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By Root 2018 0

to respect the “declarations of sovereignty and acts of independence” adopted in the former Soviet republics, signaling that the end would not be violent. When President Bush convened the National Security Council that day at the White House, it was as though we were at the start of a new and unformed world that we might have the chance to shape. It was breathtaking to think that after so many years of facing down the Soviet nuclear threat and countering their efforts to subjugate people all over the world, we might be watching the Soviet Union disappear peacefully. I thought we needed to move quickly before we lost our chance to influence events, and to my way of thinking our objectives for the former Soviet Union ought to be democracy, demilitarization, economic reform, and independence for the former Soviet republics. These were the same goals the pro-democracy forces inside the Soviet Union were fighting for, and I believed we needed to be firmly and clearly identified with them.

This was not a unanimous view among the president’s top advisors. Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft were both more cautious, urging that we did not necessarily want to see the breakup of the Soviet Union, out of concern for the instability that might generate. I thought we should do everything possible to push as hard as we could to lessen Moscow’s control over the former republics. First, I believed as a matter of principle that people should live in freedom. When Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Ukraine all voted for independence, I thought we should stand with them. Second, this was a case where our moral interests and our strategic interests were clearly aligned. It was right that we stand for freedom, and independence for the former republics would weaken our most dangerous adversary. I believed it was time for bold policy initiatives to cement the downfall of the Soviet Union.

The president agreed. He directed us to develop proposals that would demonstrate support for Russia’s reformers and show the world we were ushering in a new era. For me and my colleagues at the Defense Department, the obvious place to begin was with our nuclear arsenal.

In my first months as secretary of defense, I had been briefed on the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, the targeting plan for the use of our nuclear weapons. Over the years as we had added weapons to our arsenal, the planners had applied them to the same universe of targets. When we added, for example, fifty new Peacekeeper missiles, each with ten warheads, our nuclear target specialists would suddenly have five hundred new weapons they had to direct at a limited list. It seemed to me a commonsense question was in order. Tell me, I said to the planners, how many warheads are going to hit Kiev under the current plan? It was a difficult question to get an answer to because I don’t think anybody had ever asked it before, but I finally got a report back that under the current targeting plan, we had literally dozens of warheads targeted on this single city. It was time to rationalize our nuclear targeting. Under Paul Wolfowitz’s direction, the policy shop went to work with the joint staff and our nuclear targeting specialists and began to reform our targeting system, which in turn gave us the ability to reduce the size of our nuclear arsenal.

It was a lesson that sometimes the simplest question—how many nuclear weapons are you planning to launch on Kiev?—is the most important one. I appreciated General Powell’s description of the significance of what we did. “Cheney and his civilian analysts,” he wrote, “reversed four decades of encrusted bureaucratic thinking and put nuclear targeting on a rational basis.” And we made it possible, working with Powell and his team on the joint staff, for the president to make bold proposals in response to the historic events unfolding in Moscow. The SIOP review made it clear we could make significant reductions in the size of our nuclear forces and still preserve our deterrent capabilities.

As we pulled our proposals together, I was mindful of avoiding the