Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [286]
The most practical piece of business I had to discuss on this occasion was arms control. It was an important moment. Secretary of State Shultz and Foreign minister Gromyko were due to meet early in the New Year in Geneva to see whether the stalled arms talks could be revived. 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.
I added that as perhaps the last generation of politicians that remembered the Second World War, we had a bounden duty to ensure that no such conflict would occur again. On this basis our detailed discussions began: 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 National Security Council, which had appeared in 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 two 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. They had given us a greater degree of protection from war than we had ever known before. Yet this could — and 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’s intentions in general and of their plans for a Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) 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. I spoke, as I had in Hungary, about the desire for peace which lay behind his earlier letter to President Brezhnev. In this he was continuing something which was characteristic of America. The United States had never shown any desire for world domination. When, just after the war, they had enjoyed a monopoly of nuclear weapons, they had never used that monopoly to threaten others. The Americans had always used their power sparingly and shown outstanding generosity to other countries. I made it clear that, while I was strongly in favour of the Americans going ahead with SDI, I did not share President Reagan’s view that it was a means of ridding the world entirely of nuclear weapons. This seemed to me an unattainable dream — you could not disinvent the knowledge of how to make such weapons. But I also reminded Mr Gorbachev that the Soviet Union had been the first country to develop an anti-satellite (ASAT) capability. It was clearly not feasible to think in terms of stopping research into space-based systems. The critical stage came when the results of that research were translated into the production of weapons on a large scale.
As the discussion wore on it was clear that the Soviets were indeed very concerned