More (#3) from Arsenals of Folly:

On 25 July 1980, Carter added further to Soviet fears by promulgating a new presidential directive, PD-59, that included an argument for fighting extended nuclear wars rather than attacking at the outset with everything in the arsenal, the early LeMay strategy that was still enshrined in the SIOP. “If deterrence fails initially,” PD-59 argued, “we must be capable of fighting successfully so that the adversary would not achieve his war aims and would suffer costs that are unacceptable, or in any event greater than his gains, from having initiated an attack.” The Republican National Convention that had just nominated Ronald Reagan as its candidate for the presidency had also endorsed preparing to fight prolonged nuclear wars. The Republican platform and PD-59 together presented the Soviet Union with a solid front in favor of a new and more threatening U.S. nuclear posture.

And:

Reagan, not yet aware of the developing Soviet war scare, ratcheted his rhetoric higher in a March 1983 speech to the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida. There he named the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world” and, famously, “an evil empire.” The speech... won the support as well of Vladimir Slipchenko, a member of the Soviet general staff: "The military, the armed forces… used this [speech] as a reason to begin a very intense preparation inside the military for a state of war…. We started to run huge strategic exercises…. These were the first military exercises in which we really tested our mobilization. We didn’t just exercise the ground forces but also the strategic [nuclear] arms…. For the military, the period when we were called the evil empire was actually very good and useful, because we achieved a very high military readiness…. We also rehearsed the situation when a nonnuclear war might turn into a nuclear war."

And:

All this evidence points to the same conclusion: that the United States and the Soviet Union, apes on a treadmill, inadvertently blundered close to nuclear war in November 1983. That, and not the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, was the return on the neoconservatives’ long, cynical, and radically partisan investment in threat inflation and arms-race escalation.

During the Cuban confrontation, when American nuclear weapons were ready to launch or already aloft and moving toward their Soviet targets on hundreds of SAC bombers, both sides were at least aware of the danger and working intensely to resolve the dispute. During ABLE ARCHER 83, in contrast, an American renewal of high Cold War rhetoric, aggressive and perilous threat displays, and naïve incredulity were combined with Soviet arms-race and surprise-attack insecurities and heavy-handed war-scare propaganda in a nearly lethal mix.

And:

Cannon found that “most of his aides thought of [Ronald Reagen] as intelligent, but many also considered him intellectually lazy.” In fact, they laughed at him behind his back. He was Joe Six-pack, they told each other, his opinions and judgments exactly those guileless truisms you would expect to find among patrons of a neighborhood bar. “The sad, shared secret of the Reagan White House,” Cannon writes, “was that no one in the presidential entourage had confidence in the judgment or capacities of the president. Often, they took advantage of Reagan’s niceness and naïveté to indulge competing concepts of the presidency and advance their own ambitions. Pragmatists and conservatives alike treated Reagan as if he were a child monarch in need of constant protection. They paid homage to him, but gave him no respect.” A book in his hand was more likely to be a Tom Clancy novel than a Henry Kissinger memoir— though the same could be said for many Americans. “Not one of the friends and aides” Leslie Gelb interviewed “suggested that the President was, in any conventional sense, analytical, intellectually curious or well-informed— even though it would have been easy and natural for them to say so. They clearly did not think it necessary. Time and again, they painted a picture of a man who had serious intellectual shortcomings but was a political heavyweight, a leader whose instincts and intuition were right more often than their own analyses. His mind, they said, is shaped almost entirely by his own personal history, not by pondering on history books.” For George Shultz, in Cannon’s paraphrase, “Reagan’s seemingly irrelevant anecdotes were tools that the president used to comprehend the world. ‘He often reduced his thinking to a joke,’ Shultz said. ‘That doesn’t mean it didn’t have a heavy element to it.’” Cannon counters that Reagan “sometimes used humor to avoid facing issues he ought to have faced, particularly the reality that it was impossible to increase military spending, reduce taxes and balance the budget simultaneously.”

...Less politely, the political scientist Richard M. Pious, reviewing Cannon’s biography and other studies of the president, reduced their findings to three parallel axioms: “Reagan could only understand things if they were presented as a story; he could only explain something if he narrated it; he could only think about principles if they involved metaphor and analogy.”

And:

Reagan’s fundamentalist mentation encouraged him to find the supernatural as credible as the natural. He had been convinced since at least his days as governor of California that the end of the world was approaching. He believed that the Bible predicted the future. “Everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ,” he told a surprised California state senator one day in 1971, citing as a sign his understanding that Libya had gone Communist. The founding of Israel in 1948, the Jews thus reclaiming their homeland, was another sign Reagan credited as meaning that a great final battle between good and evil would soon be fought on the plain of Armageddon. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he believed, fulfilled the prediction in Revelation of an army out of Asia of “twice ten thousand times ten thousand” routed by plagues of “fire and smoke and sulfur.” He added Chernobyl to his list when he learned that the name of the old town was the Byelorussian word for wormwood, fulfilling the prophecy of “a great star [that] fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the fountains of water. The name of the star is Wormwood.”