Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [145]
I began by quoting President Roosevelt: ‘We, born to freedom and believing in freedom, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.’ I then went on to note that nuclear war was indeed a terrible threat, but conventional war a terrible reality. Since the atomic bombs dropped by the Americans on Hiroshima and Nagasaki there had been no conflicts in which nuclear weapons had been used — but some 140 conflicts fought with conventional weapons in which approaching 10 million people had died. In any case:
The fundamental risk to peace is not the existence of weapons of particular types. It is the disposition on the part of some states to impose change on others by resorting to force against other nations and not in ‘arms races’, whether real or imaginary. Aggressors do not start wars because an adversary has built up his own strength. They start wars because they believe they can gain more by going to war than by remaining at peace … I do not believe that armaments cause wars [nor that] action on them alone will … prevent wars. It is not merely a mistaken analysis but an evasion of responsibility to suppose that we can prevent the horrors of war by focusing on its instruments. They are more often symptoms than causes.
This was the analysis which underlay the defence and security policies I intended the Government to pursue. It provided me with a view of international power politics without which we would have had no clear sense of direction. But of course it did not of itself resolve particular problems. Throughout my first years in office I repeatedly found myself trying to reconcile five different objectives. First, there could only be strictly limited resources available for defence, particularly when the economy was growing slowly or not at all. This meant that although defence expenditure was increased, it was vital that better value for money be obtained. Second, we had regularly to assess the priority we would give to the demands of NATO policy and those other areas of British interest outside the NATO area. Third, Britain had to help ensure that NATO responded effectively to the steadily increasing Soviet military threat. Fourth, as part of this, it was vital to maintain western unity behind American leadership. Britain, among European countries, and I, among European leaders, were uniquely placed to do that. Finally, nowhere more than in defence and foreign policy does what I have come to consider ‘Thatcher’s law’ apply — in politics the unexpected happens. You have to be prepared and able to face it. There was to be no lack of examples in my years in office.
THE MILITARY BALANCE
Well before I entered Downing Street I was preoccupied with the balance of military power between the NATO alliance and the Warsaw Pact. NATO has always been a defensive alliance of western style democracies. It was founded in April 1949 in response to the growing aggression of Soviet policy, made plain by events such as the Soviet-backed communist takeover in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin blockade the previous year. Although the United States is the leading power in NATO, ultimately it can only seek to persuade not coerce. In such a relationship the danger of dissension always exists. The Soviet aim, only thinly disguised, right up until the time when a united Germany remained in NATO, was to drive a wedge between America and her European allies. I always regarded it as one of Britain’s most important roles to see that such a strategy failed.
There are other fundamental differences between NATO and its opponents. The democratic freedoms our peoples enjoy make it in practice impossible for the state to take more than a certain share of national income for military purposes. Moreover, the openness of our western societies, though they make us stronger perhaps when sacrifice is required in a manifest crisis, also make us slow to respond to insidious threats. Democracies do not, with very few exceptions, start wars. The only threat NATO ever posed to