Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [151]
On the afternoon of Monday 2 June 1980, however, I finalized the terms in discussion with Dr Harold Brown, the able US Defence Secretary, in Downing Street. I said that Britain wanted to purchase the Trident I missile on the same terms as regards research and development as Polaris, that is paying a 5 per cent levy. Dr Brown would not agree to this and said that it would have been severely criticized in Congress. But he would accept it providing the British Government bore the cost of manning the Rapier Air Defence Systems which the US intended to purchase for their bases in Britain. I agreed. I also agreed with the objective of extending and increasing US use of the base at Diego Garcia; but this made sense on its own merits and had nothing to do with the Trident decision. Dr Brown accepted this. At last the decision was effectively made and I wrote formally to President Carter requesting purchase of Trident, simultaneously informing President Giscard, Chancellor Schmidt and Prime Minister Cossiga. The decision was announced to the House by Francis Pym on 15 July and at Francis’s suggestion fully debated and endorsed on 3 March 1981.
In the summer of 1980 we thought that we had made our final decision on the independent nuclear deterrent. But it was not to be. President Reagan came into office in 1981 with a programme of modernizing US strategic nuclear forces, including Trident. On 24 August the new US Defence Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, wrote to me to confirm that President Reagan had now decided to use the Trident II (D5) missile in the Trident submarines. The US Administration would make this missile available to us if we wished to buy it. On 1 October President Reagan formally told me of his decision.
I well understood and indeed supported President Reagan’s decision to improve the US strategic nuclear capability. I was worried about the advances which the Soviet Union had made both in their technology and in numbers of weapons. However, we now faced a new situation. If we were still to go ahead with Trident I we risked spending huge sums on a system that would be outdated and increasingly difficult to maintain as the Americans went over to Trident II. But if we were to accept President Reagan’s generous offer of the new technology represented by Trident II we risked the increasing costs of any new project. Moreover, a number of political difficulties arose.
In November 1981 a group of ministers met to discuss what we should do. We argued out all the questions between us; and all the arguments which would be raised in the outside world were discussed, including some feeble and unrealistic ones. One colleague was concerned at the impact on public opinion of choosing a still more powerful missile. Another raised the question whether it would be more difficult to keep a Trident II nuclear strategic force out of future arms control negotiations, as we had managed hitherto. A third was inclined to support the case for Trident II but with fewer missiles. Yet another, while accepting that Trident II was better than the alternatives, felt that the choice raised the more fundamental question of whether the UK could afford to continue to maintain an independent strategic nuclear deterrent at all. For my part I had two anxieties. One was, as I noted above, that the cost of a completely new missile now being developed was bound to be uncertain and on past performance was likely to escalate. The other was my unease about the implications for the strategic deterrent of Soviet developments in anti-ballistic missile defence, including particle beam and laser weapons — a possibility to which I had been alerted some years earlier but which became a matter of public debate only when President Reagan proposed his SDI initiative in March 1983.
In January 1982 we had a