They met again briefly at Chernenko’s funeral in March 1985, soon after which Gorbachev finally stepped into the top job. But she still made a point of being wary and had no intention of lowering her guard. The reality, she warned in Washington that summer, was that ‘the new brooms in the Soviet Union will not be used to sweep away Communism, only to make it more efficient – if that can be done’.85 Two months later, as if to demonstrate to Moscow that the Cold War was not over, Britain expelled twenty-five Soviet diplomats exposed as spies by the defector Oleg Gordievsky. When Gorbachev retaliated in kind, Mrs Thatcher expelled six more Russians. Yet all the while Geoffrey Howe was following up her diplomatic initiative by quietly touring all the Warsaw Pact capitals during 1984 – 5.
With her impeccable track record of standing up to the Soviets, Mrs Thatcher’s advice that Gorbachev was a different sort of Soviet leader undoubtedly impressed the Americans. James Baker – Reagan’s chief of staff, later Treasury Secretary – testified that she had ‘a profound influence’ on US thinking about Russia.86 Yet this almost certainly exaggerates her role. The truth is that the Americans were already reassessing their own approach, at least from the time Shultz became Secretary of State, and Reagan personally was as keen as she was to engage the Soviet leaders. From the moment he became President he sent a series of handwritten letters to his opposite numbers in Moscow, trying to strike a human response. From Brezhnev and Andropov he received only formal replies, but he did not give up.87 When Mrs Thatcher described her talks with Gorbachev, he was ‘simply amazed’ how closely she had followed the same line that he had taken when meeting Foreign Minister Gromyko the previous September.88 What can be said is that her clear-sighted public praise of Gorbachev helped the White House assure American public opinion that the President was not going soft when he too started to do business with the Soviet leader. On the other side she helped convince Gorbachev of Reagan’s sincerity, and encouraged him to go ahead with the November 1985 Geneva summit, despite his suspicion of the American ‘StarWars’ programme. Once Reagan and Gorbachev had started meeting directly, however, her mediating role was inevitably reduced.
Reagan’s dedication to ‘Star Wars’ – the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) – was a delicate problem for Mrs Thatcher which she handled with considerable sensitivity and skill. The idea was a futuristic scheme, at the very limits of American space technology, to develop a defensive shield against incoming ballistic missiles, ultimately, it was hoped, making strategic nuclear weapons redundant. Reagan announced the project – with no prior warning to Britain or the rest of NATO – in March 1983. The allies were immediately alarmed. First of all they were sceptical of the technology and doubted that SDI would ever work with the 100 per cent certainty needed to replace the existing deterrent. Second, they feared that such an American initiative would breach the 1972 ABM Treaty and wreck the chances of further arms-control agreements by triggering a new arms race in space. Third, they feared that SDI would detach the USA from NATO: if the Americans once felt secure behind their own shield they would withdraw their nuclear protection from Europe; while if the Russians successfully followed suit, the British and French deterrents would be rendered obsolete.
Mrs Thatcher shared these fears; but she did not want to criticise the American initiative publicly because she knew Reagan was deeply committed to it. Unlike most of his advisers, who saw SDI as just another high-tech toy in the military arsenal, Reagan genuinely believed in the dream of abolishing nuclear weapons. In addition she was excited by the science, believing that, unlike ‘the laid-back generalists from the Foreign Office’ she, with her chemistry degree from forty years before, ‘had a firm grasp of the scientific concepts involved’. She was keen to support the research programme, since ‘science is unstoppable’.89 But deployment was another matter. More than anyone she worried about destabilising the Alliance, giving the Russians an excuse to walk out of arms-control negotiations, and possible American withdrawal into isolationism. She had invested too much political capital – and money – in buying Trident to be willing to see it scrapped. Above all she regarded the idea that nuclear weapons could ever be abolished as dangerous fantasy.
During 1984 her worries grew and she determined to take the lead in representing Europe’s concerns positively to the Americans. On 8 November she wrote to ask if she could call on Reagan at his ‘Western White House’ in California on her way home from signing the Hong Kong Agreement in Beijing just before Christmas. When Reagan replied that he would not be there until after Christmas, she invited herself to Washington instead. This was the most punishing schedule she ever imposed on herself (and on her staff). She left for China on the Monday evening following her Sunday talks with Gorbachev at Chequers. She signed the agreement in Beijing on the Wednesday, went on to Hong Kong to reassure the population there on Thursday, and then flew on across the Pacific and the US to Washington, from where she was helicoptered to meet the President at Camp David on Saturday morning, returning to London overnight. This involved flying right round the world – fifty-five hours of flying time – in five and a half days. Quite apart from the hours in the air, this must surely make her the only leader to have held substantial talks, on three continents, with Russian, American and Chinese leaders inside a single week.40
Yet she gave no sign of jet lag. First, as already described, she gave Reagan her favourable impression of Gorbachev; but she also passed on his defiant response to SDI. ‘Tell your friend President Reagan,’ Gorbachev had told her, ‘not to go ahead with space weapons.’ If he did, ‘the Russians would either develop their own or, more probably, develop new offensive systems superior to SDI.’ Reagan assured her that ‘Star Wars was not his term and was clearly not what he had in mind’. If the research proved successful he had actually promised to share the technology. ‘Our goal is to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons.’ Mrs Thatcher repeated that she supported the American research programme; but when the President was joined by Shultz and his National Security Advisor ‘Bud’ Macfarlane she launched into her own worries about SDI.
She took seriously Gorbachev’s threats to retaliate. ‘We do not want our objective of increased security to result in increased Soviet nuclear weapons.’ But her real fear was that SDI would undermine nuclear deterrence, which she passionately believed had kept the peace for forty years. Moreover, in response to Reagan’s optimism that SDI would turn out to be feasible, she admitted that ‘personally she had some doubts’. Macfarlane tried to convince her, but she remained sceptical. Finally, she asked ‘if someone could come to London to give her a top-level US technical briefing’. Reagan ‘nodded agreement and said it was time to break for lunch’.
Before, during and after lunch Mrs Thatcher banged on about British Airways and the Laker anti-trust case, followed by discussion of the US economy and the Middle East. All this gave time for Charles Powell to work up a statement which she now circulated, embodying four assurances that she wanted to be able to give to the press at the end of the meeting. ‘We agreed on four points,’ the statement declared:
(1) The US, and Western, aim was not to achieve superiority, but to maintain balance, taking account of Soviet developments;
(2) SDI-related deployment would, in view of treaty obligations, have to be a matter for negotiations;
(3) The overall aim is to enhance, not undercut deterrence;
(4) East – West negotiations should aim to achieve security with reduced levels of offensive systems on both sides.90,91
This was a brilliant diplomatic coup. Reagan’s staff were not pleased at being bounced in this way; but the President happily accepted her four points, saying ‘he hoped they would quell reports of disagreement between us’.92 Thus, in exchange for publicly expressing her strong support for the research, she secured – and promptly went out and publicised – assurances that the Americans would not deploy SDI unilaterally and would not abandon deterrence. Of course she knew that Shultz and others in the American admi
nistration shared her doubts and welcomed her support: she could not have done it alone. But she knew exactly what she wanted and played her hand skilfully to obtain it. When Reagan sent a long cable to allied leaders setting out the American negotiating position for the resumed arms-control talks in Geneva a few weeks later it specifically included Mrs Thatcher’s four points – though he also reiterated his personal dream of eventually eliminating nuclear weapons entirely.93
She got her ‘comprehensive briefing’ in London two weeks later from the director of SDI.94 But she was not yet ready to relax. ‘Margaret Thatcher… was on the rampage for a year or more about SDI’, Macfarlane recalled. ‘She wouldn’t let us hear the end of it.’ She flew over to Washington again in February, looking for another ‘concentrated discussion of the substantive problems’.95 Accorded the rare honour of addressing both Houses of Congress, she contrived a neat quotation from Churchill speaking to the same audience in 1952, in the very early days of nuclear weapons. ‘Be careful above all things,’ the old warrior had warned, ‘not to let go of the atomic weapon until you are sure and more than sure that other means of preserving peace are in your hands.’ Implicitly repudiating Reagan’s vision of a world without nuclear weapons, she emphasised that the objective was ‘not merely to prevent nuclear war, but to prevent conventional war as well’ – and nuclear weapons were still the surest way of doing that.96
At her meeting with Reagan she raised a new worry, as she reminded him when she got home:
As regards the Strategic Defense Initiative, I hope that I was able to explain to you my preoccupation with the need not to weaken our efforts to consolidate support in Britain for the deployment of cruise and for the modernisation of Trident by giving the impression that a future without nuclear weapons is near at hand. We must continue to make the case for deterrence based on nuclear weapons for several years to come.97
‘Bud, you know, she’s really missing the point,’ Reagan told Macfarlane. ‘And she’s doing us a lot of damage with all this sniping about it.’98 In fact, Mrs Thatcher was very careful not to snipe in public, but kept her criticism for the President’s ear alone.
In July she was back in Washington, where she had persuaded the White House to set up a seminar on arms control attended by Reagan, Shultz,Weinberger and the whole American top brass. Over lunch she confronted the President directly with the implications of his enthusiasm for getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether. ‘If you follow that logic to its implied conclusion,’ she told him, ‘you expose a dramatic conventional imbalance, do you not? And would we not have to restore that balance at considerable expense?’ In response, Macfarlane recalled, Reagan ‘looked her square in the eye and said, “Yes, that’s exactly what I imagined”’.99
In truth, no one else in the administration believed in Reagan’s naive vision of a nuclear-free future. Though Reagan would never admit it, the real point of SDI was that it was a massive bargaining chip, which raised the technological stakes higher than the struggling Soviet economy could match. Gorbachev recognised this, which was why he tried to rouse Western public opinion against it. Mrs Thatcher initially did not: she was more concerned that the Russians would meet the American challenge, leaving Europe exposed. But she assuaged her anxiety by concentrating on the lucrative crumbs she hoped British firms might pick up from the research programme. ‘You know, there may be something in this after all,’ she responded when Macfarlane dangled the prospect of contracts worth $300 million a year.100 In fact Britain gained nothing like the commercial benefits she hoped for from SDI – no more than £24 million by 1987 rather than the £1 billion the MoD optimistically predicted in 1985. But by the time she came to write her memoirs she realised that her fears had been misplaced. SDI, though never successfully tested, let alone deployed, achieved its unstated purpose by convincing the Russians that they could no longer compete in the nuclear arms race, so bringing them to the negotiating table to agree deep cuts in nuclear weapons, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And she gave the credit to Reagan for having, in his artless way ‘instinctively grasped the key to the whole question’. By initiating SDI he ‘called the Soviets’ bluff. They had lost the game and I have no doubt that they knew it.’101
But that revelation lay ahead. In October 1986 she was horrified when Reagan met Gorbachev at Reykjavik and offered off his own bat not only to cut strategic nuclear weapons by half in five years, but to eliminate them entirely in ten years. The moment passed: Gorbachev overplayed his hand by trying to get Reagan to scrap his beloved SDI as well. This Reagan would not do, since his dream of eliminating nuclear weapons was dependent on SDI being successful. But it was a bad moment for Mrs Thatcher when she heard how far Reagan had been willing to go.
What alarmed her was not just that she regarded talk of abolishing nuclear weapons as a utopian fantasy. More immediately, in blithely proposing to eliminate a whole class of weapons in a bilateral deal with the Russians, Reagan was completely ignoring Britain’s Trident and the French independent deterrent. Implicitly Trident would have to be scrapped too: there was no way Britain could have continued to buy a weapon that the Americans themselves had abandoned. But the merest suggestion of scrapping Trident would play straight into the hands of the British peace movement which she had spent so much energy combating over the past five years. In 1983 maintaining the British deterrent had been her trump card against Michael Foot’s unilateralist rabble. Now, with the next election looming and Labour posing a serious challenge, her best friend in the White House was casually threatening to tear it up. British press coverage of Reykjavik largely blamed Reagan for blocking a historic deal by refusing to give up ‘Star Wars’. Mrs Thatcher was much more worried about what he had been willing to give up.
So she lost no time in getting back to Washington as soon as she could, inviting herself to Camp David for another flying visit on 15 November. The Americans were anxious to help her, recognising that she was ‘in a pre-election phase’, while Labour’s unilateralism ‘would deal a severe blow to NATO’.102 ‘Mrs Thatcher’s overriding focus will be the British public’s perception of her performance,’ an aide noted. ‘Our interest is in assuring that the results of the meeting support a staunch friend and ally of the US.’ Nevertheless,White House staff were determined not to be bounced again, as they believed they had been in 1984, by Mrs Thatcher arriving with a document already up her sleeve. ‘We have found,’ Poindexter noted, ‘even with friends like Mrs Thatcher – that joint statements, which are usually a compromise, do not serve our policy interests.’103 This time they took care to have their own text prepared in advance.
US objectives, Shultz explained to Reagan, were first, to ‘strengthen Alliance cohesion… by reconciling your commitment to eliminate offensive ballistic missiles within ten years with Mrs Thatcher’s commitment to deploy UK Tridents within the same time frame’; second, ‘to find a mutually acceptable formula [five or six words are here blacked out] that drastic nuclear reductions… are inadvisable as long as conventional and chemical imbalances exist in Europe’; and third, to secure British endorsement of US policies.104[k] It is clear that the Americans’ real objective was the last. Just as she had done on SDI two years earlier, Mrs Thatcher secured the assurance she wanted that nuclear deterrence remained central to NATO policy and Trident would go ahead. This was spun to the British press as another triumph of Thatcherite diplomacy. The reality was rather different.
The Americans were happy to let her claim a triumph. But the truth is that this time the paper she came away waving was written in the White House. The assurances she secured were part of an ‘agreed statement to the press’ which explicitly endorsed Reagan’s Reykjavik objectives and most of his specific proposals: a 50 per cent cut in strategic weapons over five years, deep cuts in intermediate nuclear forces – which Mrs Thatcher did not like at all – and a ban on chemical weapons, plus continuing SDI research. Only the aspiration to phase out strategic weapons altogether in ten years was tactfully omitte
d.
Mrs Thatcher was still deeply worried about where American policy was heading. To her mind, even talking about abolishing nuclear weapons in the future dangerously undermined the West’s defensive posture. It was only the balance of terror – ‘mutually assured destruction’ – which had kept the peace in Europe for forty years. Not only would it be foolish to abandon nuclear weapons: it was even more foolish to imagine it was possible to abandon them. ‘You cannot act as if the nuclear weapon had not been invented,’ she told the American interviewer Barbara Walters in January 1987. ‘The knowledge of how to make these things exists.’ New countries were acquiring that knowledge all the time. ‘If you cannot be sure that no one has got them, then you have got to have a weapon of your own to deter other people.’105 Her unapologetic enthusiasm invited the charge, both at home and in America, that she was a nuclear fanatic. On the contrary, she insisted, she was simply a realist. ‘You cannot disinvent the nuclear weapon,’ she told the Daily Express in April, ‘any more than you can disinvent dynamite.’106 She was right; but she did seem to make the argument with a disturbing relish.
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