Back in Reykjavik, the stumbling block was SDI. Reagan was determined not to confine it to the laboratory for ten years, while Gorbachev was utterly unconvinced by the US offer to share it. During the Sunday-morning negotiations, planned as the final meeting of the summit, the two leaders went around in circles on this point, unable to reach agreement. Rather than end in deadlock they agreed to adjourn and give Shultz and Shevardnadze a chance to try to break the impasse.
The Americans now shifted to a radical and surprising course of action. While Shultz and Shevardnadze talked, Richard Perle and Robert Linhard, an NSC staffer, drafted a version of the zero ballistic missile proposal, first outlined in Reagan’s letter to Gorbachev of 25 July. ‘We hadn’t planned to raise this at Reykjavik,’ recalled Poindexter, who had discussed the possibility of introducing it, if necessary, with Reagan and Shultz the evening before.57 Shultz now presented the draft to Shevardnadze (the specifics of which had not yet been cleared with Reagan). It proposed that neither side would withdraw from the ABM Treaty for ten years. During the first five years both sides would reduce their strategic nuclear forces by 50 per cent; during the second five years they would agree to abolish all remaining offensive ballistic missiles. Shevardnadze did not much like the idea, pointing out that it permitted SDI deployment after ten years, but the two foreign ministers agreed to brief their bosses so that they could discuss it in their final encounter.
After lunch, when Reagan and Gorbachev reconvened for a final session, discussions went to the brink. The Perle–Linhard proposal suggested the elimination of offensive ballistic missiles, where the Soviets had an advantage. But Gorbachev began the session by pressing for the elimination of all strategic arms, which would have left the US with no nuclear weapon capable of reaching the Soviet Union from within the homeland. Advised against accepting this, Reagan raised the game still further: ‘At the end of a long discussion on the various categories of weapons being negotiated on, in which he seemed either not to have known or not to have cared about the difference between ballistic and strategic arms, Reagan declared that it would be fine with him “if we eliminated all nuclear weapons”. Gorbachev replied, “We can do that. We can eliminate them.” Shultz was not a silent spectator; he interjected to say, “Let’s do it.” ’58 With understatement, Jack Matlock, Director of Soviet Affairs on the NSC staff, recalled that ‘the President did get beyond what we had planned or thought he would do.’59 Ridgway put it more colourfully: ‘The dialogue between the President and Gorbachev was cosmic.’60
Nevertheless, the two leaders did not know what to do next. Gorbachev had insisted throughout on SDI being confined to the laboratory for ten years, and the Pentagon had equally insisted to the President that this would kill the programme. Reagan therefore refused Gorbachev’s demand, and begged Gorbachev to ‘ “do this one thing”, not to constrain SDI to the laboratory: “It is a question of one word. This should not be turned down over a word.” Gorbachev responded that “it is not just a question of one word, it is a question of principle.” ’61
The meeting therefore broke up without agreement. And because Gorbachev’s offer had been a ‘package’, no part of it now survived. All offers were off the table.
The lack of agreement, and the gloomy demeanour of George Shultz at the subsequent press conference, led the world to see the summit as a failure. But for Mrs Thatcher, at least at this stage, its failure was the only good thing about it.
She did not immediately know exactly how far Reagan had gone. Few people did, even within the administration. Most of those in the know, alarmed by what had transpired, worked hard to suppress the fact that Reagan and Gorbachev had come close to getting rid of all nuclear weapons, focusing instead on the elimination of ballistic missiles.* Nonetheless Mrs Thatcher picked up enough to be horrified. ‘She was totally appalled,’ recalled her principal private secretary, Nigel Wicks.62 ‘How could he do it? What is he doing?’ she exclaimed.63 According to Jacques Attali, then Mitterrand’s special adviser, the aftermath of Reykjavik was ‘the first time I heard Margaret Thatcher say the Americans were crazy’.64 She was upset both by the content and by the manner of what had taken place. A nuclear-free world was, she had always maintained, an impossibility. If the West sought it, therefore, it was pursuing a will o’ the wisp, and would only make itself, particularly in Britain and Continental Europe, fatally vulnerable. Now the leader of the West had sought it, without agreeing his ideas with any of his allies. Since this had happened this way, against her wishes and without her knowledge, she felt a ‘gnawing anxiety’ that the disarmament proposals ‘might well be put forward on some new occasion’.65
When Reagan telephoned Mrs Thatcher the following day, her sixty-first birthday, he confirmed what had been offered about ballistic missiles. Although initially he made no mention of abolishing all nuclear weapons, Mrs Thatcher seized upon this more accurate interpretation of what had almost transpired and sought to blame Moscow for the idea: ‘the Soviet idea to eliminate all nuclear missiles in return for a 10-year agreement to restrict SDI research to the laboratory is extremely dangerous,’ she insisted. Reagan seemed less convinced. When Mrs Thatcher reminded him of the conventional imbalance in Europe he disagreed, claiming that ‘we do not believe the conventional situation is so imbalanced. Furthermore, what the Soviets do not want is a war.’66 She was careful to praise the President – he had ‘performed marvellously’,67 she said, though she certainly did not believe this at the time – and she accused the Russians of trying to ‘engineer a breakdown’ at the meeting; but she clearly stated her anxieties. The proposal to eliminate nuclear weapons ‘caused her considerable concern’ and was ‘unsettling to opinion in Europe’. Charles Powell, who noted the telephone conversation, considered it so sensitive that he made two versions, one for a very restricted circulation. In the latter, he noted anxiously that Reagan ‘spoke dismissively’ of the ABM Treaty, and recorded that when Mrs Thatcher ‘repeatedly stressed the importance of nuclear deterrence in the face of the imbalance of conventional forces in Europe, the President’s responses were rather vague.’68 Reagan gave no ground to Mrs Thatcher: ‘He showed no sign of backing down from his concept of eliminating nuclear weapons within ten years, indeed showed considerable pride in it.’ He told her to read Red Storm Rising, the new novel by Tom Clancy and Larry Bond, set partly in Iceland, which cast doubt on the idea of Soviet military success through conventional means.
In fact, the prospect of eliminating all nuclear weapons was very short lived. The small group of officials aware of Reagan’s offer understood just how incendiary the idea was. It was understandable that they wished to erase a putative concession which, since it had not led to anything, they considered best forgotten. On 16 October, Admiral Poindexter wrote a long memo to the President, concluding thus:
I would strongly recommend that:
a) you step back from any discussion of eliminating all nuclear weapons in 10 years, and focus … on the elimination of all offensive ballistic missiles in 10 years;
b) you make no further public comment endorsing the idea of the total elimination of all nuclear weapons in 10 years as something discussed and agreed with the General Secretary.69
Reagan reluctantly went along with this recommendation, but for Mrs Thatcher it was only a small mercy. The President remained committed to his plan to abolish all offensive ballistic missiles, which she considered almost as bad as abolishing nuclear weapons altogether. As Poindexter reminded Reagan, Mrs Thatcher questioned ‘whether we can have effective deterrence without ballistic missiles. She does not believe it prudent to make major reductions without redressing conventional and chemical weapons imbalances. Mrs Thatcher also fears that elimination of ballistic missiles will undercut her domestic political position.’70
This last point weighed very heavily on Mrs Thatcher’s mind. Only the day before Reykjavik, she had made defence the climax of her annual party conference speech (see Chapter 15). In the previous week, the Labour conferenc
e had voted for unilateral nuclear disarmament and the closing of American nuclear bases in Britain. To her cheering audience in Bournemouth, Mrs Thatcher excoriated Neil Kinnock’s leadership, and said that ‘by repudiating NATO’s nuclear strategy Labour would fatally weaken the Atlantic Alliance and the United States’ commitment to Europe’s defence’. That weekend, she went on, Reagan and Gorbachev would be meeting in Reykjavik: ‘Does anyone imagine that Mr Gorbachev would be prepared to talk at all if the West had already disarmed?’71 She saw Labour’s unilateralism as a key winner for her in the general election she was free to call in 1987, just as it had been in 1983.
Two days after her oration, it began to look as if Reagan himself had started dancing to Labour’s tune. ‘Giving up nuclear weapons is the sort of thing that Neil Kinnock advocates,’ Mrs Thatcher chided the President over the phone. ‘This would be tantamount to surrender, so we must be very, very careful.’72 Even the Labour Party, so wrapped up in itself at that time that it barely noticed what was happening in the wider world, began to spot a shift. Charles Clarke,* Kinnock’s chief of staff, recalled that before Reykjavik Labour ‘didn’t appreciate enough Reagan’s concerns about nuclear weapons. After Reykjavik, we did come to see them.’73 It became possible to portray Kinnock’s ideas as closer to Reagan’s than Mrs Thatcher’s. As Richard Perle, of all people the least likely to appeal to a Labour audience, put it, ‘We were proposing to disarm the UK.’74 But despite the pile of problems he had created for her, Mrs Thatcher remained careful to avoid any anger or rudeness in talking to the President. She ended her fraught telephone call on 13 October by thanking him ‘for what she called a job well-done in Reykjavik. You lived up to the confidence we have in you.’75 She was able to praise him, without total hypocrisy, because he had, in the end, held the line against Gorbachev and refused to give in over SDI. Even on the morning after the dreadful night before, she could begin to see how something could be made of the near-disaster at Reykjavik. SDI, towards which she had originally been lukewarm, would now become, by its power as a threat and by Reagan’s unyielding adherence to it, the saviour of the West. Reykjavik, in retrospect, would become the moment when the Russians realized the game was up. ‘Thank goodness. Thank goodness,’ she reflected in retirement. ‘[The deal proposed at Reykjavik] would have given the Soviet Union all the superiority with conventional weapons. And everything we’d worked for would have been lost. Three cheers for the strength of purpose of Ronald Reagan, we go ahead with SDI. And so the whole thing failed.’76
Those observing Mrs Thatcher at close quarters often differed about her attitude to Ronald Reagan. The crisis of Reykjavik was the prime example of the problem. Some believed that, for all her proclaimed admiration, she had severe doubts. Poindexter said that ‘At the time, she was always very friendly with the President, and tough. But my instinct was that she didn’t really respect the President. I don’t think she thought the President was very smart. She probably thought he was too simplistic.’77 Robin Butler held a similar view, believing that she ‘never had any illusions about getting below the surface with Reagan. Regularly after international meetings she would say, “But Robin, he didn’t know anything about it!” ’78 Others thought that her regard was sincere. Colin Powell, who took over as Deputy National Security Advisor in the White House at the end of 1986, noted: ‘A lot of foreign leaders might reflect the fact that they didn’t think they were dealing with an intellectual equal. But Margaret never displayed that. She knew that she was dealing at the top level of abstraction and conceptualization with an intellectual equal.’79 It sounds odd to speak of Ronald Reagan in terms like ‘abstraction’ and ‘conceptualization’, but Powell was right to think that Mrs Thatcher’s respect for the President came from her faith in the strength of his general beliefs, most of which she shared. She did indeed believe that he was her intellectual equal in that he grasped the political and ideological challenges of the age in a way that other leaders in the West did not. This is why she clung to him through thick and thin.
The other Powell – Charles – who probably knew her better than any fellow official, noticed that she always tried to protect Reagan in her own mind: ‘She would always look for excuses for what she regarded as his failure to measure up. Occasionally she would say, “Oh, they must be concealing things from him if he thinks that.” But there were some issues on which she genuinely disagreed with him and was always a bit puzzled that he didn’t understand better why she disagreed.’80 Of these, by far the most important was the issue of nuclear weapons. So Reykjavik inevitably put great strain on her trust in Reagan’s wisdom, but it did not break that trust. She tried to maintain a sort of platonic idea of what Reagan really wanted. As she put it to Henry Kissinger a couple of months after the Reykjavik ‘earthquake’, ‘Her main concern remained to bring home to the President that the effect of what he had done at Reykjavik ran flatly contrary to his real objectives.’81
Her method of bringing this home to the President was to go and see him. Mrs Thatcher over-dramatizes herself when, in her memoirs, she claims that ‘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.’82 In fact, her visit had been arranged before Reykjavik. Circumventing the bureaucracy who were trying to block her, she had got her request directly into Reagan’s hand by means of Charlie Price, and the President, quite exceptionally, had sent a handwritten note to aides granting her wish that it should be at Camp David and detailing the arrangements: ‘Margaret Thatcher would like to come here for a one day meeting – just their ambas. + her sec. Charles Pow on her side. She would arrive Nov. 14 & leave after lunch the 15th. She expressed the wish this could be at Camp David. I’d like this if it could be done. This is a weekend & is presently scheduled for Camp David.’83 The visit was only publicly announced after Reykjavik, however, so it looked to the world like a response to the summit.
One irritated NSC memo complained: ‘We think we have done everything to accommodate the British, indeed we cannot recall any previous meeting in which the President played such a direct role in the arrangements. The British, nonetheless, continue to want more.’84 But it was not only over the logistics and ‘face-time’ that Mrs Thatcher was pressing. She was planning as carefully as she could to move Reagan’s mind.
In calculating how best to do this, Mrs Thatcher and Charles Powell operated almost alone. ‘You have a bilateral with the Foreign Secretary,’ Powell reminded her nine days after Reykjavik, ‘– the plump chap with glasses who used to work across the road and whom we haven’t seen for a long while! … He has been kept posted about your various discussions and the line you are taking.’85 There was no suggestion that Geoffrey Howe should help craft the policy. Taking the model of the previous successful Camp David visit in 1984, Prime Minister and private secretary began by working out the press release they would like to see emerge. Mrs Thatcher deleted from Powell’s draft the words ‘We agree that very important progress was made at Reykjavik towards balanced and verifiable arms control agreements,’ since she did not believe that either the balance or the verification was likely to be achieved.86 The draft supported INF negotiations as the priority. It also supported SDI research. But it insisted that ‘the security of the Western Alliance would continue for the foreseeable future to rest on nuclear deterrence.’87
A week later, Powell set out fully for Mrs Thatcher his advice on the best way to deal with Reagan post-Reykjavik. He commented unfavourably on a Foreign Office–MOD suggestion that Britain should ‘try to get the Americans to negotiate agreed limits on SDI research with the Soviet Union’.88 ‘One has to ask how far this is realistic,’ wrote Powell. ‘It is precisely the point on which the President stood firm at Reykjavik and reaped great credit for doing so.’ Mrs Thatcher underlined and ticked approvingly. Besides, Powell went on, such controls on SDI, as well as being unattainable, might not be ‘actually desirable’. They might make it ‘more like
ly that we shall be confronted with an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons/ballistic missiles in a fixed time-span. We want the President to pay attention to our political needs – deterrence, Trident – so we must respect his political interests which are above all SDI.’ Powell’s view was that ‘our present pickle’ was caused by discussion focusing ‘too exclusively on the symptoms (nuclear weapons) and not enough on the causes (ideological differences, Soviet subversion and so on)’.89 Britain did not have the power to get the elimination of ballistic missiles off the table, but it might be able to get the Americans to see the proposal more tactically. He recommended a ‘rather more basic approach to the President’ and invented a little private speech that Mrs Thatcher could make to him at Camp David. She underlined it carefully.
‘Ron, you did wonderfully at Reykjavik in reading Gorbachev’s game-plan and refusing to let him bounce you into giving up the SDI. It just shows how careful you have to be in dealing with the Russians: you can simply never trust them, and every proposal they make needs to be crawled over in minute detail.’ And so, the ‘speech’ went on, Reagan should hold out against ‘unreasonable constraints’ on SDI, pocket the real concessions that the Russians had already made on getting rid of their INF (while not including Britain and France in the INF negotiations), and going for really deep cuts in strategic nuclear weapons. He should make a step-by-step start with INF and ‘break up the Reykjavik package into its constituent parts’. Then came the tough bit: ‘The area where we have a real problem, Ron, is when you talk of the elimination of ballistic missiles within ten years. Now, I know why you do that … it’s part of your vision of freeing the world of nuclear weapons … But you do need to take account of the impact in Europe, where the proposal is seen as equivalent to removing the US umbrella which has guaranteed the peace for 40 years and leaving Europe exposed to the massive Soviet preponderance … in conventional weapons.’ The Europeans would not try to close the conventional gap; instead, they would turn towards neutralism, so when the President spoke of eliminating ballistic missiles, he must also speak of the conventional imbalance and of the need to ‘tackle the political causes of the East/West conflict’.
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