Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [488]
By the time of the next Anglo-German summit in Frankfurt the political pressure on the German Chancellor had increased further and he had begun to argue that a decision on SNF was not really necessary until 1991–2.
A week before I went to Frankfurt I had talked through the problem with Jim Baker over lunch at Chequers. I told him that I still considered that Chancellor Kohl was a courageous man and a strong supporter of the United States: the problem was Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who normally favoured a softer, more accommodating approach to the Soviets. I predicted that a number of other governments would be inclined to waver on SNF, because the opinion polls showed that people no longer believed in the Soviet threat. It was therefore vital that the United States and Britain should stand firm. Jim Baker said he very much agreed with my line. The Administration needed an assurance on deployment or it would not get funding from Congress to develop a successor to LANCE. But he wondered whether the price of German agreement would have to be the acceptance of vague language on negotiations on SNF. I replied that though there was scope for NATO to make unilateral reductions in its holdings of nuclear artillery, we could not negotiate on SNF without getting trapped into another ‘zero’. Jim Baker was clearly more anxious about handling German sensitivities than I was, but I still believed that we saw things in the same way.
Consequently, when I met Chancellor Kohl in Frankfurt I was quite direct. I said that in putting the case for SNF to his people he should simply ask the fundamental question whether they valued their freedom. Freedom for the German people had started on the day the Second World War had ended and NATO had preserved it for forty years. The Soviet Union continued to represent a military threat. Britain, Germany and the United States represented the real strength of NATO. I understood his difficulties in dealing with German public opinion but I believed that he and I were fundamentally in agreement. NATO had to modernize its weapons, otherwise the United States would sooner or later start to withdraw its troops from Germany. Britain and Germany together should give a lead. In spite of the pressure the Federal Chancellor was under, I came away from Frankfurt feeling that the agreed line on SNF might still hold.
Certainly, the Soviets were in no doubt about the strategic importance of the decisions which would have to be made about SNF. Mr and Mrs Gorbachev arrived at 11 o’clock at night on Wednesday 5 April in London for the visit which had had to be postponed the previous December as a result of an earthquake in Armenia. I met them at the airport and returned to the Soviet Embassy where the number of toasts drunk suggested that the Soviet leader’s early crackdown on vodka was not universally applicable. In my talks with Mr Gorbachev I found him frustrated by — and surprisingly suspicious of — the Bush Administration. I defended the new President’s performance and stressed the continuity with the Reagan Administration. But the real substance of our discussions related to arms control. I raised directly with Mr Gorbachev the evidence which we had that the Soviets had not been telling us the truth about the quantity and types of chemical weapons which they held. He stoutly maintained that they had. He then brought up the issue of SNF modernization. I said that obsolete weapons did not deter and that NATO’s SNF would certainly have to be modernized. The forthcoming NATO summit would confirm this intention. Mr Gorbachev returned to the subject in his speech at Guildhall which contained