Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [164]
Unilateralism became the official policy of the Labour Party at the 1982 Party Conference, when the necessary two-thirds majority was secured. Michael Foot personally had long been committed to the unilateralist position. It had an appeal in the universities and among some intellectuals and received a good deal of covert support from those in the media, especially the BBC. Labour councils had adopted the gimmick of declaring their areas ‘nuclear free zones’. Although the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) had begun to lose support from the high point it had reached in 1981, it remained dangerously strong.
Of the two specific aspects of nuclear policy at the centre of debate — the independent deterrent and the stationing of medium-range nuclear missiles — it was the second which was the more controversial. Cruise missiles would have to be deployed sometime in 1983 and we could expect a major campaign to prevent this.
Ultimate control of Cruise missiles was the most tricky issue. The decision to modernize medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe, it will be recalled, had been made under pressure from the Europeans, particularly the Germans, anxious to prevent any ‘decoupling’ of the American and European wings of NATO. The Americans had developed and paid for the missiles, and therefore owned them, massively reducing the cost to European governments. There was a strong feeling in the US Congress that any US-owned missiles should be subject to US control. However, American ownership obviously carried implications if it ever came to decisions about use.
In Britain, distrust of the United States surfaced on the question of whether there should be a ‘dual key’ — that is whether there should be a technical arrangement to ensure that the US could not fire these weapons without the consent of the British Government. That would go beyond the existing agreement that the US would not use nuclear weapons based in Britain without an Anglo-American ‘joint decision’.
The United States had offered us the possibility of dual key right at the start, but to exercise that option we would have had to buy the weapons ourselves, which would have been hugely expensive. John Nott, before he left his post as Defence Secretary, had been attracted by the dual key option. But neither Michael Heseltine, his successor, nor I shared his view. The UK had never exercised physical control over systems owned and manned by the US. It was in my view neither fair nor necessary to ask the US to break with that precedent now. Also the more the Soviets were told about how and in what conditions Cruise missiles would be fired, the less credible they would be as a deterrent. The Soviets might be persuaded — and for the purposes of deterrence it did not matter whether they were right or wrong — that at the last moment a British Government might not agree to their use. Finally, the use of a dual key in the United Kingdom would have raised the whole question of arrangements elsewhere in Europe. In West Germany both government and public opinion would, as I have noted, only agree to deploying Cruise and Pershing II missiles if there was no German finger on the trigger.
So for all these reasons I satisfied myself through discussions with Washington that the position in reality was satisfactory from the point of view of British security and defence, and on 1 May 1983 I cleared personally with President Reagan the precise formula we should