{"product_id":"ronald-reagan-and-his-quest-to-abolish-nuclear-weapons-isbn-9780812973266","title":"Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons","description":"In\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eRonald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Paul Lettow explores the depth and sophistication of President Ronald Reagan’s commitment to ridding humankind permanently of the threat of nuclear war. \u003cbr\u003eLettow’s narrative spans the start of Reagan’s presidency and the 1986 Reykjavík summit between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, during which America’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a defining issue. Lettow reveals SDI for what it was: a full-on assault against nuclear weapons waged as much through policy as through ideology. While cabinet members and advisers played significant roles in guiding American defense policy, it was Reagan himself who presided over every element, large and small, of this paradigm shift in U.S. diplomacy.\u003cbr\u003eLettow conducted interviews with several former Reagan administration officials, and he draws upon the vast body of declassified security documents from the Reagan presidency; much of what he quotes from these documents appears publicly here for the first time. The result is the first major work to apply such evidence to the study of SDI and superpower diplomacy. This is a survey that doesn’t merely add nuance to the existing record, but revises our \u003cbr\u003every understanding of the Reagan presidency.“Lettow conveys this extraordinary story crisply and convincingly. . . . A significant addition to our understanding of Reagan and the endgame of the Cold War.”\u003cbr\u003e–The Washington Post Book World\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Paul Lettow’s sharp and succinct book makes the best case yet for why Ronald Reagan deserves to be remembered as one of the most visionary grand strategists of the twentieth century.”\u003cbr\u003e–John Lewis Gaddis\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Paul Lettow is lucid and dispassionate. His willingness to go far back, to the very birth of the nuclear age (which coincided with the very birth of Reagan’s anticommunism), and then to trace the story forward as Reagan’s ideology slowly matured, pays triumphant dividends.”\u003cbr\u003e–Edmund Morris\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Provocative, informative . . . Lettow’s achievement is to show that both Reagan’s detractors and votaries misread him.”\u003cbr\u003e–The New York Times Book ReviewPaul Lettow received an A.B. in history, \u003ci\u003esumma cum laude\u003c\/i\u003e, from Princeton University and a D.Phil. in international relations from Oxford University. He has taught American history at Oxford University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Washington, D.C., area.Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eORIGINS\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn december 1945, Ronald Reagan almost helped lead a mass  antinuclear rally in Hollywood, California. The rally was  entitled “Atomic Power and Foreign Policy,” and the notice  bills included the subcaption “Atomic Energy—Slave or  Master?” It was sponsored by the awkwardly named Hollywood  Independent Citizens Committee of Arts, Sciences and  Professions (HICCASP).1 HICCASP had been founded during the  Second World War to provide high-profile liberal support for  the policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but by late  1945 it lacked a raison d’être and shifted to the left.2 The  thirty-four-year-old Ronald Reagan, recently discharged from  U.S. Army service and an established film star, then  considered himself to be a liberal Democrat and was an  earnest, if “naïve,” member of HICCASP.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe basic theme of the December rally in Hollywood was to  argue for international control over atomic energy and for  the abolition of atomic weapons (on which the United States  then had a monopoly).At the time, such ideas were being  widely debated. Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson  argued within the U.S. government for an international  system of controls that would eliminate atomic weapons and  regulate the peaceful uses of atomic energy. Secretary of  War Henry Stimson advocated international control of atomic  power along similar lines. On October 3, 1945, President  Harry S Truman told the U.S. Congress that the hope of civilization lies in international arrangements  looking, if possible, to the renunciation of the use and  development of the atomic bomb, and directing and  encouraging the use of atomic energy and all future  scientific information toward peaceful and humanitarian ends.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Truman administration set forth a blueprint for the  internationalization of atomic energy in its ill-fated  “Baruch Plan,” unveiled in June 1946. Even Edward Teller,  the Hungarian-born American physicist, veteran of the Manhattan Project, and eventual bête noire of the Cold War  Left, gave his support to the internationalization of atomic  energy, writing an article in early 1946 that endorsed what  would become the Baruch Plan.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRonald Reagan, the actor, was an early and ardent proponent  of the abolition of atomic weapons and the  internationalization of atomic energy. The United States  dropped atomic bombs over Japan on August 6 and 9, 1945, to  end World War II. By August 25, 1945, Reagan had signed on  as an officer of the Hollywood chapter of the American  Veterans Committee (AVC), a liberal political group. Among  the causes that the AVC endorsed was the “cession of  American nuclear power to the United Nations.” The founder  of the AVC later recalled that Reagan was particularly drawn  to the “idea of expanding the Committee into an  international lobby under the aegis of the United Nations,  working to contain the A-bomb.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReagan intended to appear at HICCASP’s “Atomic Power and  Foreign Policy” rally on December 12, 1945, at the Hollywood  Legion Stadium. Scheduled to speak at the rally alongside  Reagan were U.S. Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas  (D-Calif.), Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, and a U.S.  Marine Corps colonel. Reagan was supposed to read an  antinuclear poem, “Set Your Clock at U-235,” authored by the  then-famous radio dramatist Norman Corwin.8 Corwin’s poem  went so far in the direction of international control of  atomic energy that it veered toward one-worldism:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe secrets of the earth have been peeled, one by one, until  the core is bare: The latest recipe is private, in a guarded  book, but the stink of death is public on the wind from  Nagasaki: The nations have heard of the fission of the atom  and have seen the photographs: skies aboil with interlocking  fury, mushrooms of uranium smoke ascending to where angels  patrol uneasily.\/ . . . Unless we work at it together, at a  single earth,\/ . . . [T]here will be others out of the  just-born and the not-yet-contracted-for who will die for  our invisible daily mistakes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCorwin’s boiling skies and single earth proved too much for  Warner Bros., the studio to which Reagan was contracted as a  film actor. After the program for the HICCASP rally was  advertised in the press on December 6, a Warner Bros.  official sent a telegram to Reagan’s talent agent stating  that Reagan’s participation in the rally “as a dramatic  performer” would violate his contract with the studio.  Chastened, Reagan replied to Warner Bros. through his agent  that he would not, in fact, appear. (Reagan did get one,  less public, opportunity to declaim “Set Your Clock at  U-235,” at a dinner for Shapley on December 10.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe fervor during the immediate post–World War II years for  the international control of atomic power and the abolition  of nuclear weapons slipped out of mainstream American  politics as tensions between the United States and the USSR  rose in the mid- to late 1940s. The notion that  international cooperation could bring about the abolition of  nuclear arms and administer peaceful uses of atomic energy  was seen to be unrealistic long before Truman declared in a  July 1949 meeting that\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e[W]e have made every effort to obtain international control of atomic energy. We have failed to get that control—due to  the . . . contrariness of the Soviets. I am of the opinion we’ll never obtain international control. Since we can’t  obtain international control we must be strongest in atomic weapons.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThroughout his political career, Reagan wistfully cited the Baruch Plan and similar U.S. government efforts to  internationalize nuclear energy. He eventually retrieved the notion of internationalizing nuclear energy—in his mind,  redeemed it—when he announced, in 1983, that he intended to internationalize any missile defense system that resulted  from SDI by sharing it with the Soviet Union and other countries.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMany views that Reagan held in the mid-1940s changed as he  evolved from liberal to conservative. Reagan’s experiences  with Communists and Communist sympathizers in HICCASP and  the AVC during 1946 and 1947 would catalyze the development  of his fervent anticommunism.He shed the vestiges of his  immediate postwar liberalism and by the late 1950s had  adopted a political outlook compatible with his later  worldview and ideology—what international relations scholar  Alexander George has called an individual’s “belief system.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet it will be shown that Reagan never abandoned his hatred of nuclear weapons and his desire to eliminate them.  Reagan’s “dream”—as he himself described it—was “a world free of nuclear weapons.” “[F]or the eight years I was  president,” he wrote in his memoirs, “I never let my dream of a nuclear-free world fade from my mind.”Reagan pursued  that dream as a personal religious mission.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDespite overwhelming primary and interview-based evidence, historians and international relations scholars have thus  far neglected to investigate the impact of Reagan’s nuclear abolitionism on his presidency. In fact, the impact of that  “dream” was direct and significant. For example, Reagan’s nuclear abolitionism contributed greatly to his  determination to engage in a U.S. arms buildup that he  believed the USSR could neither afford economically nor keep  up with technologically; he intended that the Soviets would  thus be forced to agree to vast reductions in the two  countries’ stockpiles of nuclear arms. It led to SDI, one of the most important and least understood of Reagan’s Cold War  policies. To Reagan, SDI served as a catalyst for—the enabler of—his “world free of nuclear weapons.” Reagan’s  nuclear abolitionism also pervaded his administration’s  approach to arms control, and his interactions with Soviet  leaders.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLifeguard\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRonald Wilson Reagan was born in 1911 in Tampico, a tiny  farming town in western Illinois. He was the second and last  child of John Edward “Jack” Reagan, an Irish Catholic shoe  salesman, raconteur par excellence, and partisan Democrat,  and Nelle Wilson Reagan, a seamstress, amateur actress, and  devoted member of the Disciples of Christ, a Protestant  evangelical denomination.15 Ronald Reagan’s early childhood  was an itinerant one. His family moved constantly, first to  Chicago and then to a succession of small Illinois  towns—Galesburg, Monmouth, and back to Tampico—whenever Jack  Reagan’s ambition, or chronic alcoholism, made it seem best  to do so.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1920, the Reagan family finally settled in Dixon,  Illinois, a midsized town on the Rock River. A slight and  myopic young boy, Ronald Reagan was pleasant and made  friends, yet he displayed an early tendency toward a  peculiar inwardness.He found delight and reward in an  inner world of thought and imagination to which others were  not often privy.As he later wrote, “I was a little  introverted. . . . I’ve been inclined to hold back a little  of myself.” He added that “[i]n some ways I think this  reluctance to get close to people never left me completely.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReagan’s nonscholastic pursuits focused on the outdoors and  on reading. Recalling the later effect of his childhood  reading, Reagan stated in 1977 that he had been, and  remained, “a sucker for hero worship.” “All in all,” he  noted, “as I look back I realize that my reading left an  abiding belief in the triumph of good over evil.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNelle Reagan’s religiousness deeply permeated both her  youngest son’s upbringing and his later life. Ronald Reagan  went to prayer meetings on Wednesday nights, church services  on Sunday morning, Sunday school, Sunday-evening youth  prayer meetings, and then evening services following that.  Ronald’s older brother, Neil, a less resolute worshiper,  later declared that the boys had “had religion up to our  ears.”As a politician, Reagan was famously reticent  regarding his own religious beliefs. (Interviewer: “You have  a deep religious faith?” Reagan: “Yes.”) He briefly overcame  that reticence during a 1980 interview, however, when he  allowed that “[m]y mother left me with a faith that as the  years go on I realized was deeper and stronger than I ever  thought it would be.”In particular, Reagan absorbed a  central message from his mother’s faith and carried it over  into his own: “I was raised to believe that God has a plan  for everyone.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs he moved through adolescence, Reagan grew rapidly and  developed a genial personality that made him popular with  his peers. He became a capable athlete, actor, and student.  Midway through his high school years, he took on a summer  job as a lifeguard at a local Rock River beach. He returned  to take up the job each summer for the ensuing five years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReagan’s experience as a lifeguard was a formative one. He  relished his responsibility of saving lives (and had plenty  of opportunity to exercise it; the stretch of Rock River  that he oversaw was treacherous). Initially frustrated  that few of those he saved thanked him for it, Reagan began  to mark a notch in a log for each person he rescued.While  reconciling himself to public ingratitude—“I got to recognize that people hate to be saved”—he felt an  increasing sense of accomplishment as the notches, eventually seventy-seven in all, spread over the log.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReagan’s lifesaving left an indelible sense of purpose and  satisfaction in the young man. According to William Clark,  Reagan’s friend and national security adviser, and “the only  man who ever got within a furlong of intimacy” with Reagan,  in Edmund Morris’s phrase,Reagan’s lifesaving instilled  in him the “value of each person’s life as well as the power  of one man’s actions.”Lou Cannon, who as a journalist  covered President Reagan and has written several biographies  of him, has said that Reagan “loved being a lifeguard, a job  perfectly suited to his personality. Lifeguards are solitary  objects of adoration who intervene in moments of crisis and  perform heroic acts without becoming involved in the lives  of those they rescue.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eClose aides and observers from his political life recall  that the theme of lifeguarding underpinned Reagan’s aims and  instincts as a political leader. Edmund Morris, Reagan’s  authorized biographer, stated that “Reagan’s subsequent  career, his political career, was devoted to the general  theme of rescue.”Michael Deaver, who served under Reagan  from 1967 to 1985, noted that Reagan’s lifeguarding days  “were a parable of his larger life as he saw it.” After  Alzheimer’s disease had rendered even Reagan’s family and  friends unrecognizable to him, the former president would  lead his visitors to a picture, either of himself as  lifeguard or of the Rock River, and recall the exact number of people he had pulled from the river waters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBeginning with his adolescent experience as a lifeguard, Reagan harbored a fundamental impulse to intervene in the  course of events in order to rescue others from peril. In time, that impulse would fuse both with his belief that he  had a mission to fulfill in life and with his abhorrence of nuclear weapons. From the confluence came Reagan the  determined nuclear abolitionist, and Reagan the father of SDI.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs an undergraduate at Eureka College, a small Disciples of  Christ–sponsored school in Illinois, Reagan was a campus  political leader, athlete, and actor. His academic career as an economics and sociology major, while above average, did  not rank as his top priority.His awakening interest in  becoming an actor during this period coincided with his  seeing, and performing in, antiwar plays.In a production of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria da Capo, Reagan played one of two shepherd friends who construct a wall to separate themselves, proceed to fight over the distribution of  resources on each side of the wall, and finally—in a vivid  portrayal of mutual destruction—kill each other in a frenzy  of mistrust and fear.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMany years afterward, Reagan recalled that his experience watching a professional production of the World War I  antiwar trench drama Journey’s End convinced him that he wanted to become a professional actor (he later performed  the lead role when Eureka students put on the same play).Perhaps inspired by Journey’s End, Reagan authored two  unpublished antiwar short stories in 1931 that center on World War I trench life.Around that time he also flirted  with outright pacifism, although he soon retreated from that conviction (he volunteered for the U.S. Army Cavalry  Reserves in 1935).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter finishing his undergraduate degree in 1932 and  spending one last summer as a lifeguard on the Rock River,  Reagan found employment as a radio announcer in Davenport, Iowa. He was promptly transferred to the larger city of Des  Moines, where he spent the next five years as a popular sportscaster and regional celebrity. During a 1937 trip to  California to cover a baseball team’s spring training, Reagan managed to arrange a screen test with Warner Bros.  The studio signed him on as a film actor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1940 and 1941, Reagan acted in a number of well-received films that elevated him to the status of Hollywood star.A  reservist, he entered active duty in the U.S. Army in 1942 and served for the duration of World War II. Reagan never  left the United States during the war (poor eyesight  disqualified him from combat duty); he narrated training  films for the U.S. Army Air Corps and then served as the  adjutant for the base in California that produced the films.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe war intensified Reagan’s political interests. Known  before the war to read extensively and expound at length on  current events, he did so with fervor as the conflict  progressed.In keeping with his inherited loyalty to the Democratic Party, Reagan strongly supported President  Roosevelt and identified himself as a liberal in terms of  domestic politics.Through the end of the war, Reagan’s  views on foreign affairs remained, in Lou Cannon’s later description, “patriotic, idealistic and unformed.”As we  have seen, however, there was one aspect of world affairs on which Reagan’s views had formed instantly and deeply—and, as  it turned out, permanently: he loathed nuclear weapons.[quote] --The Washington Post Book World","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302901076197,"sku":"NP9780812973266","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812973266.jpg?v=1767735904","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/ronald-reagan-and-his-quest-to-abolish-nuclear-weapons-isbn-9780812973266","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}