How Gorbachev and Velikhov slowed the nuclear arms race

Washingtonpost.com : The end of the cold war arms race owes more to Soviet Premier Gorbachev and physicist Yevgeny Velikhov than to US President Ronald Reagan says David E. Hoffman in the Washington Post .The Soviet Union had plans to compete with Reagan’s " star wars ” program that would have taken the arms race into space and provided massive subsidies to the Soviet military industrial complex says Hoffman, whose article is based on his recently published book The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy .However, in 1985, Velikhov urged Gorbachev not to do it. Velikhov had concluded, based on earlier research, that Reagan’s idea could not work. He proposed that Gorbachev abandon the conventional Cold War approach of matching what Reagan was doing, and argued instead for an “asymmetrical” response, one that would answer Reagan but not be the same.One asymmetrical option would be to overwhelm any defense system by building more missiles. Inevitably, some Soviet missiles would get through.The asymmetrical response that Gorbachev favored more was to talk Reagan out of missile defense program that the US did not yet possess and exchange it all for something that both leaders wanted: deep reductions in existing nuclear arms.