Free The Dead Hand by David Hoffman

Soviets now realized they could not stop the Pershing II missile deployments, due in two months. Nor did they know what to do about these events; they were locked intotheir positions by their own truculence. Reagan’s reaction to the Korean airliner incident left Soviet leaders “wallowing in the mud.”
    In October, Reagan was given a fresh briefing on the ultra-secret SIOP, the Single Integrated Operational Plan, the procedures for nuclear war. This was the sixth generation of the war plan, known as SIOP-6, which took effect on October 1, 1983. The new plan reflected the desire to give the president options to fight a protracted nuclear war. 36 Reagan wrote in his diary: “A most sobering experience with Cap W and Gen. Vessey in the Situation room, a briefing on our complete plan in the event of a nuclear attack.” 37
    Reflecting later in his memoirs, Reagan recalled, “In several ways, the sequence of events described in the briefings paralleled those in the ABC movie. Yet there were still some people at the Pentagon who claimed a nuclear war was ‘winnable.’ I thought they were crazy. Worse, it appeared there were also Soviet generals who thought in terms of winning a nuclear war.” 38
    Shultz told Reagan in mid-October all the recent arms control proposals had gone nowhere. “If things get hotter and hotter, and arms control remains an issue,” Reagan told Shultz, “maybe I should go see Andropov and propose eliminating all nuclear weapons.” Shultz reminded him that it wasn’t likely Andropov would give up nuclear weapons. “Without an arsenal of nuclear weapons, the Soviets are not a superpower.”
    Very suddenly, Reagan was swept into one of the most chaotic and uncertain periods of his presidency. Clark resigned as his national security adviser, to become secretary of the interior. Reagan promoted Clark’s deputy, Robert C. McFarlane, who had spent most of his time in previous months negotiating the Lebanon crisis. Across Western Europe, antinuclear rallies brought 2 million people into the streets to protest against the plan to deploy the Pershing II missiles.
    On October 23, at 6 A.M., a lone driver steered a yellow Mercedes truck through the parking lot at the U.S. marine encampment at the Beirut International Airport in Lebanon. The truck, laden with the equivalent of over twelve thousand pounds of TNT, blew up and killed 241 U.S. military personnel and injured one hundred others, the most severe militarydeath toll in Reagan’s presidency. 39 When McFarlane woke him in the middle of the night with the news, Reagan’s face turned ashen. McFarlane recalled “he looked like a man, a 72-year-old man, who had just received a blow to the chest. All the air seemed to go out of him. ‘How could this happen?’ he asked disbelievingly. ‘How bad is it? Who did it?’” Then, on October 25, Reagan ordered U.S. forces to invade the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, on grounds that American students on the island were imperiled by instability following a coup. 40 On October 27, Reagan led the memorial service at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for the Marines lost in Beirut. He was, McFarlane recalled, “clearly heart-broken.”
    In the middle of it all, a secret written analysis from the CIA was brought to Reagan. It contained Gordievsky’s reports about RYAN, the KGB intelligence-gathering operation for signs of a nuclear attack. McFarlane recalled it reached Reagan in October, amid the Grenada and Lebanon crises, although the precise date is not known. 41 Thatcher knew of the Gordievsky information as well, and may have told Reagan about it on her visit a few weeks earlier.
    McFarlane was at first unsure whether the Soviets were as paranoid as it seemed in the Gordievsky materials. “It raised questions in my mind about whether this apparent paranoia was real, or a propaganda scheme being fed to Western Europe to drive a wedge between us and the allies,” McFarlane said. The presence of Foreign