Book Review by Robert Kennedy of Thomas C Reed's At the Abyss

Review of Thomas C Reed's At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War
for George (LLNL hacker-magician and colleague of Reed's, George A Michael)

On November 15, 2004, former weapon designer and Secretary of the Air Force Thomas C Reed came to our fair city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee to lecture its denizens about his new memoir, At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War. There is much in here to amaze the average citizen of a certain age and force them to reevaluate the history they thought they knew. Furthermore, these revelations will come as no surprise to those who already read Peter Schweizer's seminal Victory, published by the Atlantic Monthly Press 10 years ago. The 5-front strategy as laid out by Schweizer included:

energy-economic: collude with the Saudis to drop the price of crude oil - the USSR's principal cash cow - on the world market thereby starving the Soviets of critical hard currency, plus no grain or machinery sales on credit, frustrate natural gas sales to Europe, and blow up the pipeline with bad chips if that didn't work;

military-technical: push the envelope past where Soviets could compete; SDI was a fundamental part of that;

political: nonviolent but covert CIA activities, e.g. heading off Castroization in Surinam, technical and logistic support to nationalist independence movements in Eastern Europe;

diplomatic: bleed the Soviet Army white in Afghanistan;

information war: corrupted chips & software, techno-honeypots to feed sabotage to Soviet spies, Voice of America broadcasts;

Victory profoundly changed the worldview of a lot of people, your humble reviewer included, and At the Abyss backs up virtually all of it. Scholarship from other sources over the past decade also shows that both Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan were greatly underestimated while in office.

Unlike Schweizer, Reed was a personal participant in many of the events he relates here, and so he brings to this narrative the personal perspective of one who has been there, done that, and gotten the T-shirt. In addition he provides many amusing anecdotes and takes on various historical figures. Reed has had decades to ruminate on his life, and the literary quality of this memoir clearly reflects the fullness of time (unlike most of the breathless, hastily written, typo-ridden "tell alls" filling the bookstalls today). If nothing else (but there is much more) it is his erudition and depth of thought which gives this memoir the verisimilitude which others lack.

Only a few times does Reed appear to spin things, I suspect out of loyalty to his former colleagues, on this side of the ocean and that. For example, he writes:

"Red Army officers are great people, careful, and at the right time, they did the right thing"

which is a reference to the fact that the Soviet general staff kept the Cheget (nuclear briefcase) out of the hands of irresponsible politicians during the failed coup of August 1991. We owe a great deal to those brave volunteers who may well have saved humanity from a holocaust. But this fine sentiment does not address the fact that other members of the Soviet VPK created and ran (and may still run) the biological warfare complex, Biopreparat, which is arguably at least as evil as nukes, if not more so. Nukes, after all, don't self-replicate.
In another case, he puts forth a rather convoluted defense of the MX deployment, which frankly does not make a lot of sense to me.

Following his formal lecture to the Oak Ridge audience, Mr. Reed entertained some questions from this writer.

Q1. Do you believe Peter Schweizer's thesis in Victory? Was colluding with the Saudis [in order] to crash the Soviet economy [by flooding world market with cheap crude] a major part of Pres. Reagan/DCI Casey's strategy?
A1. Yes, but Schweizer didn't have the information I had. The Soviet economy floated on huge pile of natural resources/commodities which was their weakness. Schweizer did a great job with what he did have. Schweizer's book was the inspiration for my own.

Q2. Was the reason Soviet military didn't support the August 1991 coup that they realized after Desert Storm that they couldn't even defend the rodina ("motherland" in Russian) with existing doctrine?
A2. Yes, but opinion was split according to age. Captains/majors paid the right kind of attention to Desert Storm, colonel and above didn't. [This accords with ground truth about profound generation gap in Russia today]

Q3. Which DOMINIC shots did you work on?
A3. Can't remember.
[See critique below.]

Q4. Did you hear the legend about the Politburo meeting the day after RR's "Star Wars" speech? (Top scientists said to Politburo, "it's a physical impossibility, we can prove it -- however, if anyone can do it, the damned Americans can, therefore we must too")
A4. I heard the same thing, but don't have a citation either.

Q5. Is preemptive war OK doctrine?
A5. Generally, no, it's a bad idea. But nuclear weapons are in a special class. Incipient proliferators ought to be hit. US had a plan to hit DPRK in '94, but my friend Bill Perry [former SecDef] says, 'they [North Koreans] can shoot whenever they want to'. A premptive strike would cause artillery barrage of Seoul with 100K casualties. Probably too late for preemption now. We should have done it in Korea [in '94]. China must step in now, to explain the facts of life to DPRK.
Saddam had a bomb program in 1991, he wanted one bad. Taking him out was a good thing. Islamists think we [West] have no place living in their ideal world. Israelis took out Osirak reactor. They don't dither as much as we do.
[Later in offline conversation:] Enriched uranium is more dangerous than plute, don't know if US has the stones to preempt when that casus belli exists.[my words]

Q6. Is US planning to split world and run it with China? [not my question; is like the old "Co-Dominium" idea about Russians and Americans, once popular in sci-fi]
A6. China is a up and coming great power. China was a terrible proliferator but China must realize proliferation in their neighborhood is the last thing they want. China pretty much delivered complete copy of fourth Chinese test device ("Chi-four"?) to Pakistan as a template for Pak nukes. DPRK nukes mean South Korean nukes which mean Japanese nukes which mean Taiwanese nukes and so on. A nightmare.

Reed says some astounding things, but these revelations are leavened by an absurd coyness about other things that are common knowledge among the informed, or at worst open secrets. For example, the fact that the Pershing II had a CEP under 30 meters, or that one can see the stripes on the Pentagon parking lot from a U.S. spysat, is just as or more significant to me than the fact it was the missed n,2n reaction in the more abundant isotope lithium-7 which made the Castle BRAVO test go like gangbusters. Everybody knows that one, so why be elliptical? In other cases, Reed makes up silly covernames for bomb tests and programs whose real identities are easy enough to figure out with just a little cross-referencing on the Web. (See question 3 above and also our nuclear test database ) Perhaps such easily penetrated covernames as "Oso" (from contextual clues, it was most likely the failed PETIT test shot, plus the high-yield BIGHORN or BLUESTONE atmospheric tests in June 1962) are simply his pro forma gestures to comply with the strictures on publishing after classified government service.

So, herewith some of the revelations:

Soviet fatalities during WWII were more like 50 million.
Igor Kurchatov made up a list of expendable janitors to be shot by Beria in case First Lightning (first Soviet A-bomb on 29Aug1949) went bad.
Josef Stalin was apparently murdered by Lavrentiy Beria! The dictator had secretly assigned management of the Soviet H-bomb (a program kept secret even from his peers on the Politburo, according to Richard Rhodes and David Holloway) to his secret police chief, and was growing dissatisfied with the lack of results.
Ted Hall, the Soviet spy at Los Alamos, was the younger and very devoted brother of Col. Ed Hall of the USAF Ballistic Missile Division in Los Angeles. Col Hall was put in charge of "Project Q" which became the Minuteman ICBM, and later helped the French develop their own ICBM, Diamant.
Before the Cuban Missile Crisis even started, the Soviets had already put 98 tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba, inc. 12x 2-kt Luna tactical rockets, 80x 10-kt FKR cruise missiles, 6x 6-kt gravity bombs in IL-28 bombers, and had granted weapons release ahead of time to the commander on the scene, General Pliyev!
Armand Hammer, late of Occidental Petroleum, was a documented Soviet agent.
US Navy pilot Jim Stockdale, better known as spoiler Ross Perot's running mate in 1992, personally knew there had been no Gulf of Tonkin incident, yet kept that secret from his North Vietnamese captors through 8 years of prison and torture in Hanoi.
One of the Soviet cosmonauts, participating in the joint US-USSR Apollo-Soyuz space flight was a KGB science officer.
President Ronald Reagan had no close friends. He also ignored Nancy's views and conventional wisdom on detente. Closing down 'Evil Empire' was RR's first goal as president, articulated even before the 1980 GOP Convention. A very small subgroup including DCI Bill Casey implemented the 5-point strategy to crash the Soviet economy, unbeknownst to the conventionally-minded "Pragmatist" in the Administration. RR's definition of war aims was to "force the Soviets to seek the consent of the governed".
Mikhail Gorbachev privately referred to RR as "a liar".
Tactical nuclear weapons are not part of the SIOP.
President George HW Bush (the 41st) identifies Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as the most partisan man ever seen in that body.
Stealth was a Soviet idea.
The US military was appalled at President Bush's surprise decision to end Desert Storm after 100 hours.
Soviet army officers were profoundly influenced by the US performance in the Desert Storm, and became deeply skeptical of their own. There was a deep generation gap in this thinking, but it led to the failure of the coup and the nonviolent collapse of the USSR.
Soviet army officers decided they trusted the Americans more than the coup plotters in August 1991.
In 1992, the commander of the US Strategic Air Command came to believe nuclear weapons had no military utility at all.
It was the West which cashed the Soviet peace dividend. A glut of Soviet-era commodities kept the lid on inflation worldwide throughout the 1990s.

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