Ronald Reagan And His Quest To Abolish Nuclear Weapons

In Ronald 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. Lettow’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. Lettow 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 very understanding of the Reagan presidency.

On February 6, 1981, at his first National Security Council meeting, Ronald Reagan told his advisers: “I will make the decisions.” As Reagan’s Secret War reveals, these words provide the touchstone for understanding the extraordinary accomplishments of the Reagan administration, including the decisive events that led to the end of the Cold War. In penning this book, New York Times bestselling authors Martin Anderson and Annelise Anderson drew upon their unprecedented access to more than eight million highly classified documents housed within the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California—unseen by the public until now. Using his top secret clearances, Martin Anderson was able to access Ronald Reagan’s most privileged exchanges with subordinates and world leaders as well as the tactical record of how Reagan fought to win the Cold War and control nuclear weapons. The most revelatory of these documents are the minutes of Reagan-chaired National Security Council meetings, the dozens of secret letters sent by Reagan to world leaders, and the eyewitness notes from Reagan-Gorbachev summits. Along with these findings, the authors use Reagan’s speeches, radio addresses, personal diaries, and other correspondence to develop a striking picture of a man whose incisive intelligence, uncanny instincts, and quiet self-confidence changed the course of history. What emerges from this treasure trove of material is irrefutable evidence that Reagan intended from his first days in office to bring down the Soviet Union, that he considered eliminating nuclear weapons his paramount objective, and that he—not his subordinates—was the principal architect of the policies that ultimately brought the Soviets to the nuclear-arms negotiating table. The authors also affirm that many of Reagan’s ideas, including his controversial “Star Wars” missile-defense initiative, proved essential in dissolving the Soviet Union and keeping America safe. Riveting and eye-opening, Reagan’s Secret War provides a front-row seat to history, a journey into the political mind of a remarkable leader, and proof that one man can, through the force of his deep convictions, bring about sweeping global change.

This book examines how Ronald Reagan’s electrifying 1964 televised speech, “A Time For Choosing,” ignited the conservative movement within the GOP. Ronald Reagan’s televised speech, or what many conservatives today simply call “The Speech,” was a call for action, telling Americans that now was “A Time for Choosing.” “The Speech” catapulted Reagan into national politics, the California governorship, and ultimately the presidency. The themes of the speech, including anti-Communism, strong national defense, and the need to protect the average American from taxes and bureaucracy, ignited the conservative movement in the GOP, resulting over time in the sidelining of the more liberal, establishment wing of the Republican Party. The contributors in this edited volume show how Ronald Reagan’s “coming out” speech on the national stage helped set the political agenda for the next three decades.

Ronald Reagan's address to members of the British Parliament, June 8, 1982 -- Introduction -- Ronald Reagan and the evolution of Cold War rhetoric and policies -- The drafting of the Westminster address -- Democracy is not a fragile flower: ultimate definition and dialectical engagement at Westminster -- Reaction to the address -- The importance of Reagan at Westminster: democracy still needs cultivating.

Way Out There in the Blue is a major work of history by the Pulitzer Prize­winning author of Fire in the Lake. Using the Star Wars missile defense program as a magnifying glass on his presidency, Frances FitzGerald gives us a wholly original portrait of Ronald Reagan, the most puzzling president of the last half of the twentieth century. Reagan's presidency and the man himself have always been difficult to fathom. His influence was enormous, and the few powerful ideas he espoused remain with us still -- yet he seemed nothing more than a charming, simple-minded, inattentive actor. FitzGerald shows us a Reagan far more complex than the man we thought we knew. A master of the American language and of self-presentation, the greatest storyteller ever to occupy the Oval Office, Reagan created a compelling public persona that bore little relationship to himself. The real Ronald Reagan -- the Reagan who emerges from FitzGerald's book -- was a gifted politician with a deep understanding of the American national psyche and at the same time an executive almost totally disengaged from the policies of his administration and from the people who surrounded him. The idea that America should have an impregnable shield against nuclear weapons was Reagan's invention. His famous Star Wars speech, in which he promised us such a shield and called upon scientists to produce it, gave rise to the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan used his sure understanding of American mythology, history and politics to persuade the country that a perfect defense against Soviet nuclear weapons would be possible, even though the technology did not exist and was not remotely feasible. His idea turned into a multibillion-dollar research program. SDI played a central role in U.S.-Soviet relations at a crucial juncture in the Cold War, and in a different form it survives to this day. Drawing on prodigious research, including interviews with the participants, FitzGerald offers new insights into American foreign policy in the Reagan era. She gives us revealing portraits of major players in Reagan's administration, including George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, Donald Regan and Paul Nitze, and she provides a radically new view of what happened at the Reagan-Gorbachev summits in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington and Moscow. FitzGerald describes the fierce battles among Reagan's advisers and the frightening increase of Cold War tensions during Reagan's first term. She shows how the president who presided over the greatest peacetime military buildup came to espouse the elimination of nuclear weapons, and how the man who insisted that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire" came to embrace the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and to proclaim an end to the Cold War long before most in Washington understood that it had ended. Way Out There in the Blue is a ground-breaking history of the American side of the end of the Cold War. Both appalling and funny, it is a black comedy in which Reagan, playing the role he wrote for himself, is the hero.

US foreign policy during the Cold War has been analysed from a number of perspectives, generating large bodies of literature attempting to explain its origins, its development and its conclusion. However, there are still many questions left only partially explained. In large part this is because these accounts restrict themselves to a single level of analysis, either the international system, or the structure of the state and society. The first level of analysis, focusing on the role of individuals, has largely been excluded. This book argues that structural theories, and any approach that limits itself to one level of analysis, are inadequate to explain the development of US foreign policy. Instead, it is necessary to incorporate the first level of analysis in order to bring human agency back and provide a more detailed explanation of US foreign policy. Bilsland proposes an analytical framework which incorporates presidential agency into a multi-level analysis of US foreign policy during the Cold War, constructing a multi-level case study comparison of the foreign policies of Presidents Truman and Reagan. He argues that the worldview of the president is central to agenda setting in US foreign policy making and that the management style of the president influences both decision-making and the implementation of US foreign policy. Evidence to support this is drawn from detailed empirical analysis of Truman’s foreign policy of containment in Korea and Reagan’s foreign policy of rollback in Nicaragua. This work will be of interest to students and scholars of US Foreign Policy, US History and International Relations

The dramatic, first-hand account of the historic 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Iceland—the definitive weekend that was the key turning point in the Cold War—by President Reagan’s arms control director, Ken Adelman. In October 1986, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met for a forty-eight-hour summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. Planned as a short, inconsequential gathering to outline future talks, the meeting quickly turned to major international issues, including the strategic defense initiative and the possibility of eliminating all nuclear weapons—negotiations that laid the groundwork for the most sweeping arms accord in history the following year. Scrupulously researched and based on now-declassified information, Reagan at Reykjavik tells the gripping tale of this weekend that changed the world. Filled with illustrative accounts of the private discussions between Reagan and his team, Ken Adelman provides an honest and up-close portrait of President Reagan at one of his finest and most challenging moments. Reagan at Reykjavik includes 16 pages of black-and-white photos and 11 illustrations.

A historian debunks four-dozen PC myths about our nation's past. Over the last forty years, history textbooks have become more and more politically correct and distorted about our country's past, argues professor Larry Schweikart. The result, he says, is that students graduate from high school and even college with twisted beliefs about economics, foreign policy, war, religion, race relations, and many other subjects. As he did in his popular A Patriot's History of the United States, Professor Schweikart corrects liberal bias by rediscovering facts that were once widely known. He challenges distorted books by name and debunks forty-eight common myths. A sample: • The founders wanted to create a wall of separation between church and state • Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation only because he needed black soldiers • Truman ordered the bombing of Hiroshima to intimidate the Soviets with atomic diplomacy • Mikhail Gorbachev, not Ronald Reagan, was responsible for ending the Cold War America's past, though not perfect, is far more admirable than you were probably taught.