Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [292]
But then suddenly, at the very end, the trap was sprung. President Reagan had conceded that during the ten-year period both sides would agree not to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, though development and testing compatible with the Treaty would be allowed. Mr Gorbachev said that the whole thing depended on confining SDI to the laboratory — a much tighter restriction that was likely to kill the prospect of an effective SDI. The President rejected the deal and the summit broke up. Its failure was widely portrayed as the result of the foolish intransigence of an elderly American President, obsessed with an unrealizable dream. In fact, President Reagan’s refusal to trade away SDI for the apparent near fulfilment of his dream of a nuclear-free world was crucial to the victory over communism. He called the Soviets’ bluff. The Russians may have scored an immediate propaganda victory when the talks broke down. But they had lost the game and I have no doubt that they knew it.* For they must have realized by now that they could not hope to match the United States in the competition for military technological supremacy and many of the concessions they made at Reykjavik proved impossible for them to retrieve.
My own reaction when I heard how far the Americans had been prepared to go was as if there had been an earthquake beneath my feet. I supported the idea of a 50 per cent reduction in strategic ballistic missiles over five years, but the President’s proposal to eliminate them altogether after ten years was a different matter. The whole system of nuclear deterrence which had kept the peace for forty years was close to being abandoned. Had the President’s proposals gone through, they would also have effectively killed off the Trident missile, forcing us to acquire a different system if we were to keep an independent nuclear deterrent. My intense relief that Soviet duplicity had finally caused these proposals to be withdrawn was balanced by a gnawing anxiety that they might well be put forward on some new occasion. I had always disliked the original INF ‘zero option’, because I felt that these weapons made up for western Europe’s unpreparedness to face a sudden, massive attack by the Warsaw Pact; I had gone along with it in the hope that the Soviets would never accept. But extending this approach more generally to all strategic ballistic missiles would have left the Soviets confronting western Europe with a huge superiority of conventional forces, chemical weapons and short-range missiles. It also undermined the credibility of deterrence: talk about eliminating strategic ballistic missiles (and possibly nuclear weapons altogether) at some point in the future raised doubts in people’s minds about whether the United States was prepared to use nuclear weapons in the present. Somehow I had to get the Americans back onto the firm ground of a credible policy of nuclear deterrence. I arranged to fly to the United States to see President Reagan.
FURTHER DISCUSSIONS OF NUCLEAR
STRATEGY AT CAMP DAVID
I have never felt more conscious than in the preparation for this visit of how much hung on my relationship with the President. It seemed to me that we were poised between a remarkable success and a possible catastrophe. I received the fullest briefing from the military about the implications of a defence strategy involving the elimination of all ballistic missiles. It was argued in some quarters