The rusting and fall of the Iron Curtain

My father said, “I may not come home one of these nights. . . . I’m going to depend on you to take my place with Mom and the boys . . . get everybody in the car . . . drive south.’’ Away from ground zero. I sensed my father’s cold certainty that the catastrophic war was coming - maybe soon. What I didn’t know was that LeMay and other top brass were urging Kennedy to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against Moscow. Nuclear war with the Soviet Union was inevitable in any case - so hit them now! That summer we still had a “first strike’’ advantage that would be lost as Moscow’s arsenal grew. My father, I would later learn, opposed LeMay. That night he showed me his fear of the coming war, and asked me to do something about it. “Yes, sir,’’ I said again. The rest of my life followed from that moment - even if differently from Dad’s. I’ve written of it before.

Kennedy said no to the generals in 1961, laying the groundwork for his refusal to order an attack over Cuba 14 months later. The Berlin crisis was resolved that August when Khrushchev ordered the construction of the Berlin Wall. The escapes stopped. Kennedy protested the wall, but secretly considered it a godsend, avoiding war. Moscow soon achieved nuclear parity with Washington, making any preemptive strike impossible. Mutual assured destruction. But the national security establishment, including generals and the “totalitarian school’’ of Kremlinologists, continued to regard the Cold War standoff as permanent high noon, hair trigger forever. That is why the mad accumulation of nukes continued for another quarter-century. The core doctrine of “realist’’ orthodoxy was that the Soviet Union could only be defeated by war.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the event that proved the realists wrong. When joyous citizens breached the Berlin Wall with rock music and dancing instead of guns and tanks, the Cold War was over. Against every prediction, the Soviet Union dismantled itself nonviolently. A number of factors made that happen, including the multidecade restraint of military men like my father, the internal collapse of the Soviet economy, and the steadfast arms control regime, which began with Kennedy and Khrushchev, and climaxed with Ronald Reagan’s embrace of Mikhail Gorbachev’s astonishing proposals at Geneva and Reykjavik, Iceland.

But Gorbachev and Reagan were both responding to something else - the pressures from below of grass-roots movements for peace on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Unimagined by realists, unforeseen by the CIA, a nonviolent democracy movement, beginning with Lech Walesa’s Solidarity in Poland, and spreading through the satellite nations into Russia itself, culminated in the refusal of communist soldiers to obey orders to shoot demonstrators. In the West, a mass movement against nuclear weapons, reflected even in Hollywood movies, coalesced around the simple call for a “Freeze!’’ that was initiated by an MIT graduate student named Randy Forsberg.

Gorbachev and Reagan deserve full credit for ending the nuclear standoff nonviolently, but they could not have done it without the “naive’’ determination of their respective populations to reject war. Nov. 9, 1989, redefined realism to mean, Give peace a chance. The greatest date of our lifetimes.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.