Last week I got through reading "The Dead Hand", which I will plug again. Great book. I saw and lived these things as a armed forces member and citizen. It was really cool to finally be able to see behind the scenes.

The most amusing thing about the story of the end of the cold war was SDI. Reagan, contrary to popular belief, was not a cowboy. His goal was actually to completely eliminate nuclear missiles, and he told his staff this several times. Whenever he said this, however, the clique of those in power went berserko. How could he advocate such a thing! So they most always managed to shut him down, prevent him from ever going public with his dream.

Gorbachev, likewise, was a prisoner of the system he was in. The armed forces had a huge -- and mostly secret -- budget. They were into everything. They were paranoid and highly suspicious of anything having to do with the U.S. They were more and more detached from reality. For a while there, soviet spies were instructed to start gathering clues that a surprise nuclear attack was underway, even though nobody in the west had anything like that in mind. Given that amount of craziness, Gorbachev's goal was never to end communism, it was to open things up and try to make the system work better. He genuinely cared for the little guy, and saw that the system was not working.

Additionally, the Soviets had reached the point where everybody in the system (mostly) knew how messed up it was. They just couldn't do anything about it. People wanted somebody, somehow to fix things.

During a meeting with a physicist, Reagan first heard the idea of a missile defense. He latched on to it right away, although it took many months to go public. What better way to eliminate nuclear weapons than to make them obsolete? It wouldn't be offensive, it would be something to prevent damage. Who could oppose that?

Now the funny part is that even though this was mostly just an idea in Reagan's head, it drove the Soviet's crazy. How much work had been done? Did the Americans have a working weapon? What technologies should we develop? The natural Russian paranoia and distrust of the U.S. fed into what was just a dream on the American side. (Yes, I understand that money was spent, but SDI was something that was going to take decades. Initial progress was extremely slow.)

So the Soviet armed forces spent all kinds of resources pouring over SDI and trying to come up with a response. What did they fear? Space-based nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered space-based lasers, not SDI itself. Finally they came up with their own plan to create their own SDI -- a hugely expensive program. After all, how could you plan to counter something that doesn't currently exist? When the Soviet government looked at those projected expenses, along with the failing economy, the lost war in Afghanistan, and many other factors? It was obvious that something had to change.

It's a fascinating story because although the system on the U.S. side could certainly shut down the president from doing something so radical as proposing an elimination of nuclear weapons, what could they do about the guy just having a dream? He had an idea. People have ideas. Nobody really knew how to stop him from talking about his ideas. But the idea alone, whether it worked or not, was just another straw on the camel's back that eventually brought down a huge system of governance. Amazing story.