not go off on their own. The treaty procedures were all carefully orchestrated and we only went where our Soviet hosts took us (or vice-versa). I once asked one of our team chiefs if we could really be sure the Soviet government had not concealed some SS-20s somewhere in the vastness of the largest-by-far country in the world. “We can only count the ones they show us,” he replied. 
There is no reason to suspect, however, that the Russians did anything but live up to the letter and spirit of the treaty, and the treaty did provide for the use of national technical means to monitor compliance. It seemed evident to me that the Russians inspectors I met had no desire to cheat, and history also shows this to be true, because they believed in it. Some hardliners in the Soviet hierarchy were upset with the deal, but they were not strong enough to block it. Among other things (such as Chernobyl experience of nuclear horror, the cost of the lost cause in Afghanistan, and the failing economy), when the teenage German Mathias Rust flew a private plane through Soviet airspace unmolested and landed near Red Square in Moscow in May 1987, the Gorbachev took the opportunity of this humiliating incursion into Russian airspace to dismiss about 200 military leaders and officials for incompetence – many of them the very ones who could have made it more difficult or even impossible for Gorbachev to implement his policies.[endnoteRef:1] The hardliners did not trust us, as many in the U.S. government did not trust them, and since the treaty DID favor the United States in a number of ways, they were vehemently against it. With Gorbachev’s purge, they were not strong enough to block it. With them out of the way and the Russian people free to debate and criticize past policies under glasnost, the Soviet leader was able to launch his reforms and seek arms reduction, even if it meant the forthcoming agreements were not exactly equally balanced. [1:  Chernobyl disaster, accident in 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union, the worst disaster in the history of nuclear power generation. The Chernobyl power station was situated at the settlement of Pripyat, 10 miles (16 km) northwest of the city of Chernobyl (Ukrainian: Chornobyl) and 65 miles (104 km) north of Kiev, Ukraine. The station consisted of four reactors, each capable of producing 1,000 megawatts of electric power; it had come online in 1977–83.
The disaster occurred on April 25–26, 1986, when technicians at reactor Unit 4 attempted a poorly designed experiment. Workers shut down the reactor’s power-regulating system and its emergency safety systems, and they withdrew most of the control rods from its core while allowing the reactor to continue running at 7 percent power. These mistakes were compounded by others, and at 1:23 am on April 26 the chain reaction in the core went out of control. Several explosions triggered a large fireball and blew off the heavy steel and concrete lid of the reactor. This and the ensuing fire in the graphite reactor core released large amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere, where it was carried great distances by air currents. A partial meltdown of the core also occurred.
On April 27 the 30,000 inhabitants of Pripyat began to be evacuated. A cover-up was attempted, but on April 28 Swedish monitoring stations reported abnormally high levels of wind-transported radioactivity and pressed for an explanation. The Soviet government admitted there had been an accident at Chernobyl, thus setting off an international outcry over the dangers posed by the radioactive emissions. By May 4 both the heat and the radioactivity leaking from the reactor core were being contained, albeit at great risk to workers. Radioactive debris was buried at some 800 temporary sites, and later in the year the highly radioactive reactor core was enclosed in a concrete-and-steel sarcophagus (which was later deemed structurally unsound).
Some sources state that two people were killed in the initial explosions, whereas others report that the figure was closer to 50. Dozens more contracted serious radiation sickness; some of these people later died. Between 50 and 185 million curies of radionuclides (radioactive forms of chemical elements) escaped into the atmosphere—several times more radioactivity than that created by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. This radioactivity was spread by the wind over Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine and soon reached as far west as France and Italy. Millions of acres of forest and farmland were contaminated, and, although many thousands of people were evacuated, hundreds of thousands more remained in contaminated areas. In addition, in subsequent years many livestock were born deformed, and among humans several thousand radiation-induced illnesses and cancer deaths were expected in the long term. The Chernobyl disaster sparked criticism of unsafe procedures and design flaws in Soviet reactors, and it heightened resistance to the building of more such plants. Chernobyl Unit 2 was shut down after a 1991 fire, and Unit 1 remained on-line until 1996. Chernobyl Unit 3 continued to operate until 2000, when the nuclear power station was officially decommissioned.
Following the disaster, the Soviet Union created a circle-shaped exclusion zone with a radius of about 18.6 miles (30 km) centered on the nuclear power plant. The exclusion zone covered an area about 1,017 square miles (2,634 square km) around the plant. However, it was later expanded to 1,600 square miles (4,143 square km) to include heavily radiated areas outside the initial zone. Although no people actually live in the exclusion zone, scientists, scavengers, and others may file for permits that allow them to enter for limited amounts of time. (from Britannica.com)

] 

The Russians destroyed more missiles than we did - 1846 to 846, and more equipment; they had 130 missile sites to close or convert, while the U.S. had only thirty-one. Pershing missile personnel I knew liked to brag about the speed and accuracy of the Pershing missiles (if a Pershing missile was hypothetically launched from Clarksville, for instance, it could be relied on to detonate within twenty minutes in New York’s Yankee Stadium between the pitcher’s mound and home plate). While it is true that the SS-20s were not as accurate (150-450 meters CEP, or circular error probable to 100 feet CEP for the Pershings), they were bigger, far more powerful, and could carry multiple warheads.[footnoteRef:4]   [4:  Each SS-20 carried three 150 kiloton multiple reentry vehicles (MRVs), while the Pershing II’s could dial up a blast from five to eighty kilotons (the range of the first from 370-3100 miles while the maximum range of the Pershing was about 1100 miles). 
] 

The INF Treaty was one of the last great events of the Cold War. One can argue that without the deployment of the Pershing missiles and cruise missiles in Europe, Gorbachev never would have felt compelled to undertake the openness and reform that led to the collapse of the Soviet system and empire – if this is true, then those who resisted the deployment and compared their Western leaders to Nazi warmongers were wrong. 
Mikhail Gorbachev admired an idealized Lenin, but according to all accounts he not only feared the use of nuclear force in war, but opposed the use of force in general and its application even in the interests of the state.[footnoteRef:5] Gorbachev feared a nuclear was and was so opposed to the use of nuclear weapons that he refused to push the button to launch a nuclear strike even in training exercises. Both he and Ronald Reagan had dreams of eliminating all nuclear weapons; though unable to accomplish that goal, the INF Treaty and the peaceful end of Soviet authoritarian rule was a very hopeful step for much of the world. It may be pointed it out that many were skeptical and critical of Reagan for trusting the Russian leader (especially those on the right of the political spectrum) and that there was a similar institutional reluctance in the Soviet Union to support Gorbachev’s efforts to affect agreement with the U.S. in the interest of world peace. Ironically, both men are reviled to this day by many in their respective countries, yet the evidence seems to indicate that both reinforce the “great man” theory of history (individuals can greatly influence the course of history) by the roles they played in the peaceful end of the Cold War.   [5:   Mikhail Gorbachev’s character, motivations, and role in the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War is analyzed In Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 264-344 passim.
] 

Ronald Reagan clearly linked arms control to a humanization of Soviet rule within its empire and an end to aggressive intervention in the Third World. Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika were partly the result of the evolution of anti-Stalinism originating with Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They followed Reagan’s 1983-speech depicting the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” by only a few years. Reagan’s later 1987 plea in Berlin, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” is also indicative. The remarkable thing is that Gorbachev seemed to have listened. He refused to use force to defend it. 
Gorbachev knew he would not be able to achieve the sweeping arms reduction agreements he wanted without showing the West the arms were no longer needed. The best way to achieve that was for the Soviet Union to become more Westernized – something Gorbachev himself along with his wife Raisa and their coterie were quite comfortable with. An exchange between Thatcher and Gorbachev shows that he realized that unless Westerners became convinced that the Soviet Union no longer threatened to pursue world domination for communism, they would be unlikely to give up their weapons. Anatoly Chernyaev made this clear in a 1998 statement: “Our policy did not change until Gorbachev understood that there would be no improvement and no serious arms control until we admitted and accepted human rights, free emigration, until glasnost became freedom of speech, until our society and the process of perestroika changed deeply.”[footnoteRef:6] [6:  See Jack F. Matlock, Jr, Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (New York: Random House, 2004), 253.
] 

By the time most of the initial work of destroying missiles and closing or converting their bases had been done in 1990, Gorbachev’s popularity had peaked in the U.S.S.R. Surprisingly perhaps, the man who had called the Soviet Union an evil empire, Ronald Reagan, was also popular there – perhaps even more popular there than he was at home (according to Matlock). Reagan did not take credit for “winning” the Cold War or changing the Soviet government though. In his memoirs he wrote “not of the victory of one country over another but of the triumph of one idea over another. ‘Democracy triumphed in the cold war because it was a battle of values – between one system that gave preeminence to the state and another that gave preeminence to the individual and freedom.’”[footnoteRef:7] [7:  Matlock, 316.  ] 

Without Reagan, Gorbachev and his government may not have taken their country in the direction they did. Though Reagan’s role as a cold warrior contributed to ending the Cold War, his role as peacemaker may ironically have been even more significant. There is even more irony in the argument, which seems quite solid, that the Soviet Union, which produced the aggressive leader who started the Cold War, also produced the dovish leader who ended it. 
Though a convinced Communist, Gorbachev’s ideology was very anti-Stalin (as were all, or nearly all, of Stalin’s successors). From Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes, through Brezhnev’s détente, to Gorbachev’s “new thinking,” the Soviet Union had slowly evolved from totalitarianism and the use of force within and outside the Soviet Empire to an ultimate embrace of Western values. This evolution did not have to progress linearly, as it did, especially as the KGB, the Soviet army, and the military industrial complex were not enthusiastic followers. When they realized that General Secretary Gorbachev was unwilling to use force even in the interest of the Soviet empire, it was too late. It may have been inevitable for the Soviet Union to collapse or for it to morph into more of a hybrid economy as Communist China did or to revert to totalitarianism, but it was not inevitable for it to collapse peacefully. That it did was above all due to Mikhail Gorbachev.[footnoteRef:8] [8:  Much of this line of thinking is laid out in Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 264-344.
] 

In the early 1980s, and even before that, analysts in the U.S. and Soviet dissidents predicted the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. Its Five-Year Plans never worked, consumer products were chronically scarce, and its people were denied the freedom and opportunity available elsewhere. Trotsky had predicted that the West would flounder and decay while the Soviet Empire was to flourish and prosper – as time went on, it became clear that the reverse was true. This, coupled with the difficulties the Russian military was experiencing in Afghanistan, the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, and other factors caused a faction of the Russian leadership to consider major changes in the system. Reagan (and Margaret Thatcher) had pushed him in the direction of reform, and unrestrained, it led to the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union. 
	What we had no way of knowing for sure in the 1980s that Mikhail Gorbachev was serious about arms control. As part of my effort to become as proficient as possible in the Russian language, a quest that ultimately led to my selection as a translator in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, I attended as many as fifteen or more three-week Russian immersion seminars and got to know quite a few Russian emigrants, a number of them fresh from the Soviet Union (including a KGB general named Oleg Kalugin, promoted as youngest general ever in 1974 and denounced in 2002 as a traitor by Vladimir). None of them trusted Gorbachev in the early years of Gorbachev’s leadership, but Reagan believed he could deal with him – and he turned out to be right. Even as a member of the inspections teams, getting to know and develop a strong rapport to my Soviet counterparts, I had had doubts. Were neoconservatives like Robert Gates, Dick Cheney, and Brent Scowcroft right that Gorbachev was about theatrics and deception? 
The Russians SEEMED more earnest and open about the elimination procedures than we did; it now can be asserted that this came from the very top.[footnoteRef:9] As we now know, Gorbachev was afraid of a nuclear war, was strongly focused on reducing or eliminating that threat (as Reagan was), and he was prepared to and in response to demands by Reagan he DID institute systematic reforms of the Soviet Union. Documents released in the latter nineties show that glasnost (“openness” or free speech) and perestroika (reform) were undertaken to assure the West the Soviet Union was no longer to be feared in order to bring about arms reduction. As she recounts in her memoirs, Margaret Thatcher told Gorbachev that she saw no reason to believe that the Soviet Union had given up “the goal of securing world domination for communism.” Gorbachev refuted Thatcher’s argument, but as he later wrote, “I must admit … that our policy towards developing countries had been highly ideological and that, to a certain extent, Mrs. Thatcher had been right in her criticisms.’”[footnoteRef:10]  [9:  We were asked to collect information; while the Russians showed no indication that they had been given similar instructions.
]  [10:   See Jack F. Matlock, Jr, Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (New York: Random House, 2004), 253.] 

Not long after meeting with Thatcher, Gorbachev spoke to the Politburo, explained how she helped him understand how the Soviet Union was perceived by many in the West and declared that it was necessary to reduce Soviet conventional weapons in Europe. According one of Gorbachev’s closest advisors, Anatoly Chernyaev, at that meeting of the highest policy-making body in the Soviet government on May 8, 1986, Gorbachev said:
Remember, I told you about my meeting with Thatcher. She said they were afraid of us, that we invaded Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Afghanistan. This perception is widespread among the public there. It persists in the minds of many people. Anti-Soviet propaganda is based on it. We should strengthen our policy for the humanization of international relations with our actions. We should let them know that we are not just sitting or lying on our military doctrine, but that we are trying to find a way to make the world more stable.[footnoteRef:11]   [11:  Ibid, 253-54.] 


Few of us may expect how impressed and awed a Russian who had never been to the West before could be by a visit to an Air Force commissary (grocery store) or new car dealer. Before I had been to the Soviet Union and witnessed myself how empty the shelves were in a typical grocery in Moscow, Minsk, or Volgograd (which were far better provided than elsewhere in the Soviet Union), I did not fully understand how members of the Russian teams wondered at the abundance they found. 
Admiring the new cars at a dealership, one of the Russian inspectors confided to me: “You know, if I brought a car like that home to the Soviet Union, my neighbors would destroy it – rip off the windshield wipers, steal the tires, vandalize it. In your country if one person has something nice, others strive to be like you and get it for themselves. In mine, people only wish to take what you have in order to bring you down to their level.” 
 A one point while spending a month in Minsk (Belarus) on an elimination inspection (watching the Soviet side cut up missile launchers), I had the sense of being obscenely wealthy in comparison not only to the average person, but to officers in the Soviet army, who outranked me. At another time in a bookstore in Volgograd the day after the elimination inspection in Kapustin Yar where we witnessed the destruction of SS-20 missiles, I gathered as many books as I could carry (Russian literature by greats such as Gogol and Tolstoy, as well as translations in Russian of detective novels and authors like Mark Twain). Though on the street I may have gotten maybe twenty rubles to a dollar, even at the official rate of 1:1 the books were a good buy, and hard (if not impossible) to find back home. But Sasha, my Russian counterpart came up to me as I was about to pay and said, “Bill, do you know what you are doing? Do you realize how much those are going to cost?” A little surprised at his concern, I assured him I could handle it. Later, in the train he came up to me and explained that the books I selected were sold in a special part of the store, sold at a rate ten times the official price (in the Soviet Union the price was engraved on every item sold, but under Gorbachev’s perestroika some allowance was made for supply and demand for some enterprises). He told me that what I paid amounted to over a week’s salary for him; I later calculated that for me it was closer to an hour or two.  I was also in Moscow when the first McDonalds opened there – the lines of people stretched for blocks, each willing to pay what amounted to, for many, a full day’s pay for a burger and fries.
It is now possible to reach some conclusions about the historical significance of the INF Treaty. One can argue that without the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe, Gorbachev never would have felt compelled to negotiate. If this is true, then those in Western Europe who resisted the deployment of those missiles and compared their leaders and those of the United States for deploying them to Nazi warmongers, were wrong. The opposite was closer to the truth; the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles brought about steps to ensure peace, not war. It was the final push on Gaddis’s “open” door. While there may, of course, have been other conceivable outcomes, we may conclude that the signing and implementation of the INF Treaty was one of the factors that led to the end of the Cold War.