Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [480]
DISCUSSIONS WITH MR GORBACHEV IN DECEMBER 1987
Britain’s own security interests were closely bound up with US-Soviet arms negotiations. As regards SNF, these weapons were a vital protection for our troops stationed in Germany. Discussions between the two great powers about strategic nuclear weapons were also of direct interest to us insofar as they affected the position of our Trident nuclear deterrent. More generally, I never ceased to believe in the importance of nuclear weapons as a means of deterring conventional, not just nuclear, war — the one issue on which I knew I could not take the Reagan Administration’s soundness for granted.
So although I had no intention of allowing myself to become a kind of broker between the Americans and the Soviets, I was delighted when Mr Gorbachev accepted my invitation to stop over at Brize Norton on his way to the United States to sign the INF Treaty. This would give me an opportunity to gauge his thinking before his meeting with President Reagan and to tackle him on other issues, such as human rights and regional conflicts, on which I thought I could exert beneficial influence. The Americans had specifically asked me to press Mr Gorbachev on Afghanistan, where it was clear he was trying to find a way of pulling Soviet forces out of that disastrous venture.
Within the Soviet Union there were mixed signs. Mr Gorbachev had brought his ally Mr Yakovlev into the Politburo; but — in a move which was to have enormous long-term consequences — his one-time protégé, Boris Yeltsin, who had been brought in as head of the Moscow Party as an incorruptible radical reformer, had been publicly humiliated. Within the Soviet leadership, apart from Mr Gorbachev himself, it still seemed that probably only Foreign minister Shevardnadze and Mr Yakovlev were fully committed to the Gorbachev reforms.
At the start of our talks I brought out my copy of Mr Gorbachev’s book, Perestroika, which seemed to please him. It prompted a long description of the difficulties he was facing in bringing about the changes he wanted. In the language of the Soviets — faithfully reflected in the language of the western media — the opponents of perestroika were usually called ‘conservatives’. I told him how irritating I found this and said that I wanted nothing to do with Mr Gorbachev’s ‘conservatives’: they could hardly be more different from mine. Then we got down to the detailed discussions on arms control. There was not much to say now about INF and it was the projected START Agreement,* which would lead to cuts in strategic nuclear weapons, on which we focused. There were still large differences between the two sides as regards definition and verification. I also repeated my determination to keep nuclear weapons, which Mr Gorbachev described as my preferring to ‘sit on a powder keg rather than an easy chair’. I countered by reminding him of the large superiority which the Soviets enjoyed in conventional and chemical forces. Then I raised Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the human rights issue, suggesting that any action he took on these would be likely to assist the US Administration in overcoming opposition in the Senate to the INF Treaty. But I made no headway: he said that a solution in Afghanistan would be easier if we stopped supplying the rebels with arms and that human rights was a matter for