Sleepwalking With the Bomb by John C. Wohlstetter Page B

between superpowers. Yet Russia is no longer a true superpower, although it is still able to cause lots of trouble around the world. It makes no sense to place current-day Russia’s concerns at a level higher than those of all other nations. In terms of arms control and deterrence, Barack Obama has traveled in time back to 1967, to the days of mutual assured destruction, placing superpower arms concord above deploying full-scale missile defense as insurance against future “clandestine cache” strategic surprise. To put that in perspective, imagine that President Johnson in 1967 had based American policy on how things looked in 1922. That was the year the Washington Naval Treaty put limits on ships and their armaments. Leaders of the great democracies thought these limits would prevent a second world war. Tyrants in Germany and Japan ended that fantasy.
    The Cold War turned out better, but arms accords did not bring about the collapse of the evil empire, nor can it be proven that they alone prevented a nuclear war. All that can be known are two truths: The accords, whether wise or not, did not realize the worst fears of their critics. Equally, it can be said, they did not realize the high hopes of their ardent supporters. They were politically salient, bringing a measure of political peace in Western countries, but ultimately of marginal impact on strategic affairs save for missile defense. Missile defense research lagged and was skewed by arms-control priorities. We are thus more vulnerable to small-power strikes than likely we would be had our research and development on missile defense proceeded without impediments arising out of the prevailing U.S. interpretation of Cold War arms agreements.
    President Obama’s “open mic” exchange with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev at the March 2012 Nuclear Summit exemplified his preoccupation with arms control over missile defense, an attitude that animated the now-defunct ABM Treaty. 16 The president noted that missile defense is a “particular” concern, thus indicating an intention to move towards Moscow’s position after the U.S. 2012 election. Indeed, the White House has sought to share sensitive missile defense data with Moscow, a move strongly opposed by many members of Congress.
    Arms control is an essential tool, not a talisman. Agreements with adversaries are possible, but only when interests in fact coincide, as they do with efforts to avoid accidental war, and with several later arms treaties. It is dangerous for America to assume that an enemy’s strategic interests are the same as its own—as Jimmy Carter learned when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and George W. Bush learned when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia. Commonality of strategic goals was, in those cases, simply absent. With Russia, President Reagan put it best by often citing a Russian proverb: “Trust, but verify.”
    Soviet leaders were hardly immune to mirror-imaging fallacies—that is, the assumption that one’s opponent behaves like oneself. Riding in Los Angeles during his 1959 visit to America, Khrushchev spotted a sign held up by a woman protesting the Hungarian revolt, brutally suppressed by the Soviets in 1956. The sign read: “Death to Khrushchev, the Butcher of Hungary.” Khrushchev angrily turned to American UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge: “Well, if Eisenhower wanted to have me insulted, why did he invite me to come to the United States?” Lodge was incredulous at this question, but Khrushchev persisted: “In the Soviet Union, she wouldn’t be there unless I had given the order.” This was no idle boast. Dean Rusk, secretary of state during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, recounted how during a demonstration in front of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, a staffer asked a Russian soldier how long it would last. The Russian glanced at his watch and replied: “Sixteen minutes.”
    It would take the end of the Cold War to relieve much public anxiety about nuclear arms races