In the Fall of 1979, Senator Paul Laxalt and Governor Reagan asked me to once again be a military advisor in the yet-to-be-announced Reagan run against Carter. I readily agreed. But it set me to thinking about Mr. Reagan's cogent 1976 question, “Can't you military men come up with something better than Mutual Assured Destruction?” I thought I'd better try.
I gathered an informal group of strategic thinkers together to pose Reagan's question and look for answers. These included retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert C. Richardson III, retired Vice Admiral Mark Hill, Mr. Jack Morse, retired Navy Captain and former Assistant Secretary of Defense, nuclear physicist Arnold Kramish, and conceptual aerospace engineer Fred Redding.
We all agreed that the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction was the end result of a technological innovation -- the nuclear weapon on intercontinental delivery systems. Any change in that doctrine would be based as well upon technological innovation. The area in which technology might provide such innovation appeared to be space. We asked ourselves what could be done to end run the MAD doctrine using our perceived advantages in space technology. Also to our great advantage was the rapid exploitation of microchip technology to speed up computation -- an area in which the USSR lagged significantly.
We concluded that a harvest of available and emerging U.S. technology provided an opportunity to create strategic defensive systems of sufficient capability to change our strategy. By emphasizing protection of the United States and its allies from nuclear attack, we could break out of the all-offense, vengeance-oriented MAD doctrine. Considering how targeting is done, we knew that even a modestly effective defense against the main offensive threat, long range ballistic missiles, would make it impossible for a Soviet planner to be assured of success in a first strike. We could deter nuclear attack by insuring the failure of a first strike rather than by ensuring the success of our second strike, as called for by MAD.
I and my colleagues were not alone in concluding that U.S. strategic defenses against ballistic missiles were imperative. Senator Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming almost single-handedly forced the Carter Administration to pay attention to this issue. A distinguished aerospace engineer, Maxwell Hunter convinced the senator that chemical laser platforms deployed in space were the technological answer to defense against long range missiles. Dr. Angelo Codevilla was instrumental in getting Hunter's ideas across, which were backed by three other technical experts; the group acquired the nickname "The Gang of Four." Senator Wallop's efforts resulted in a sharp increase in DOD funding of laser research.
Codevilla, the same staffer who had alerted me and Dick Pipes to the perfidious staff report on Team B, approached me to collaborate on a book which would accentuate the need for strategy change and the role of defenses therein. We did produce such a book titled “Shall America be Defended?” Codevilla was greatly disappointed that I would not agree to include a judgment that the spaceborne laser was the technological answer to the problem. I did not wish to come down hard on one technical solution since I had learned by then that several other options showed merit. These options included the space-borne kinetic energy, "hit-to-kill" systems, technologically more mature and probably much less costly than beam weapons.
By early 1980, I was so well convinced that effective defenses could be built that I strongly urged them on Candidate Reagan in the course of several campaign staff meetings. The most memorable was in Nashua, New Hampshire in February 1980. In a skull session prior to a debate with George Bush, I presented a highly condensed version of my group's recommendations for a strategic switch to Mutually Assured Survival versus Mutually Assured Destruction.
Mr. Reagan was very interested. This came as no surprise since he and some his closest advisors (notably Martin Anderson and Ed Meese) had long been disturbed by the suicide-pact nature of MAD. Further, some six months earlier, Reagan had been shocked during a visit to North American Air Defense (NORAD) headquarters when General Jimmy Hill had told him that he could warn of a nuclear missile attack, but could do nothing more to defend against it.
Ronald Reagan showed his instinctive grasp of the importance of a concept over details of execution at that meeting in a Nashua motel, but he also showed his political savvy. Noting that I had been a member of Team B some four years earlier, he asked me about its origins -- this somewhat to my surprise. Later that evening, Ronald Reagan was to make formidable use of my answer.
Richard Allen, later to become Reagan's NSC chief, remarked: "We've seen history made tonight." Indeed that was true. George Bush, fresh from a win in the Iowa Caucus, was not keen on the scheduled Nashua debate, which had been set up by a supporter, a Mr. Breen, editor of the local newspaper. Bush, no longer in need of a debate, withdrew funding. The Reagan campaign put up the money. Further, Reagan invited all the Republican candidates to participate. The Bush people didn't want them. They came anyway. Reagan greeted them. Bush did not. Mr. Reagan took the microphone to explain why the other candidates would not participate. Mr. Bush's friend and the moderator, Mr. Breen, told the technicians to turn off the microphone. Mr. Reagan then made his famous angry retort: "Mr. Green (sic), I paid for this microphone!"
That was drama enough, all redounding to the benefit of Ronald Reagan. No sooner had the debate begun than a newsman asked George Bush about his role in the Team B effort. Mr. Bush's answer left the impression that Team B was his initiative and that he had supported its findings. Mr. Reagan drew one of his famous three-by-five cards from his pocket and said: "Just this afternoon, I was speaking with a member of Team B and he would paint a rather different picture." He went on to relate how Team B was initiated by the independent President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and that CIA under George Bush had reacted negatively to Team B's actions and findings.
I was sitting near the front row in the audience with Dick Allen. George Bush knew perfectly well which member of Team B had given this ammunition to Reagan. Bush subsequently sent an old friend, Dr. Ray Cline, around to my office to complain. Ray, like all other former intelligence chiefs except me, had signed up in George Bush's camp on the grounds that he had been CIA Director. I am sure that Ray Cline was a bit embarrassed with his chore. In any case it didn't have an impact on my actions.
During 1980, when I was not involved with other matters pertaining to the Reagan Campaign and encouraged by Reagan's obvious keen interest, I was hard at work on fleshing out the strategic defense concept. I wrote articles for journals such as Strategic Review and for newspapers.
My group of collaborators was growing. It became clear that our emphasis on space technology as the key to national military strategy had much broader implications. Dr. Peter Glaser joined our group and convinced us that other national objectives could also be met if the United States became serious about the usage of space. He informed us of the great potential for generating abundant electrical power with solar power satellites and beaming that power to Earth. And this was but one of numerous advantages that were potentially available if space were effectively exploited. Thus our concept was moving from a pure military strategy toward a broader national strategy.
I wrote one article for a newspaper on this broader concept which I titled: “A Combined Military-Civil National Space Strategy”. The editor didn't like this bureaucratic title and renamed it “The High Frontier”. We all liked that title and adopted it as a good description of our ideas. I was later to be sharply criticized and threatened with a lawsuit over the name. The late Gerald O'Neill of Princeton, a proponent of self-sustaining human habitats in space had written a book titled “The High Frontier”. He roundly scolded me for using the title and thus besmirching his peaceful ideas with my military proposals. I found out that he had no legal case. We also discovered that an earlier book written in the nineteenth century about hot air balloons had borne the title “The High Frontier”. We didn't change our name.
Of course, my colleagues and I were delighted when Reagan won the Republican nomination. I went to the convention in Detroit, representing John Fisher's American Security Council, where I thumped the tub for a strong national security plank in the platform, including a demand for ballistic missile defenses "at least equal to those of the USSR." The selection of George Bush as Vice Presidential candidate took the edge off. I knew that Bush would probably never forgive me for not joining his team and advising Reagan on Team B. He would be unlikely to be enthusiastic about my proposals for missile defense-and indeed he was not. My choice was Jack Kemp, who had been an enthusiast for High Frontier's proposal, more openly than Mr. Reagan during the campaign.
Another shock came by chance. Paul Nitze, one of the former Democrat "neo-conservatives" had been backing Reagan's insistence on stronger military defenses. He joined me and two other colleagues for a drink in a bar nearby the Convention Center. I began to wax eloquent about the need for missile defenses. Nitze flatly contradicted me. He was dead set against such defenses on the grounds that they would be "destabilizing" and were not "cost effective." Nitze was later to become a key advisor on arms-control in the White House. I was convinced all through the Reagan and Bush years that he and Brent Scowcroft were doing all they could to sabotage Mr. Reagan's SDI program.
The general election campaign of 1989 was pretty much a cake walk. I was dispatched from time to time as a surrogate speaker. Dick Allen, who was charged with formulating foreign affairs, military and intelligence positions called me frequently for input.
The word got around Washington that I would become Reagan's new CIA Director. That was not in the cards because Bill Casey, the campaign manager wanted the job, and I would have turned it down. I thought then (and still think) that what I was doing was more important and more in line with my talents. But I did enjoy the rumors. CIA bureaucrats, who had in the past been overt or covert bureaucratic enemies started calling me up. "It's been a long time, Danny. Why don't we have lunch?" I knew why they called and was not about to tell them they were needlessly covering their backsides. But I didn't have lunch.
