THE UNITED STATES SUPPLIED CHEMICAL WEAPONS TO IRAQ IN EARLY 1980s IN THE WAR AGAINST IRAN
Infuriated by Iraq's use of chemical weapons and by U.S. support for such heinous behavior, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had ended the shah's secret nuclear weapons program when he assumed power in 1979, condemning nuclear weapons as anti-Islamic, reversed course in 1984 and started the program back up again.
While the United States was strengthening its support for Saddam Hussein's Iraq regime, Reagan continued his bombastic anti-Soviet rhetoric and provocative behavior. In 1983, he urged his audience at the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, "to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority . . . not to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulse of an evil empire." The United States deployed ground -- launched cruise missiles to Great Britain and Pershing II missiles to West Germany in November 1983 and conducted Able Archer 83 ---- a massive military test using nuclear weapons ---that same month. By the end of 1983, U.S.---Soviet relations had reached their lowest point in more than two decades. The two nations were conducting proxy wars around the globe, and a real one seemed possible. Some Soviet officials were convinced that a U.S. attack was imminent.
Bellicose rhetoric frightened the public. The Day After, which was viewed by a huge television audience, and other nuclear--war movies heightened the sense of alarm and helped spark a massive nuclear freeze movement. Psychiatrists reported that children in both the United States and Soviet Union were experiencing an outbreak of nuclear nightmares not seen since the early 1960s.
Even nuclear weapons designers were not inured against the implications of the rising threat of nuclear war. Physicist Theodore Taylor had an epiphany during his first visit to the Soviet Union. He described the experience to psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, whose own probing scholarship had revolutionized the field of nuclear studies :
Walking in Red Square in Moscow, Taylor saw many young people in wedding parties visiting Lenin's tomb and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and was impressed by how happy they looked. He experienced a flashback to the night of the birth of one of his children years before when, rather than being with his wife, he was at the Pentagon poring over intelligence data, including aerial photographs of central Moscow, in connection with potential plans for nuclear attack. Standing in Red Square, he began to weep uncontrollably :"It was seeing those happy-looking , specific people, going around, working their way up to the mausoleum. For any human being to contemplate setting off a bomb on top of all this, these people, is insane . . . a symptom of insanity." He had experienced such feelings before, but now for the first time "I literally set foot in the SU to see what it was that I was doing with all the details filled in. "Before that, Moscow had been no more than "a set of lines at various levels of rads. . . and. . . pressures and calories . . . per square centimeter" that one had to "match" with "the bombs with those numbers."
Taylor decided to abandon weapons research and devote himself to more life-affirming research.
Despite his bluster, Reagan too feared the possibility of nuclear war, although his knowledge of nuclear weapons was miniscule. In 1983,he shocked a group of congressmen when he said that bombers and submarines did not carry nuclear weapons. But his profound, gut-level aversion to nuclear weapons was sincere. He repeatedly told stunned advisors that he considered them "evil" and wanted to eradicate them. His fears were shaped, in large part, by his religious convictions, particularly his fascination with Armageddon, the biblical account of the bloody conflagration that ends history and augurs Jesus' return, which he believed might be coming. He associated it with nuclear war and thought it his responsibility to protect the American people. Bud McFarlane, who served as Reagan's deputy national security advisor, said, "From the time he adopted the Armageddon thesis, he saw it as a nuclear catastrophe. Well, what do you do about that 's answer was that you build a tent or a bubble and protect your country."
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