Peace Magazine: How They Ended an Arms Race

Peace Magazine

How They Ended an Arms Race

• published Feb 03, 2025 • last edit Feb 03, 2025

How They Ended an Arms Race: Yevgeny Velikhov’s Friends Reminisce

Metta Spencer: Academician Yevgeny Velikhov was extremely influential with the succession of leaders of his country – from Brezhnev through Andropov, Chernyenko, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and even Putin. He had very strong, powerful relationships in the Soviet Union. In late November, he passed away at the age of 89. We owe a great debt of gratitude toward Academician Velikhov, and I want to say the same of the four men who are with me here today, Roald Sagdeev, Richard Garwin, Frank von Hippel, and Thomas Cochran. All of them certainly had good contacts with Velikhov and played immensely important roles in ending the nuclear arms race of the 1980s.

Roald Sagdeev: It started in 1956. I had just been recruited as a young researcher at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow, the most highly classified institution in the Soviet Union at that time. The topic was controlled fusion, the peaceful uses of nuclear reactions. But everything was classified because the older people had just come from the Russian version of something like the Manhattan Project. We weren’t permitted to even say the word “plasma.”

Velikhov was still a graduate student with two years more to go in Moscow University – but he was coming in maybe once or twice a week, and one of my older colleagues gave him work which eventually became a topic for his thesis. It was the abstract problem of what instabilities might result in the flow of a conducting fluid through a magnetic field.

As a student, his analysis was not tied to the fusion process. But his very first paper, which he published at the end of his Moscow University studies, became extremely important in the scientific understanding of what is happening with black holes – magnetic rotational instability. It relates very well to how ionized matter falls inside a black hole.

Some of our mentors at the Kurchatov Institute, after spending years working for the bomb, were already thinking about what to do in what was a terrible situation: how to save the world from nuclear war.

In the late 1980s, the nuclear arms race paused and seemed to end. Now it has revived. But there are lessons to learn from four scientists who reminisced in December on Zoom about working with the late Yevgeny Velikhov. Thomas Cochran, Richard L. Garwin, Roald Sagdeev, and Frank von Hippel share their memories of this moment in history.

Velikhov was extremely influential in the scientific world, and his contributions to ending the nuclear arms race cannot be overstated. Through his collaborations with other great minds, such as the ones here today, he was pivotal in shaping a future free from nuclear conflict.

Velikhov started at that time to send messages to the Politburo and Velikhov and I were still very far from that activity. We were publishing science papers, and one of our very first joint papers, with another colleague, still is quoted on the so-called quasilinear theory of plasma turbulence, which plays some role in fusion topics. So Velikhov was very bright in dealing with quite sophisticated mathematical problems dealing with hydrodynamic instabilities. But he also had a very practical mind thinking about devices and so on.

Yevgeny was interested with magneto hydrodynamic generators, how to convert the mechanical energy of a plasma moving through a magnetic field into electric power. He came up with a few suggestions, and bosses of Institute agreed to establish a new additional department that quickly grew. Velikhov became a department director in a very young age. I think by the age 30, he was head of the division of the institute with several hundred people working for him.

At that same time, my daily contacts with Velikhov stopped. I was moved to a newly created academic campus in Novosibirsk, Siberia. But we met when I would visit Moscow, perhaps once or twice a month, and I was watching what he was doing. He was doing applied physics, physics using magneto hydrodynamics, plasmas and other things, such as creating new types of powerful lasers which were of interest to the military. This put him quickly into contact with the Military Industrial Complex people. I think this played a very important role in developing our view that something needed to be done.

to General Secretaries about current issues. Before Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) came in 1983, we were considering a number of other issues, including anti-satellite weapons. Velikhov was very active, and he even encouraged General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko, who was predecessor to Gorbachev for about one year, to sign letters to Carl Sagan and Richard Garwin.

Richard Garwin: I remember.

Sagdeev: Chernenko’s predecessor as General Secretary, Yuri Andropov, played a role in bringing Velikhov into different working groups organized by the Central Committee’s Politburo to discuss critical problems. Velikhov also was a very important alternative channel for communication between two superpowers at the time when Soviet Union was under sanctions after its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan when there were no serious discussions on critical issues related to nuclear weapons. He was founder and the first chairman of the Committee of Soviet Scientists Against the Nuclear Threat. Dick, Frank and Tom all interacted with Velikhov through that channel. I was a member of the Soviet Academy of Science and Director of the Space Research Institute at the time, a major entity working on space science. Velikhov, as one of the vice presidents of the Academy, was interested in what my institute was doing, and I was invited to join the Committee of Soviet Scientists Against the Nuclear Threat as Vice Chairman.

Garwin: I would like to introduce some additional counterpart organizations on the U.S. side. I was involved in going to Moscow with the Soviet-American Disarmament Study (SADS) group. Paul Doty, a Harvard biochemist, was its chairman. SADS would meet in the Presidium of the Soviet Academy and elsewhere, and sometimes all the Russians would leave because it was their own city and they had other things to do. We would be left with the Americans talking to one another, but we were assured by Velikhov that no word would be missed, even though there were no Russians present, by which we understood that there would be recordings. I hope the recordings still exist and are of good quality.

I discussed with Velikhov his magneto-hydrodynamic generator in which he had a rocket engine’s exhaust passing through a magnetic field to generate twenty megawatts of electrical power. I was skeptical. He could have produced the same amount of power with automobile batteries. Before going to Moscow, I used to talk with Henry Kissinger in his office when he was Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to President Nixon.

Finally, because Velikhov was very busy, there needed to be a third person to actually carry out the projects on a day-to-day basis. In the joint test ban verification work, that was primarily Mikhail Gokhberg, the senior scientist at the Soviet Academy’s Institute for Physics of the Earth.

Sagdeev: I just bought a few days ago a new song he wrote, singing with a guitar.

Cochran: Yes, he writes poetry and songs. Wonderful!

Spencer: Thomas, can you tell me a little bit about the project on seismic verification?

Cochran: I was in an environmental organization called Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Before Reagan was elected, I’d been working on trying to stop a U.S. program to commercialize the use of plutonium as a nuclear fuel. But after the Reagan Administration came into power in 1981, it started cranking up the US nuclear weapons program, and I got interested in doing something in that area. So, I started with colleagues writing books about nuclear weapons. In the process, I read a paper that came out of Livermore National [nuclear weapons] Laboratory about how to muffle the sound of nuclear underground nuclear explosion so you wouldn’t be able to detect it with seismic instruments. And I began to think that it would be interesting to have a nongovernmental organization to monitor the U.S. Nevada nuclear test site. But you wouldn’t be able to get funding for that because it would be considered too one-sided.

So, I then thought about writing Gorbachev and Reagan a joint letter for publicity purposes — to ask if they would entertain having civilian scientists monitor the two weapon sites. A friend of mine who was a reporter at the Washington Star newspaper introduced me to a young man in the Soviet embassy, Vitaly Churkin (later Russia’s UN ambassador) and the three of us had lunch together. Churkin’s recommendations were not helpful in my view.

Then I called up Jeremy Stone, President of the Federation of American Scientists, and asked him how I could talk to Soviet scientists. He invited me to a conference in Virginia and I pitched my idea to the Soviet delegation, which was headed by Kokoshin, who was part of the leadership of Velikhov’s Committee of Soviet Scientists Against the Nuclear Threat. I got positive feedback. At the Airlie conference I spoke with Frank von Hippel, who said he was going to Moscow and hoped to talk to Velikhov. In Moscow Frank recommended and Velikhov agreed to set up a workshop on nuclear test ban issues at the Soviet Academy in May 1986. There I pitched the idea that we at NRDC would be willing to organize and pay to field an American seismic team, if the Soviets would join us in monitoring both the US and Soviet principal nuclear weapon test sites. I invited to the workshop the chairman of NRDC’s board of directors, Adrien DeWind, who actually signed the agreement with Velikhov to engage in what we called the US-USSR Joint Test Ban Verification Project.

Spencer: It was mostly to change perceptions, wasn’t it?

Frank von Hippel: The prehistory of the test ban is that, in 1963 in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy and First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev got serious about negotiating a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. But because of verification objections that were raised by Edward Teller and others, it turned into a Partial Test Ban. It did not ban nuclear testing underground. That was because the Soviets were not comfortable with in-country seismic monitoring at the time.

Gorbachev opened this issue up again in August 1985 when, a few months after he became General Secretary, he launched a Soviet test moratorium. It was unilateral but its continuation beyond the end of 1985 was conditional on the Reagan administration joining in.

The Reagan administration didn’t want to stop testing and even suggested that perhaps the Soviets were still conducting small tests. In October 1985, Velikhov and I met in Copenhagen at a conference on the centenary of Niels Bohr’s birth to talk about the idea of international “openness” that Bohr had pushed very hard as necessary for global nuclear disarmament.

As we were sitting on a bus on the way back to the hotel from the conference, Velikhov told me about an idea to allow an NGO to seismically monitor the Soviet Union’s main test site in Kazakhstan to verify that they really had stopped.

Spencer: Excuse me. I thought Tom had cooked up the idea first. So independently Velikhov came up with the same notion?

Von Hippel: Perhaps. Or perhaps Kokoshin had relayed Cochran’s proposal to Velikhov. In any case, when the first seismic measurements came back from Kazakhstan in July 1986, they had a major impact on Congress, which had lost interest in the test ban after 1963. And the Democrats in Congress started to push two successive Republican Presidents, Reagan and Bush Sr., to join the Soviet moratorium.

Cochran: When we got back from Kazakhstan, Christopher Payne, who was a Congressional staffer, organized a meeting of a few moderate Democratic members of Congress who were not yet on board on the idea of a moratorium on nuclear testing. We explained what was going on with the joint verification work in Kazakhstan, and the Soviet willingness to allow in-country seismic monitoring. That changed their position, which was later adopted by President Clinton. It was the Clinton Administration that ultimately negotiated the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

To do the measurements in July 1986, the U.S seismic team took 20 tons of seismic equipment – first to Moscow and then to Kazakhstan. We were able to comply with Velikhov’s request to get back to Moscow in about one month’s time after Velikhov and DeWind signed the agreement in May 1986. Velikhov had told us, “Come right back” while the window of opportunity was open.

Garwin: And then there was Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative speech in March 1983. I was receiving an award in California that day, and my wife and I were in a hotel, and I was putting on my formal clothes and listening to Reagan’s speech. He asked the physicists who had given the US nuclear weapons to “give us the means to make them impotent and obsolete.” The ideas that had been proposed at that time included nuclear powered X-ray lasers on fast-reaction rockets to lift the lasers above the atmosphere.

Von Hippel: In response to Reagan’s speech, a group of Soviet scientists led by Velikhov wrote an open letter to US scientists and said, in effect, “we had these discussions that led to the 1972 Treaty limiting ballistic missile defenses. We agreed that, with nuclear weapons, the offense would dominate defense and attempts at defense would simply create an offense-defense arms race. The Soviet scientists asked in effect, “have you changed your minds?”

At the Federation of American Scientists, Jeremy Stone as President, and I as chairman responded, in effect, “No, we haven’t changed our minds, and we’d be happy to come to Moscow and discuss it with you.” Velikhov’s committee responded positively and, over Thanksgiving 1983, we went to Moscow and then Tbilisi in Georgia and met with the leadership of Velikhov’s committee including Sagdeev, Kokoshin, and Sergei Kapitsa. I learned later that the Committee was already in dialogue with, the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on International Security and Arms Control, of which Garwin was a key member.

So, we wanted to have nuclear disarmament, but Reagan’s relaunch of ballistic missile defense created uncertainty. Maybe defense would become possible after all? It took discussions in both the U.S. and Moscow to reestablish that offense really would dominate. Dick was a leader in that discussion in the US and Velikhov and Sagdeev within the Central Committee in Moscow.

Garwin: CISAC was formed in 1980 as a direct successor to SAGS, with Paul Doty also as a founder of CISAC for the purpose of meetings with the Soviet scientists in Washington once or twice a year. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences could no longer support SAGS, but we had an angel who would support CISAC, and that worked very well. And then came Gorbachev in 1985 and people said he would die soon, like Chernyenko and Andropov, but fortunately, that was not the case.

Spencer: I want to hear about the Black Sea activities, because that sounded very adventurous.

Von Hippel: Velikhov was told that you could detect nuclear weapons on ships at distances of kilometers and he didn’t check before telling Gorbachev, who announced this supposed Soviet breakthrough to the world. Roald came to me and said we had to clean this up. So, we started a joint research project on the detection of warheads.

Cochran: Seismic Work and Nuclear Discussions back briefly to the seismic work after we finally got US government to allow Russian seismologists to come to the United States. We took a delegation to Nevada to witness the sensitivity of the seismic instrumentation around the Nevada Test Site. The professional seismologists, including the team from the Scripps Oceanography Institution, led by Jonathan Berger, set up very sensitive instruments around both the test site in Kazakhstan and around the Nevada Test Site.

We took a congressional delegation to Kazakhstan in, I believe it was 1987, to look at those new installations. While we were there, the Soviets arranged for a 20-ton chemical explosion at the Kazakh test site to demonstrate the sensitivity the instruments which were about 100 kilometers away. We duplicated that demonstration in 1988, around the Nevada Test Site. Velikhov came to Nevada to observe that 1988 demonstration, and, as we were flying back, we had a conversation about what we were going to do next. I was, of course, aware of what Frank and Roald were doing because I was part of the study effort and so I suggested, why don’t we do some experiments to test the sensitivity of radiation detectors to detect the presence or absence of nuclear weapons on surface ships? Velikhov agreed to do the experiment.

I spent the following year assembling a team and identifying and acquiring the bed radiation detectors to take with us. And Velikhov assembled six teams on the Soviet side and then invited us all to do these experiments in 1989. When we got to Yalta, we were housed on a hospital ship in the harbor. The ship with the nuclear warhead was off-shore, the Slava, the command ship for the Soviet Black Sea fleet. We had discussions on the hospital ship with Ambassador Victor Karpov, a leading Soviet arms control negotiator. Karpov mentioned that the Soviets would be willing to take the warheads off the surface ships, even without verification if the US would do the same.

We had a congressional delegation along with us. I came back and told General Colin Powell that the Soviets were ready to take the warheads off the surface without verification if the US would do likewise. He said, “No, the U.S. would not do so,” and he gave three reasons. And then, of course, two years later, George Herbert Walker Bush and Yeltsin agreed to take the warheads off the ships without verification. That was fortunate, because the warheads were taken off the Slava (renamed the Moskva), which the Ukrainians sank in April 2022.

Sagdeev: Context and the Detection Idea the context, just to clarify a little bit, was that the Soviets wanted to include limits on nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missiles in the START Treaty. It was a special request from Gorbachev. He tried to ask all of us to do something to support this demand. It was impossible, because we could not agree on something that could not be verified.

So, one of the scientists in the Academy, the director of the Institute of Geochemistry, came to Velikhov and said, “Oh, we have a solution to this problem. We can detect whether there are nuclear warheads on a submarine miles away.” Velikhov said, “Okay, what is your idea?”

The idea was following: you have a small concentration of the noble gas, argon-40, in the atmosphere. If it absorbs a neutron, it becomes argon-41, which has a 2-hour half-life and emits a characteristic 1.3 million electronvolt gamma ray when it decays. So, he said, that means that a nuclear-armed ship would leave in its wake an indicator of the presence of nuclear warheads.

I said to Velikhov, “We have to calculate the background noise and the statistical probability that one could detect such a signal.” Velikhov responded, “I agree with you. But I was so excited by this idea that, unfortunately, I already told Gorbachev it would solve the whole problem.”

That was about two months prior to the Summit in Washington, DC, in early December 1987. And it was too short a time to actually get to Gorbachev. The government bureaucracy issued instructions to make a big national program and demonstrate the technique. I was present at one of the sessions discussing how scientists should react.

Harry Thomp came to Alexandrov, the director of the Kurchatov Institute in addition to being president of the Soviet Academy. He sent his deputy of the nuclear division, Spartak Belyaev. Several people, including the Director of the second Soviet nuclear lab, Chelyabinsk 70, signed a letter to Gorbachev that this idea couldn’t work, but red tape helped hide this letter from Gorbachev. Perhaps someone said, “It will demonstrate that Soviet warheads are radioactively dirty and much easier to detect by Americans than vice versa.”

Spencer: Okay. In the demonstration somebody flew past the ship with a helicopter and a detector of some kind, right?

Sagdeev: Detection of warheads with helicopters was already routinely done by both the Soviet and American militaries. For example, you have an American military ship somewhere in the Mediterranean; Soviet military helicopters often overfly them at the altitude of a few tens of meters and were able to detect neutrons from warheads because it’s a short distance. Nobody was objecting. It was mutual. Americans were overflying Soviet ships and vice versa.

Cochran: At the Black Sea Experiment, the American delegation brought one gamma radiation detector that worked. It was a germanium crystal detector. But you had to be right on top of the warhead. The Soviet side brought, as I recall, six experiments, one of which was led by the head of the institute that misled Velikhov. He brought his detector system, and it failed. But, of the other systems the Soviets brought, one was a helicopter with a neutron detector that successfully detected neutrons from the plutonium in the Soviet warhead 70 meters away. So, that experiment worked well.

When we got back to Moscow, we went to the Kurchatov Institute and they told us more about that system and showed us photographs of American ships and sailors on American ships that they had overflown. But that system would only detect warheads with plutonium, but not necessarily all of them. They claimed that they could count warheads on the decks of some surface ships, but I don’t think they could detect warheads on submarines or in the bottom of an aircraft carrier that could be loaded onto aircraft. But it helped the American side to see how open the Soviets were willing to be.

After the Black Sea experiment, Velikhov took the American delegation to Sary Shagan to see the anti-satellite laser system that was under development there and found it to be far less capable than the U.S. Department of Defense was advertising. Velikhov also took us to Chelyabinsk 65, where the Soviets first produced plutonium for their warheads. It’s equivalent to our Hanford Site in Washington State. We visited two of the shutdown production reactors.

Velikhov, throughout the period Frank and I were interacting with him, was using us to help Gorbachev in his glasnost effort to open up formerly secret facilities. During each of two trips to the Soviet Union, we invited a delegation of three congressmen and congressional staff. The international press was also present.

The first trip was to visit the Krasnoyarsk radar site in 1987, where there was an early-warning radar station under construction in a location that violated the ABM treaty, which requires that early-warning radars be located at the edge of the country and looking outward. The U.S. government was claiming that it was a battlefield management radar system. We were with this first congressional delegation that had just gone out to look at the seismic sites that were being installed in Kazakhstan. When we returned to Moscow around six o’clock in the evening, Velikhov called me up and said, “Get your delegation together. We’re going to Siberia at midnight.”

So, we got on a plane and flew to Siberia, and then got on helicopters to fly to the radar site. We concluded that it had nothing to do with battle management. Reluctantly, they gave us permission to go into the building for a few minutes. Inside, we were able to see how far apart the radar receivers were spaced. The spacing of the receivers is related to the wavelength of the radar, so we could know the frequency of the radar signals. The frequency was so low that it couldn’t have been a battle management radar. But still, it was an early-warning radar in a location forbidden by the ABM Treaty, and eventually, the Soviets took it down.

Sagdeev: Before they decided to take it down, however, the military-industrial guys came up with another proposal. “Okay, we agree that we violated the rules, but now we Soviets will provide this instrument as a scientific instrument for international non-military cooperation.” So, they wanted Velikhov to be a salesman for an idea which everyone in the world would understand is just nonsense. Finally, the decision was made just to dismantle it, but with all the episodes we have discussed, you can understand what kind of reputation Velikhov developed among these military guys.

It culminated in the spring of 1989 when Gorbachev convened the first session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, a new more democratic type of parliament to replace the Supreme Soviet. I remember Yevgeny asked me privately, “I need your advice. Gorbachev asked me if I would agree to take the role of Chairman of the Committee on Arms Services, just like Sam Nunn in the US Senate.” So, we had a conversation and agreed that if he assumed that post, he would have to change his life. He would no longer be a scientist. But he wanted to reform everything, and he agreed.

Then the session started, and in the second week, this committee started to form. People were talking about who would be chairman. And Velikhov came to me in the midst of the session. We had not heard any follow-on after the first proposal and Velikhov asked me to do a quiet investigation: “What was going on?”

I went to Primakov, who was a very good friend of mine since university time, and asked, “What is happening? Is Velikhov going to be chairman?” And he said, “Oh, no, a complete change. His name is already cancelled.” He told me that the military-industrial complex wants their own man as the chairman of this committee.

Spencer: He said in his interview with me in 1997 that he didn’t feel that he could accomplish anything in those years.

Spencer: I’d like to finish off by a change of pace, because relations between Russia and the West are just as bad as they were before you started your efforts, and we’re in a very bad space. Tell me what you have learned that you could pass on to the people who are trying to solve this terrible conflict between Russia and the West. Have you learned something that you can pass on to people who are trying to make some progress by solving the problem and that you have so successfully addressed back then?

Cochran: My first piece of advice would be: get involved. But understand that, if you’re trying to make major social change, it will take at least a decade, and in the end, you may not be successful. But you should get involved anyway.

My second piece of advice is that demonstrations are very useful in this process. You can write technical papers. You can write policy papers, but a lot of people, including politicians, don’t read them. Those that read them have their own views, and they don’t pay any attention to what you say. But, if you do a demonstration like we were able to do with the Black Sea experiment and the seismic monitoring in Kazakhstan, you can get world attention. You can get on the front page of The New York Times. I think Velikhov understood that.

The third thing is, if you want to create social change, it takes a coalition, and if there’s not one, you have to invent one.

Spencer: Well, is there anybody in Moscow now that you’d like to coalition with?

Cochran: I think you have to wait. I don’t think there’s anybody in Moscow to do business with right now, because of Putin. Today we don’t have a Gorbachev. We may have to wait until Putin is out of the picture. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do things in the meantime. The same is true in China. We used to have very good relations with the Chinese nuclear weapons laboratory.

Von Hippel: At a slightly more abstract level, Niels Bohr thought deeply about how to prevent a post-World-War-II nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. His big message even during the World War to Roosevelt and Churchill when our nuclear weapons program was supposedly secret, was, “You have to be open with Stalin about what you’re doing and also share the decision about the use of the bomb or are you going to have a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union after the war.”

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he issued this message publicly to the UN. I don’t know whether there was any cause and effect, but Gorbachev and Velikhov and Sagdeev and Tom have all understood the importance of openness to ending the nuclear arms race. And we did end that race for a while. Now, with China’s buildup, we are beginning to see signs of its revival.

But the audience for these demonstrations at which Tom and Velikhov were geniuses was not just in the U.S., where it had such impact. It was also playing to an audience within the Soviet Union, because Gorbachev was not unopposed, and they were trying to explain that the rest of the world supported what Gorbachev was trying to do.

In fact, I think one reason I was invited to be a part of these historic events was because I was the chairman of the Federation of American Scientists, and that sounded like a much more important organization than it actually was. It was an NGO with 5,000 members. I think they were playing off the misunderstanding that maybe it was a federation of all the American scientists – that we all supported what Gorbachev was trying to do.

I also wanted to get back briefly to Velikhov because 1989 was when things started going bad. Politically, Gorbachev started being forced to side with the hardliners. I talked to Velikhov about this and he said, “You shouldn’t fall dead before you’re shot,” and he heroically stayed with his agenda to the very end.

Garwin: I would add also that, if I were younger and wanted to do something in this area, I would try to work with organizations like Pugwash, which offers opportunities to work on these international issues with people from around the world. Pugwash was started a decade after World War II. It didn’t immediately end the Cold War, but it was an important element in keeping that effort alive and avoiding World War Three. Pugwash came together in response to the 1957 Bertrand Russell-Albert Einstein manifesto. Cyrus Eaton, a Cleveland industrialist, funded the first conference to meet in his birthplace, Pugwash, Nova Scotia. About 20 people, including a Chinese physicist, came.

Sagdeev: What went wrong? Why did we not succeed and now find ourselves in the Putin era? I’m sure Yevgeny probably was thinking about it until the very last second he was alive. Tom was saying important things about international brainstorming among scientists. The history of how the Soviets agreed to sign the ABM Treaty – the whole concept of limiting anti-missile activities came from the American side. And I think I’m sure Dick was involved from the very beginning of the debates. It originated inside the scientific community in America and was picked up by the Johnson administration and Secretary of Defense MacNamara. The first reaction from the Soviet government was very negative. Famously, Prime Minister Kosygin, who was visiting the United States, said to President Johnson, “Defense is moral! Offense is immoral!” It took about three, four years for the Soviet government to accept this idea. I would like to know more how this idea became accepted in the United States. But part of it was this group of great American scientists who were very active, and I agree with Tom when he said that Garwin is a real genius. So, we need such people involved. Before Gorbachev came, we had a patient discussion in Geneva for several decades. I remember someone telling me, “Something strange is happening in Geneva. The American delegation is trying to erect new buildings for a long-term presence in Geneva. That means that they are not counting on quick resolution of the problem, but for very long negotiations.

I think we need to be involved in these infinite negotiations. For example, Joe Biden talking to Putin a month or two before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, instead of smiling and saying, “this is stupid,” could have said, “Okay, let’s talk. Let’s go back to Geneva to start talking.” This type of patience is needed from political leaders. And now I would like to come back to the ABM Treaty – why we don’t have it anymore. George W Bush killed it. The famous quotation from him was, “friends do not need treaties.” So, what was behind this conversation? The only thing that about everyone in the world, including even the Indians and Chinese, agree on, is that Putin is a monster – but we have to find a way to deal with the monsters.

Garwin: Finally, in April 1986 in Chernobyl in Ukraine, Velikhov played a heroic role in going on the helicopter, dropping lead into the open reactor core, which was no longer operating but was on fire and releasing its stored radioactivity. He did many other things. For instance, he connected all of his MHD generators around Norway and Sweden on the ocean and the Baltic Sea and created a very large dipole moment to sense the earth’s resistivity down to depths of tens and hundreds of kilometers.

Spencer: This has been so interesting, but we’re going to have to end it. I would love to just keep going for hours and hours, but I’m sure that there are lots of people who want to see this and listen to what you’ve shared with us. I’m immensely grateful to all of you. I’ve had a good time, and I hope you have too. n

Published in Peace Magazine Vol.41, No.1 Jan-Mar 2025
Archival link: http://www.peacemagazine.org/archive/HowTheyEndedanArmsRace.htm
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