The Downing Street Years (81 page)

I subsequently learnt that George Shultz thought that I had secured too great a concession on the Americans’ part in the wording; but in fact it gave them and us a clear and defensible line and helped reassure the European members of NATO. A good day’s work.

I again visited Washington in February 1985. Arms talks between the Americans and the Soviet Union had now resumed, but SDI remained a source of contention. I was to address a joint meeting of Congress on the morning of Wednesday 20 February and I brought with me from London as a gift a bronze statue of Winston Churchill, who had also many years before been honoured with such an invitation. I worked specially hard on this speech. I would use the Autocue for its delivery. I knew that Congress would have seen the ‘Great Communicator’ himself delivering faultless speeches and I would have a discriminating audience. So I resolved to practise speaking the text until I had got every intonation and emphasis right. (Speaking to Autocue, I should add, is a totally different technique to speaking from notes.) In fact, I borrowed President Reagan’s own Autocue and had it brought back to the British Embassy where I was staying. Harvey Thomas, who accompanied me, fixed it up and, ignoring any jetlag, I practised until 4 a.m. I did not go to bed, beginning the new working
day with my usual black coffee and vitamin pills, then gave television interviews from 6.45 a.m., had my hair done and was ready at 10.30 to leave for the Capitol. I used my speech, which ranged widely over international issues, to give strong support for SDI. I had a terrific reception.

I regarded the
quid pro quo
for my strong public support of the President as being the right to be direct with him and members of his Administration in private. It was a little more awkward on this occasion for I had brought Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine with me for my meeting and working lunch with the President, which made for a more stilted and less satisfactory conversation than on other occasions. (I did not bring them again.) But I went to the heart of what was worrying me. I told President Reagan that I thought it was important to avoid exaggerated rhetoric about SDI. We must not get into a situation where people were told that nuclear weapons were wicked, immoral and might soon be rendered unnecessary by the development of defensive systems. Otherwise the British public’s support for them would be eroded. I think that the President took this point. He, for his part, emphasized that SDI was not going to be a bargaining chip. The United States would not go to Geneva and offer to give up SDI research if the Russians reduced nuclear weapons by a certain amount. He was to prove as good as his word.

The following month (March 1985) saw the death of Mr Chernenko and, with remarkably little delay, the succession of Mr Gorbachev to the Soviet leadership. Once again I attended a Moscow funeral: the weather was, if anything, even colder than at Yuri Andropov’s. Mr Gorbachev had a large number of foreign dignitaries to see. But I had almost an hour’s talk with him that evening in St Katherine’s Hall in the Kremlin. The atmosphere was more formal than at Chequers and the silent, sardonic presence of Mr Gromyko did not help. But I was able to explain to them the implications of the policy I had agreed with President Reagan the previous December at Camp David. It was clear that SDI was now the main preoccupation of the Soviets in arms control.

Mr Gorbachev brought, as we had expected, a new style to the Soviet Government. He spoke openly of the terrible state of the Soviet economy, though at this stage he was still relying on the methods associated with Mr Andropov’s drive for greater efficiency rather than
radical reform. An example of this was the draconian measures he took against alcoholism. As the year wore on, however, there was no evidence of improvement in conditions in the Soviet Union. Indeed, as our new — and first-class — ambassador to Moscow, Bryan Cart-ledge, who had been my foreign affairs private secretary when I first became Prime Minister, pointed out in one of his first despatches, it was a matter of, ‘jam tomorrow and, meanwhile, no vodka today’.

A distinct chill entered into Britain’s relations with the Soviet Union as a result of expulsions which I authorized of Soviet officials who had been spying. The defection of Oleg Gordievsky, a former top KGB officer, meant that the Soviets knew how well informed we were about their activities. I had several meetings with Mr Gordievsky and had the highest regard for his judgement about events in the USSR. I repeatedly tried — without success — to have the Soviets release his family to join him in the West. (They eventually came after the failed coup in August 1991.)

In November President Reagan and Mr Gorbachev had their first meeting in Geneva. Not much of substance came out of it — the Soviets insisted on linking cuts in strategic nuclear weapons to an end to SDI research — but a good personal rapport quickly developed between the two leaders (though not, sadly, between their wives). There had been some concern expressed that President Reagan might be outmanoeuvred by his sharp-witted and younger Soviet counterpart. But he was not, which I found not at all surprising. For Ronald Reagan had had plenty of practice in his early years as President of the Screen Actors Guild in dealing with hard-headed trade union negotiations — and no one was more hard-headed than Mr Gorbachev.

During 1986 Mr Gorbachev showed great subtlety in playing on western public opinion by bringing forward tempting, but unacceptable, proposals on arms control. Relatively little was said by the Soviets on the link between SDI and cuts in nuclear weapons. But they were given no reason to believe that the Americans were prepared to suspend or stop SDI research. Late in the year it was agreed that President Reagan and Mr Gorbachev — with their Foreign ministers — should meet in Reykjavik, Iceland, to discuss substantive proposals.

In retrospect, the Reykjavik summit on that weekend of 11 and 12 October can be seen to have a quite different significance than most of the commentators at the time realized. A trap had been prepared for the Americans. Ever greater Soviet concessions were made during the summit: they agreed for the first time that the British and French deterrents should be excluded from the INF negotiations; and that cuts in strategic nuclear weapons should leave each side with equal
numbers — rather than a straight percentage cut, which would have left the Soviets well ahead. They also made significant concessions on INF numbers. As the summit drew to an end President Reagan was proposing an agreement by which the whole arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons — bombers, long-range Cruise and ballistic missiles — would be halved within five years and the most powerful of these weapons, strategic ballistic missiles, eliminated altogether within ten. Mr Gorbachev was even more ambitious: he wanted the elimination of all strategic nuclear weapons by the end of the ten-year period.

But then suddenly, at the very end, the trap was sprung. President Reagan had conceded that during the ten-year period both sides would agree not to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, though development and testing compatible with the Treaty would be allowed. Mr Gorbachev said that the whole thing depended on confining SDI to the laboratory — a much tighter restriction that was likely to kill the prospect of an effective SDI. The President rejected the deal and the summit broke up. Its failure was widely portrayed as the result of the foolish intransigence of an elderly American President, obsessed with an unrealizable dream. In fact, President Reagan’s refusal to trade away SDI for the apparent near fulfilment of his dream of a nuclear-free world was crucial to the victory over communism. He called the Soviets’ bluff. The Russians may have scored an immediate propaganda victory when the talks broke down. But they had lost the game and I have no doubt that they knew it.
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For they must have realized by now that they could not hope to match the United States in the competition for military technological supremacy and many of the concessions they made at Reykjavik proved impossible for them to retrieve.

My own reaction when I heard how far the Americans had been prepared to go was as if there had been an earthquake beneath my feet. I supported the idea of a 50 per cent reduction in strategic ballistic missiles over five years, but the President’s proposal to eliminate them altogether after ten years was a different matter. The whole system of nuclear deterrence which had kept the peace for forty years was close to being abandoned. Had the President’s proposals gone through, they would also have effectively killed off the Trident missile, forcing us to acquire a different system if we were to keep an independent nuclear deterrent. My intense relief that Soviet duplicity had finally caused these proposals to be withdrawn was balanced by a gnawing anxiety
that they might well be put forward on some new occasion. I had always disliked the original INF ‘zero option’, because I felt that these weapons made up for western Europe’s unpreparedness to face a sudden, massive attack by the Warsaw Pact; I had gone along with it in the hope that the Soviets would never accept. But extending this approach more generally to all strategic ballistic missiles would have left the Soviets confronting western Europe with a huge superiority of conventional forces, chemical weapons and short-range missiles. It also undermined the credibility of deterrence: talk about eliminating strategic ballistic missiles (and possibly nuclear weapons altogether) at some point in the future raised doubts in people’s minds about whether the United States was prepared to use nuclear weapons in the present. Somehow I had to get the Americans back onto the firm ground of a credible policy of nuclear deterrence. I arranged to fly to the United States to see President Reagan.

I have never felt more conscious than in the preparation for this visit of how much hung on my relationship with the President. It seemed to me that we were poised between a remarkable success and a possible catastrophe. I received the fullest briefing from the military about the implications of a defence strategy involving the elimination of all ballistic missiles. It was argued in some quarters in the US Administration that NATO strategy would not be undermined by the elimination of strategic ballistic missiles, and that aircraft, Cruise missiles and nuclear artillery, in all of which it was thought the West had a superiority, would provide an even better deterrent. In fact, NATO’s whole strategy of flexible response — dependent as it was on a full range of possible military, including nuclear, responses to a Soviet attack — would have ceased to be viable. The so-called ‘Air Breathing Systems’ (Cruise missiles and bombers) were less certain to penetrate Soviet defences and generally more vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike. That would weaken their deterrent value. Europe would be dangerously exposed.

Just as important were the political considerations. To provide a credible British deterrent using Cruise missiles rather than Trident might be twice as expensive. Was it really likely that in an atmosphere full of talk of a world free of nuclear weapons we would ever obtain
public support for such a programme? The more closely I examined the implications, the worse they were.

Percy Cradock (my Special Adviser on security matters), Charles Powell and I drafted and redrafted the arguments I would use with President Reagan. These must be logically coherent, persuasive, crisp and not too technical.

I flew into Washington on the afternoon of Friday 14 November. That evening I practised my arguments in meetings with George Schultz and Cap Weinberger. I saw George Bush for breakfast the following morning and then left for Camp David where I was met by President Reagan.

To my great relief I found that the President quickly understood why I was so deeply concerned about what had happened in Reykjavik. He agreed the draft statement which we had finalized after talking to George Shultz the previous day and which I subsequently issued at my press conference. This stated our policy on arms control after Reykjavik. It ran as follows:

It is easy to imagine what the effect of the Camp David statement must have been in Moscow. It meant the end of the Soviets’ hope of using SDI and President Reagan’s dream of a nuclear weapons-free world to advance their strategy of denuclearizing Europe, leaving us vulnerable to military blackmail and weakening the link between the American and European pillars of NATO. It also demonstrated that, whether they liked it or not, I was able to have some influence on President Reagan on fundamental issues of alliance policy. Mr Gorbachev, therefore, had as much reason to do business with me as I with him. Add to this the fact that the Soviets often preferred to deal with right-wing western governments, because they regarded them as hard-headed negotiators who would nonetheless keep a bargain when it has been reached, and that I had struck up such a good personal relationship with Mr Gorbachev at Chequers before he became leader, and it is no surprise that I was soon invited to Moscow.