This article first appeared on Today in Alternate History.
March 23, 1997 - A Decade of Reykjavik
The world celebrated as the Reykjavik Agreement reached its historic decade-long milestone
set by Reagan and Gorbachev at the Icelandic capital. The specified
period for confining testing of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)
to the laboratory was also reached.
Thankfully, the ever-present
danger of Mutually Assured Destruction had been avoided. To his great
credit, Reagan had remained faithful to his long-sighted vision in 1976 at
Kansas City, when he said the Republican National Convention, "You are
going to write for people a hundred years from now, who know all about
us. We know nothing about them. We don't know what kind of a world they
will be living in."
More importantly, Reagan had faced up to the reality that SDI
would fail to deliver any time soon. Notwithstanding these welcome
breakthroughs, the limitation of nuclear armaments was a problem
infinitely more complex than four decades earlier when
President Harry Truman of the United States set Under Secretary of State
Dean Acheson onto the task of answering the question, "What to do with
The Bomb?" The UN Atomic Energies Commission had "to deal with the problems
raised by the discovery of atomic energy." It requested proposals, and
Truman tapped "park bench statesman" Bernard Baruch to present one. Baruch had recommended
America as the sole nuclear power give up the Bomb, but many Americans
in the '40s felt the nation had come by the atomic bomb legitimately and
had no need to give it up until the nations agreed to outlaw atomic
weapons.
The successor governments of the 90's under Clinton and Yeltsin
were not looking at the world a century on, but they certainly had a
significantly different perspective from either Baruch in '46 or Reagan
in '76 or even '86. Due to nuclear proliferation, other countries had
joined the nuclear club of nations.
In metaphorical terms, the genie was out of the bottle. What would be the
point of handling atomic weapons over to the United Nations if they
continued to be deployed around the world? Or if one of the
superpowers maintained their own secret stockpile? Or a device was
delivered to the target in the cargo of a ship or a terrorist
organization developed a suitcase bomb? SDI had no answers for these
scenarios.
Where Gorbachev had hesitated to use his conventional
armed forces to keep the Soviet Union together, Yeltsin and more so his
successor Vladimir Putin had done so to keep the Russian Federation in
one piece. War came to Chechnya and Georgia. These conflicts only pushed
Eastern European states towards the West. As the NATO Alliance expanded
eastwards, Moscow feared encirclement and existential threat. In keeping
with her bloody history of invasion, Russia prepared for
the inevitability of war with European aggressors. When Presidential candidate Mitt Romney proposed that Russia was America's primary adversary, President Obama responded that "the 1980s called and want their foreign policy back."
Subsequent
developments indicated that Romney was closer to the truth. The buffer
states chose sides, as the Baltics joined NATO, and Ukraine and Georgia
became candidates for future membership of the collective security
agreement under which an attack on one was considered an attack on all.
Belarus turned to Moscow, but Ukraine looked to Washington. When Russia
occupied the Crimea in 2014, citing a Soviet-era justification, it was
obvious to most that a conventional World War Three was around the
corner. After decades in which Western politicians had feared the
overwhelming force of the Soviet Union, the NATO Alliance was far
greater in strength. This was largely due to technology advancement on
the battlefield.
Events could only take one direction. In early
2015, President Putin announced that the Russian Federation would not be
renewing the Reykjavik Agreement. Instead, in the interests of
security, Russia would re-equip its nuclear capability with the
assistance of its allies in Beijing. In retaliation, President Obama
announced that the United States would resume SDI testing with its
allies and partners. How to handle this changed landscape in the
long-term became the core campaign issue in the 2016 presidential
election. Fundamentally, all of the candidates agreed that the US would
also need to take the same steps, but the larger question was whether to
invest in a next generation SDI technology that could end the new arms
race. Americans elected Romney on his third race for the White House,
trusting him to find the answers to resolving this deepening crisis.
Reversing the logic of Eisenhower's Farewell Address, he put faith in
the military-industrial-complex to defeat Putin and his "potential for
the disastrous rise of misplaced power."
Author's Note:
In reality, the talks collapsed at the last moment over SDI.
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