Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography

by Margaret Thatcher

  The Gorbachevs drove down from London on the morning of Sunday 16 December, arriving in time for lunch. Over drinks in the Great Hall Mr Gorbachev told me how interested he had been to see the farmland on the way to Chequers. Agriculture had been his responsibility for a number of years and he had apparently achieved some modest progress in reforming the collective farms, but up to 30 per cent of the crops were lost because of failures of distribution.

  Raisa Gorbachev knew only a little English – as far as I could tell her husband knew none: but she was dressed in a smart western-style outfit, a well-tailored grey suit – just the sort I could have worn myself, I thought. She had a philosophy degree and had indeed been an academic. Our advice at this time was that she was a committed hardline Marxist; her obvious interest in Hobbes’s Leviathan, which she took down from the shelf in the library, might possibly have confirmed that. But I later learned from her – after I had left office – that her grandfather had been one of those millions of kulaks killed during the forced collectivization of agriculture under Stalin. Her family had no good reason for illusions about communism.

  We went in to lunch – I was accompanied by a rather large team of Willie Whitelaw, Geoffrey Howe, Michael Heseltine, Michael Jopling, Malcolm Rifkind (Minister of State at the Foreign office), Paul Channon and advisers; he and Raisa by Mr Zamyatin, the Soviet Ambassador, and the quietly impressive Mr Alexander Yakovlev, the adviser who was to play a large part in the reforms of the ‘Gorbachev years’. It was not long before the conversation turned from trivialities – for which neither Mr Gorbachev nor I had any taste – to a vigorous two-way debate. In a sense, the argument has continued ever since and is taken up whenever we meet; and as it goes to the heart of what politics is really about, I never tire of it.

  He told me about the economic programmes of the Soviet system, the switch from big industrial plant to smaller projects and ‘businesses’; the ambitious irrigation schemes and the way in which the industrial planners adapted industrial capacity to the labour force to avoid unemployment. I asked whether this might not all be easier if reform were attempted on a free enterprise basis, with the provision of incentives and a free hand for local enterprise to run their own show, rather than everything being directed from the centre. Mr Gorbachev denied indignantly that everything in the USSR was run from the centre. I took another tack. I explained that in the western system everyone – including the poorest – ultimately received more than they would from a system which depended simply on redistribution. Indeed, in Britain we were attempting to cut taxes in order to increase incentives so that we could create wealth, competing in world markets. I said I had no wish to have power to direct everyone where he should work and what he or she should receive.

  Mr Gorbachev insisted on the superiority of the Soviet system. Not only did it produce higher growth rates, but if I came to the USSR I would see how the Soviet people lived – ‘joyfully’. If this was so, I countered, why did the Soviet authorities not allow people to leave the country as easily as they could leave Britain?

  In particular, I criticized the constraints placed on Jewish emigration to Israel. He claimed that 80 per cent of those who had expressed the wish to leave the Soviet Union had been able to do so and repeated the Soviet line, which I did not believe, that those forbidden to leave had been working in areas relating to national security. I knew there was no purpose in persisting now; but the point had been registered. The Soviets had to know that every time we met their treatment of the refuseniks would be thrown back at them.

  We had coffee in the main sitting room. All of my team except Geoffrey Howe, my private secretary Charles Powell, and the interpreter left. Denis showed Mrs Gorbachev around the house.

  If at this stage I had paid attention only to the content of Mr Gorbachev’s remarks I would have to conclude that he was cast in the usual communist mould. But his personality could not been more different from the wooden ventriloquism of the average Soviet apparatchik. He smiled, laughed, used his hands for emphasis, modulated his voice, followed an argument through and was a sharp debater. He was self-confident and though he larded his remarks with respectful references to Mr Chernenko, he did not seem in the least uneasy about entering into controversial areas of high politics. He never read from a prepared brief, but referred to a small notebook of manuscript jottings. Only on matters of pronunciation of foreign names did he refer to his colleagues for advice. As the day wore on I came to understand that it was the style, far more than the Marxist rhetoric, which expressed the substance of the personality beneath. I found myself liking him.

  The most practical piece of business I had to discuss on this occasion was arms control. I had found in talking to the Hungarians that the best basis on which to discuss arms control in a relatively serene atmosphere was to state that our two opposing systems must live side by side, with less hostility and lower levels of armaments. I did the same again now.

  Two things quickly became clear. The first was just how well briefed Mr Gorbachev was about the West. He commented on my speeches, which he had clearly read. He quoted Lord Palmerston’s dictum that Britain had no eternal friends or enemies but only eternal interests. He had been closely following leaked conversations from the American press, to the effect that the US had an interest in not allowing the Soviet economy to emerge from stagnation.

  At one point, with a touch of theatre, he pulled out a full-page diagram from the New York Times, illustrating the explosive power of the weapons of the superpowers compared with the explosive power available in the Second World War. He was well versed in the fashionable arguments then raging about the prospect of a ‘nuclear winter’ resulting from a nuclear exchange. I was not much moved by all this. I said that what interested me more than the concept of the nuclear winter was avoiding the incineration, death and destruction which would precede it. But the purpose of nuclear weapons was, in any case, to deter war not to wage it. Yet this must now be achieved at a lower level of weaponry. Mr Gorbachev argued that if both sides continued to pile up weapons this could lead to accidents or unforeseen circumstances, and with the present generation of weapons the time for decision-making could be counted in minutes. As he put it, in one of the more obscure Russian proverbs, ‘Once a year even an unloaded gun can go off.’

  The other point which emerged was the Soviets’ distrust of the Reagan Administration in general and of their plans for a Strategic Defence Initiative in particular. I emphasized on more than one occasion that President Reagan could be trusted and that the last thing he would ever want was war, that the United States had never shown any desire for world domination.

  As the discussion wore on it was clear that the Soviets were indeed very concerned about SDI. They wanted it stopped at almost any price. I knew that to some degree I was being used as a stalking horse for President Reagan. I was also aware that I was dealing with a wily opponent who would ruthlessly exploit any divisions between me and the Americans. So I bluntly stated that he should understand that there was no question of dividing us: we would remain staunch allies of the United States. My frankness on this was particularly important because of my equal frankness about what I saw as the President’s unrealistic dream of a nuclear-free world.

  The talks were due to end at 4.30 p.m. to allow Mr Gorbachev to be back for a reception at the Soviet Embassy, but he said that he wanted to continue. It was 5.50 p.m. when he left, having introduced me to another pearl of Russian popular wisdom to the effect that, ‘Mountain folk cannot live without guests any more than they can live without air. But if the guests stay longer than necessary, they choke.’ As he took his leave, I hoped that I had been talking to the next Soviet leader. For, as I subsequently told the press, this was a man with whom I could do business.

  President Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative was to prove central to the West’s victory in the Cold War. Although I differed sharply from the President’s view that SDI was a major step towards a nuclear-weapon-free world – something which
I believed was neither attainable nor even desirable – I had no doubt about the rightness of his commitment to press ahead with the programme. Looking back, it is now clear to me that Ronald Reagan’s original decision on SDI was the single most important of his presidency.

  In Britain, I kept tight personal control over decisions relating to SDI and our reactions to it. This was one of those areas in which only a firm grasp of the scientific concepts involved allows the right policy decisions to be made. Laid-back generalists from the Foreign Office – let alone the ministerial muddlers in charge of them – could not be relied upon. By contrast, I was in my element.

  In formulating our approach to SDI, there were four distinct elements which I bore in mind. The first was the science itself. The American aim in SDI was to develop a new and much more effective defence against ballistic missiles. This would be what was called a ‘multi-layered’ Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD), using both ground and space-based weapons. This concept of defence rested on the ability to attack incoming ballistic missiles at all stages of their flight, right up to the point of re-entry of the earth’s atmosphere on its way to the target. Scientific advances opened up new possibilities to make such defence far more effective than the existing Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defence. The main advances which appeared likely were in the use of kinetic energy weapons (which were non-nuclear and which, when launched at high speed against the nuclear missile, would smash it) and in the use of laser weapons. Even more challenging, however, was the requirement for an enormously powerful and sophisticated computer capability to direct and co-ordinate the system as a whole. Such an undertaking would not only require huge sums of money but also test the ultimate creative abilities of the western and communist systems competing for it.

  The second element was the existing international agreement limiting the deployment of weapons in space and ABM systems. The 1972 ABM Treaty, as amended by a 1974 Protocol, allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to deploy one static ABM system with up to one hundred launchers in defence of either an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silo field or the national capital. The precise implications of the treaty for the research, testing, development and deployment of new kinds of ABM system were subject to heated legalistic dispute. The Soviets had started out with a ‘broad interpretation’ of the treaty which they narrowed when it later suited them. Within the American Administration there were those who pressed for a ‘broader than broad’ interpretation which would have placed almost no effective constraint on the development and deployment of SDI. The Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence always sought to urge the narrowest possible interpretation, which the Americans – rightly in my view – believed would have meant that SDI was stillborn. I made it clear in private and public that research on whether a system was viable could not be said to have been completed until it had been successfully tested. This apparently technical point was really a matter of common sense. But it was to become the issue dividing the United States and the USSR at the Reykjavik summit and so assumed great importance.

  The third element in the calculation was the relative strength of the two sides in Ballistic Missile Defence. Only the Soviet Union possessed a working ABM system (known as GALOSH) around Moscow, which they were currently upgrading. The Americans had never deployed an equivalent system. The United States assessed that the Soviets were spending in the order of $1 billion a year on their research programme of defence against ballistic missiles. Also the Soviets were further advanced in antisatellite weapons. There was, therefore, a strong argument that the Soviets had already acquired an unacceptable advantage in this whole area.

  The fourth element was the implications of SDI for deterrence. I started off with a good deal of sympathy for the thinking behind the ABM Treaty. This was that the more sophisticated and effective the defence against nuclear missiles, the greater the pressure to seek hugely expensive advances in nuclear weapons technology. I was always a believer in a slightly qualified version of the doctrine known as MAD – ‘mutually assured destruction’. The threat of (what I preferred to call) ‘unacceptable destruction’ which would follow from a nuclear exchange was such that nuclear weapons were an effective deterrent against not just nuclear but also conventional war. I had to consider whether SDI was likely to undermine that. On one argument, of course, it would. If any power believed that it had a completely effective shield against nuclear weapons it had, in theory, a greater temptation to use them. I knew – and post-war experience demonstrated beyond doubt – that the United States would never start a war by launching a first strike against the Soviet Union, whether it believed that it was secure from retaliation or not. The Soviets, by contrast, claimed to have no such confidence.

  But I soon began to see that SDI would strengthen not weaken the nuclear deterrent. I never believed that SDI could offer one hundred per cent protection, but it would allow sufficient United States missiles to survive a first strike by the Soviets. Theoretically, the US would then be in a position to launch its own nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. It follows that the Soviets would be far less likely to yield to the temptation to use nuclear weapons in the first place.

  The decisive argument for me, however, was precisely the one which made me reject President Reagan’s vision of a nuclear-weapon-free world. It was that you could not ultimately hold back research on SDI any more than you could prevent research into new kinds of offensive weapons. We had to be the first to go for it. Science is unstoppable: it will not be stopped for being ignored. The deployment of SDI, just like the deployment of nuclear weapons, must be carefully controlled and negotiated. But research, which necessarily involved testing, must go ahead.

  It was the subject of SDI which dominated my talks with President Reagan and members of his Administration when I went to Camp David on Saturday 22 December 1984 to brief the Americans on my talks with Mr Gorbachev. This was the first occasion on which I had heard President Reagan speaking about SDI. He did so with passion. He was at his most idealistic. He stressed that SDI would be a defensive system and that it was not his intention to obtain for the United States a unilateral advantage. Indeed, he said that if SDI succeeded he would be ready to internationalize it so that it was at the service of all countries, and he had told Mr Gromyko, the Soviet Foreign minister, as much. He reaffirmed his long-term goal of getting rid of nuclear weapons entirely.

  I was horrified to think that the United States would be prepared to throw away a hard-won lead in technology by making it internationally available. (Fortunately the Soviets never believed that he would.) But I did not raise this directly. Instead, I concentrated on my areas of agreement with the President. I said that it was essential to pursue the research, but that if this reached the point where decisions had to be made to produce and deploy weapons in space a very different situation would arise. Deployment would not be consistent either with the 1972 ABM Treaty or the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Both of these would have to be renegotiated. I also explained my concern about the possible intermediate effect of SDI on the doctrine of deterrence. I was worried that deployment of a Ballistic Missile Defence system would be destabilizing and that while it was being constructed a pre-emptive first strike against it would become an attractive option. But I acknowledged that I might well not be fully informed of all the technical aspects and wanted to hear more. In all this I was keen to probe the Americans, not just in order to learn more of their intentions but to ensure that they had clearly thought through the implications of the steps they were now taking.

  What I heard was reassuring. President Reagan did not pretend that they yet knew where the research could finally lead. But he emphasized that keeping up with the United States would impose an economic strain on the Soviet Union. He argued that there had to be a practical limit as to how far the Soviet Government could push their people down the road of austerity. As so often, he had instinctively grasped the key to the whole question. What would the effects be of SDI on the Soviet Union?
In fact, as he foresaw, the Soviets did recoil in the face of the challenge of SDI, finally renouncing the goal of military superiority which alone had given them the confidence to resist the demands for reform in their own system. But of course this still lay in the future.

  What I wanted now was an agreed position on SDI to which both the President and I could lend our support, even though our long-term view of its potential was different. I now jotted down, while talking to National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane, the four points which seemed to me to be crucial.

  My officials then filled in the details. The President and I agreed a text which set out the policy.

  The main section of my statement reads:

  I told the President of my firm conviction that the SDI research programme should go ahead. Research is, of course, permitted under existing US/Soviet treaties; and we, of course, know that the Russians already have their research programme and, in the US view, have already gone beyond research. We agreed on four points: (1) the US, and western, aim was not to achieve superiority, but to maintain balance, taking account of Soviet development; (2) SDI-related deployment would, in view of treaty obligations, have to be a matter for negotiation; (3) the overall aim is to enhance, not undercut, deterrence; (4) East-West negotiation should aim to achieve security with reduced levels of offensive systems on both sides. This will be the purpose of the resumed US-Soviet negotiations on arms control, which I warmly welcome.