WHY IS THE WORLD SO DANGEROUS?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP85T00153R000300080019-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 9
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 23, 2008
• Sequence Number: 19
• Publication Date: November 30, 1983
• Content Type: MEMO

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NIC# 8640-83
30 November 1983
MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
FROM . Herbert E. Meyer
Vice Chairman, National Intelligence Council
SUBJECT : Why Is the World So Dangerous?
1. The level of global violence has risen as sharply and as suddenly as
a child's temperature. In just the last several months we have seen the
shoot-down of KAL Flight 007, the assassination of Benigno Aquino, the
murderous decapitation of South Korea's leadership in Rangoon, the terrorist
bombings of US, French, and Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, the Libyan invasion
of Chad, and the anti-Bishop coup in Grenada that ultimately triggered our own
successful action on that island. What makes these acts of violence so
especially disturbing is their common denominator: each has hurt the
citizens, governments, or interests of the Free World.
2. Clearly, the world has become a much more dangerous place. We need
to know why. Are these acts of violence somehow linked, or traceable to the
same malevolent source? Or should we dismiss the present trend as a series of
frightening, tragic, but unconnected events whose one-after-another timing is
mere coincidence?
3. I believe the current outbreak of violence is more than coincidence.
More precisely, I believe it signals the beginning of a new stage in the
global struggle between the Free World and the Soviet Union. My contention
rests on a perception that present US policies have fundamentally changed the
course of history in a direction favorable to the interests and security of
ourselves and our allies. What we are seeing now is a Soviet-led effort to
fight back, in the same sense that the Mafia fights back when law enforcement
agencies launch an effective crime-busting program. Let me concede right now
that I cannot prove this -- if your definition of proof is restricted to
intercepts, photographs, and p rloined documents. Of course these things
matter. They matter hugely. t to truly understand an alien phenomenon like
the Soviet Union, one needs to go beyond a listing of facts; one needs also to
make a leap of imagination:
4. If four years ago the Soviet leadership had asked my counterpart --
call him Vice Chairman of the Soviet National Intelligence Council -- for his
evaluation of the global struggle, I believe my counterpart would have
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replied: "Comrades, I'm delighted to report that the correlation of forces is
moving steadily in our direction." He would have cited the following trends
to support his upbeat analysis:
The US economy was faltering.
US defense spending was too low to truly assure the
nation's security.
The Soviet Union had established a mechanism for the steady
flow of wealth from West to East.
The Soviet Union had established a companion mechanism to
assure the steady flow of technology from West to East.
The Soviet Union, through the effective use of surrogates
such as Cuba and Vietnam, had developed a technique for
spreading its influence throughout the Third World by
targeting fragile countries, destabilizing them, and
swiftly taking over.
-- Through the massive deployment of SS-20s, the Soviets were
changing the balance of power in Europe.
-- In more and more countries, policymakers, elites, and the
masses were coming to accept the Soviets' long-standing
claim that time was on their side; that one needed only to
align with Moscow to be on the winning team.
5. Were the Vice Chairman of the Soviet National Intelligence Council
called in by the Kremlin's leaders, say in mid-1983, and asked for his
evaluation, I believe he would have sung a very different song: "Comrades,"
he would have said, "something has gone wrong. The US is refusing to accept
history!" Assuming our Vice Chairman were allowed to continue -- and this is
a bloody big assumption -- he would have cited the following trends to support
his downbeat analysis:
-- The US economy is recovering, with the only argument
focusing on the breadth and duration of the boom. (The
vice chairman, who enjoyed the privilege of access to US
business publications, could not understand their failure
to discuss the awesgr, national-security implications of a
15-month, 64 percent rtise in the Dow-Jones Industrial
Average, combined with a lowering of the annual inflation
rate to less the 4 percent.)
-- US defense spending is up, with the debate in Congress and
on the campaign hustings focusing only on the proper size
of the increase. (The vice chairman had in his briefing
book -- but chose not to read aloud -- a letter Dwight
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Eisenhower wrote to General Lucius Clay in 1952: "One of
the great and immediate uses of the military forces we are
developing is to convey a feeling of confidence to exposed
populations, a confidence which will make them sturdier,
politically, in their opposition to Communist inroads.")
The flow of wealth from the West to the East is less than
the Soviets had anticipated it would be by now. (The vice
chairman took a deep breath and pointed out that Moscow's
most audacious project, the Siberia to Western Europe
pipeline, had been literally cut in half by US opposition;
after all, the pipeline was originally to have comprised
two strands, and lately no one either in Western Europe or
the Soviet Union had even mentioned that second strand.)
The flow of technology from West to East is less than the
Soviets had anticipated it would be by now. In part, by
reducing the flow of wealth the US also reduced the Soviet
Union's ability to buy equipment and know-how. And the
US-led crack-down on illegal technology transfers had put a
crimp in that key effort. (The Vice Chairman thought sadly
-- but did not take the liberty of complaining -- that the
expulsions of roughly 100 KGB agents from Western
countries, mostly on technology transfer-related charges,
had wiped out the KGB's welcome home-party fund.)
The Soviet mechanism for spreading power through the Third
World, while still a considerable threat to Western
security, has run into unexpected resistance. Soviet
textbooks insist that anti-Soviet Third World insurgencies
cannot develop. Yet in 1983 there are five of them -- in
Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola, Kampuchea and Afghanistan.
Thus Moscow can no longer target a Third-World country and
assume that no serious resistance will develop. Most
worrisome of all is the shocking setback in Grenada. (The
vice chairman bit his tongue to keep from pointing out that
the Soviet Union believed deeply in the domino theory --
and that one of its own had just toppled over.)
With deployment now certain of Pershing Its and cruise
missiles, NATO is about to change the balance of power in
Europe back to its Ivor. (The vice chairman had read in
Pravda that a P-II'sl"flight time to Moscow was 12 minutes
_- -which, he thought to himself, is roughly how long it
takes some of the Kremlin's leaders to get out?of their
chairs, let alone to their shelters.)
And most dangerous of all, by describing the Soviet Union
as "the focus of evil" US President Reagan has
singlehandedly deployed the one weapon for which the
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Soviets lack even a rudimentary defense: the truth. (The
vice chairman made a mental note to ask a friend at the USA
and Canada Institute how it happened that the Republican
Reagan had made good against the Soviets a threat made
against the Republicans by the Democrat Adlai Stevenson in
1952: "If you don't stop telling lies about us, we'll
start telling the truth about you.")
6. Whether or not such briefings actually took place, it's apparent that
by mid-1983 Soviet leaders had sufficient evidence to conclude that US policy
had fundamentally changed course, and was now moving in a direction highly
unfavorable to Soviet national interests.
7. From Moscow's perspective, the immediate danger would be the taking
hold of a perception among leaders and voters throughout the West, but
particularly in the US, that this new course was not only right but also
successful. Surely Western politicians -- especially those up for re-election
-- would chortle: "You see, we were exactly right to stand up to the
Russians. We are defending our own interests more effectively now, and it's
working." The inevitable result of this approach would be precisely what
Soviet leaders dreaded most: widespread public support for the new US course
and, therefore, a continuation or even an acceleration of it.
8. If Moscow's chief objective were to knock the US off its course,
Moscow's most likely strategy would be to discredit this course through the
following tactics:
-- Raise the level of violence, thus making the world a more
dangerous place. (Keep in mind that US tolerance of
violence has declined markedly during the last 10 years.)
-- Attribute the increased violence and danger to the
inevitable result of reckless US policies. (It could be
safely assumed that members of the US media and other
elites would swiftly pick up and amplify this theme.)
-- Hope that voters will force a change of course, either by
replacing the incumbent leaders or forcing them to adopt
more "moderate" policies.
9. To implement this strategy, the Soviets would not need to commit each
and every act of violence themselves. They would commit some, arrange for
others to be committed by surlgates or allies, and generally create an
atmosphere in which violence flourishes. This last element would be
especially fruitful, for there are always those'who stand ready to murder for
one cause or another when the timing seems right.
10. Whether or not this Soviet strategy succeeds in the short term, I
believe the current outbreak of violence is a harbinger of things to come.
Let me begin with an assertion that seems startling, but that is accepted by
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at least two dozen Soviet specialists and generally well informed individuals
I know, whose political views and affiliations range across the spectrum: If
the Soviet Union does not achieve its ambition to displace the US as the
world's pre-eminent power within -- very roughly -- the next 20 years, the
Soviet Union will never succeed. Among the analytic points supporting this
assertion:
The Soviet Union has failed utterly to become a country.
After sixty-six years of communist rule, the Soviet Union
remains a nineteenth-century-style empire, comprised of
more than 100 nationality groups and dominated by the
Russians. There is not one major nationality group that is
content with the present, Russian-controlled arrangement;
not one that does not yearn for its political and economic
freedom. It's hard to imagine how the world's last empire
can survive into the twenty-first century except under
highly favorable conditions of economics and demographics
-- conditions that do not, and will not, exist.
The Soviet economy is heading toward calamity. With an
average annual growth rate of less than 2 percent, and with
defense spending going up at an average annual rate of
4 percent, something fairly drastic has got to give, and
fairly soon. It's a matter of simple arithmetic.
Moreover, sharply rising energy costs will make even
current growth rates difficult to sustain. It is
inevitable that if present economic trends continue, living
standards will decline, perhaps to post-World War II
levels. We have all been warned by the experts never to
under-estimate the Russians' capacity for belt-tightening;
I myself have published articles on this very subject. But
there is a limit, and that limit is coming closer every
year.
The Soviet Union is a demographic nightmare. Today only
about half the country's population can speak Russian; for
an industrialized, technologically-advanced society, this
is intolerable. Moreover, so low has been the Russian
birthrate that in coming years the able-bodied working-age
population of the Russian Republic -- which contains
roughly two-thirds of the Soviet Union's total industrial
production capacity - will actually decline. This is not
merely a drop in the" rowth rate; it is a drop in the total
number of warm bodies showing up each fnorning, drunk or
sober, for work. Moreover, high birthrates in?the Moslem
republics have begun to soak up vast amounts of investment
for schools, hospitals, roads, and so forth. Thus, fewer
and fewer Russians must work harder and harder to support
more and more non-Russians. This sort of thing cannot go
on indefinitely.
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-- The East European satellites are becoming more and more
difficult to control. Already economic growth rates in the
key satellites are marginal, non-existant, or negative.
These rates will decline further as the Soviet Union moves
to insulate itself from the rising costs of empire by
squeezing its satellites harder, for example by raising the
prices of its raw materials and paying its satellites less
for the finished goods the Soviet Union then buys.
Economic trouble leads inevitably to political unrest, so
the question is not whether Moscow's difficulties will
mount but rather how bad things will get. We are all
familiar with the situation in Poland. But other
satellites may be closer to their own political boiling
points than we realize. Romania has just announced massive
cutbacks in electric power, including the shutting down of
all schools for the month of January along with pressures
on consumers to stop using vacuum cleaners, washing
machines, and refrigerators. And in East Germany -- widely
regarded as among the most stable and secure satellites --
the Communist Party daily Neues Deutschland, in an
astounding ideological departure, published in its
October 22 edition two letters from clergymen who expressed
their fears about new Soviet missiles. In all, it seems
likely that the Soviets will need to use raw military power
somewhere in Eastern Europe before too long; they may need
to use such power in several satellites at once.
11. The Soviet leadership simply cannot make the changes necessary to
either reverse these trends or cope with them. Kremlin leaders could boost
their country's economic growth rate only by slashing the defense budget or by
enacting massive economic reforms. Either remedy would threaten the Communist
Party's grip on power, thus neither remedy has the slightest chance of being
administered. The demographic nightmare is equally difficult to end. Moscow
cannot transfer industrial-production capacity from the Russian to the non-
Russian, and especially non-Slav, republics. Doing so would give these
republics more power over Moscow than Moscow is willing to risk. And Moscow
cannot import workers to Russian factories from Moslem republics because these
workers (a) don't speak Russian, (b) don't want to come, and (c) would be
bitterly resented by Russian workers, who would be required to share scarce
housing and food with individuals they view as racially inferior.
12. Two Kremlin actions ;ovide a good measure of Moscow's domestic
impotence. To boost the birthrate among Russian women -- who average six
abortions, according to recent, highly credible-research -- the Soviet Union
has decided to offer Glory of Motherhood awards to women who bear large
families. And to reform the world's second largest economy, Kremlin leaders
just last month ordered the execution, for corruption, of the poor devil who
managed Gastronome No. 1, Moscow's gourmet delicatessen. These feeble and
pathetic actions are not those of a dynamic or even a healthy leadership
responding to national emergency. They bring to mind neither Roosevelt in
1933 nor Reagan in 1981, but rather Nicholas II in 1910.
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13. In sum, time is not on the Soviet Union's side. This assertion is
now widely accepted among Western observers, as I've noted. But its
staggering 4mplications have scarcely been absorbed. To do so we need to make
yet another leap of imagination, this one to consider the phenomenon of
thwarted ambition:
14. We have all known individuals who have come to recognize that time is
no longer their ally: the 45-year-old corporation vice president who realizes
that he may never make chairman; the 35-year old childless woman who lies
awake at night, listening to the relentless ticking of her biological clock;
the campaigning politician who has confidently brushed aside polls that show
him trailing his opponent by 20 points, and who now realizes that with just
two weeks left before election day, that lead may be too big to close. The
perception that time is no longer on one's side may take weeks or even years
to develop, and often it is obvious to others first. But by definition the
perception comes suddenly.
15. There are, in fact, just two ways to cope with the perception that
time has become an enemy. The first is to accept the unpleasant reality, and
to resign one's self to reduced expectations: life as a mid-level corporate
manager isn't so bad, there are advantages to not having children, it'll be
nice to leave public life for a while. This is quite often an honorable and
perfectly sensible approach.
16. The second response is to go for it. That is, to refuse to meekly
accept one's likely fate, and instead to work or even fight for whatever it is
one wants. This, too, is quite often an honorable and perfectly sensible
approach. But it is a phenomenon of human nature that from the moment one
concludes that time is an enemy and that the proper response is to go for it
-- all is changed. Ideas and actions that were unthinkable the day before are
now quite thinkable and even appealing. Why? Because the alternative is
failure, and this is judged to be unacceptable. Ambitious, seemingly defeated
mid-level business executives who have taken desperate and daring measures
populate our corporate boardrooms. They populate our prisons, too. The
35-year-old single woman who conceives a child before finding a husband has
gone from a scandal to a national trend. And the history of desperate
politicians in the final days of their campaigns is the stuff of Washington
legends.
17. Now let us consider the implication of our assertion that if the
Soviet Union doesn't take the West in the next 20 years or so, it never
will: it means that if present tUen~o be continue, we're e pre-eminent power andd
War. That is, the US will con`ipthe Free World will both survive and flourish.
18. What matters here is not whether US observers believe this, but
rather whether our perception is shared by Soviet officials. No doubt there
are some in Moscow who view the future with confidence. And probably there
are some who see trouble ahead, but who take an aprres-moi-le-deluge attitude. But it seems to me inevitable that some Sovie ficials --
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possibly at the very top, more likely at the third or fourth level echelons now view their empire's future as bleak. And of those officials it seems
equally inevitable that while some will opt to accept the inevitable, so to
speak, others will be less fatalistic. Their argument would run like this:
Ours is an unstable political system, held together solely by terror and
military force. Peaceful political change is utterly alien to Russia. The
alternative to moving forward is not standing still, but falling backward.
Thus when we lose our forward momentum and begin to suffer reversals, our
empire will crumble swiftly and violently. We who are the elite -- like every
totalitarian elite that has come before -- will be swept away. And unlike the
elite that we swept away in 1917 -- so many of whose members wound up driving
taxis in Paris -- we will wind up swinging from lamp-posts in every city from
Leningrad to Vladivostok.
19. They could decide to go for it: to launch one or a series of actions
designed to change the correlation of forces before it is too late to do so.
In this category I would include a grab for the Persian Gulf, and possibly
even a conventional or nuclear bolt-from-the-blue first strike on Western
Europe or perhaps on the US. I do not predict these actions. I merely
predict -- and this is worrisome enough -- that to some Soviet officials such
actions may no longer be too risky to contemplate.
20. It has long been fashionable to view the Cold War as a permanent
feature of global politics, one that will endure through the next several
generations at least. But it seems to me more likely that President Reagan
was absolutely correct when he observed in his Notre Dame speech that the
Soviet Union -- "one of history's saddest and most bizarre chapters" -- is
entering its final pages. (We really should take up the President's
suggestion to begin planning for a post-Soviet world; the Soviet Union and its
people won't disappear from the planet, and we have not yet thought seriously
about the sort of political and economic structure likely to emerge.) In
short, the Free World has out-distanced the Soviet Union economically, crushed
it ideologically, and held it off politically. The only serious arena of
competition left is military. From now on the Cold War will become more and
more of a bare-knuckles street fight.
20. We should be optimistic, for if present trends continue we will
win. But we must also be on guard, for it is all too likely that incumbent or
future Soviet leaders will not choose to await their fates quietly while their
empire completes its shattering descent into history. The current outbreak of
violence may thus be merely a prelude to the most dangerous years we have ever
known.
Herbert E. Meyer
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