The Downing Street Years (80 page)

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 about SDI. They wanted it stopped at almost any price. I knew that to some degree I was being used as a stalking horse
for President Reagan. I was also aware that I was dealing with a wily opponent who would ruthlessly exploit any divisions between me and the Americans. So I bluntly stated — and then repeated at the end of the meeting — that he should understand that there was no question of dividing us: we would remain staunch allies of the United States. My frankness on this was particularly important because of my equal frankness about what I saw as the President’s unrealistic dream of a nuclear-free world.

The talks were due to end at 4.30 p.m. to allow Mr Gorbachev to be back for an early evening reception at the Soviet Embassy, but he said that he wanted to continue. It was 5.50 p.m. when he left, having introduced me to another pearl of Russian popular wisdom to the effect that, ‘Mountain folk cannot live without guests any more than they can live without air. But if the guests stay longer than necessary, they choke.’ As he took his leave, I hoped that I had been talking to the next Soviet leader. For, as I subsequently told the press, this was a man with whom I could do business.

President Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative, about which the Soviets and Mr Gorbachev were already so alarmed, was to prove central to the West’s victory in the Cold War. Although, as I have noted, I differed sharply from the President’s view that SDI was a major step towards a nuclear weapon-free world — something which I believed was neither attainable nor even desirable — I had no doubt about the Tightness of his commitment to press ahead with the programme. Looking back, it is now clear to me that Ronald Reagan’s original decision on SDI was the single most important of his presidency.

In Britain, I kept tight personal control over decisions relating to SDI and our reactions to it. I knew that irreparable harm could have been done to our relations with the United States had the wrong line or even tone been adopted. I was also passionately interested in the technical developments and strategic implications. This was one of those areas in which only a firm grasp of the scientific concepts involved allows the right policy decisions to be made. Laid back generalists from the Foreign Office — let alone the ministerial muddlers in charge of them — could not be relied upon. By contrast, I was in my element.

When I was Leader of the Opposition I had had several briefings from military experts about the technical possibilities of SDI and indeed about the advances already made by the Soviet Union in laser and anti-satellite technology. These left me fearful that they were already moving ahead of us. I collected and read articles from
Aviation Weekly
and the scientific press. Consequently, when I began to read reports of the new Reagan Administration’s thinking in this area I immediately understood that we too needed access to the best expert advice in order to assess the potentially revolutionary implications. Neither the Foreign Office nor the Ministry of Defence took SDI sufficiently seriously. Time and again I had to press for papers which had been promised and these, when they came, consistently underrated the technical possibilities opened up by the research and the American Administration’s determination to press ahead with it. In fact, the only time I found much enthusiasm was when there appeared to be possibilities — which, by contrast, the MoD significantly exaggerated — for British firms to win large contracts for the research.

In formulating our approach to SDI, there were four distinct elements which I bore in mind. The first was the science itself. The American aim in SDI was to develop a new and much more effective defence against ballistic missiles. This would be what was called a ‘multi-layered’ Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD), using both ground and space-based weapons. This concept of defence rested on the ability to attack incoming ballistic missiles at all stages of their flight, from the boost phase when the missile and all its warheads and decoys were together — the best moment — right up to the point of re-entry of the earth’s atmosphere on its way to the target. Scientific advances opened up new possibilities to make such defence far more effective than the existing Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defences. The main advances which appeared likely were in the use of kinetic energy weapons (which were non-nuclear and which, when launched at high speed against the nuclear missile, would smash it) and in the use of laser weapons. Even more challenging than the development of these different elements of SDI, however, was the requirement for an enormously powerful and sophisticated computer capability to direct and coordinate the system as a whole. Such an undertaking would not only require huge sums of money but also test the ultimate creative abilities of the western and communist systems competing for it.

The second element to be considered was the existing international agreements limiting the deployment of weapons in space and ABM systems. The 1972 ABM Treaty, as amended by a 1974 Protocol, allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to deploy one static
ABM system with up to one hundred launchers in defence of either an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silo field or the national capital. The precise implications of the treaty for the research, testing, development and deployment of new kinds of ABM system were subject to heated legalistic dispute. The Soviets had started out with a ‘broad interpretation’ of the treaty which they narrowed when it later suited them. Within the American Administration there were those who pressed for a ‘broader than broad’ interpretation which would have placed almost no effective constraint on the development and deployment of SDI. The Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence always sought to urge the narrowest possible interpretation, which the Americans — rightly in my view — believed would have meant that SDI was stillborn. I always tried to steer away from this phraseology and made it clear in private and public that research on whether a system was viable could not be said to have been completed until it had been successfully tested. Underneath the jargon, this apparently technical point was really a matter of straight common sense. But it was to become the issue dividing the United States and the USSR at the Reykjavik summit and so assumed great importance.

The third element in the calculation was the relative strength of the two sides in Ballistic Missile Defence. Only the Soviet Union possessed a working ABM system (known as GALOSH) around Moscow, which they were currently up-grading. The Americans had never deployed an equivalent system. The United States assessed that the Soviets were spending in the order of $ 1 billion a year on their research programme of defence against ballistic missiles. Also the Soviets were further advanced in anti-satellite weapons. There was, therefore, a strong argument that the Soviets had already acquired an unacceptable advantage in this whole area.

The fourth element was the implications of SDI for deterrence. I started off with a good deal of sympathy for the thinking behind the ABM Treaty. This was that the more sophisticated and effective the defence against nuclear missiles, the greater the pressure to seek hugely expensive advances in nuclear weapons technology. I was always a believer in a slightly qualified version of the doctrine known as MAD — ‘mutually assured destruction’. The threat of (what I preferred to call) ‘unacceptable destruction’ which would follow from a nuclear exchange was such that nuclear weapons were an effective deterrent against not just nuclear but also conventional war. I had to consider whether SDI was likely to undermine that. On one argument, of course, it would. If any power believed that it had a completely effective shield against nuclear weapons it had, in theory, a greater temptation
to use them. I knew — and post-war experience demonstrated beyond doubt — that the United States would never start a war by launching a first strike against the Soviet Union, whether it believed that it was secure from retaliation or not. The Soviets, by contrast, claimed to have no such confidence.

But I soon began to see that SDI would strengthen not weaken the nuclear deterrent. Unlike President Reagan and some other members of his Administration I never believed that SDI could offer one hundred per cent protection, but it would allow sufficient United States missiles to survive a first strike by the Soviets. Theoretically, the US would then be in a position to launch its own nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. It follows that the Soviets would be far less likely to yield to the temptation to use nuclear weapons in the first place.

The decisive argument for me, however, was precisely the one which made me reject President Reagan’s vision of a nuclear weapon-free world. It was that you could not ultimately hold back research on SDI any more than you could prevent research into new kinds of offensive weapons. We had to be the first to get it. Science is unstoppable: it will not be stopped for being ignored. The deployment of SDI, just like the deployment of nuclear weapons, must be carefully controlled and negotiated. But research, which necessarily involved testing, must go ahead.

It was the subject of SDI which dominated my talks with President Reagan and members of his Administration when I went to Camp David on Saturday 22 December 1984 to brief the Americans on my earlier talks with Mr Gorbachev. This was the first occasion on which I had heard President Reagan speaking about SDI. He did so with passion. He was at his most idealistic. He stressed that SDI would be a defensive system and that it was not his intention to obtain for the United States a unilateral advantage. Indeed, he said that if SDI succeeded he would be ready to internationalize it so that it was at the service of all countries, and he had told Mr Gromyko as much. He reaffirmed his long-term goal of getting rid of nuclear weapons entirely.

These remarks made me nervous. I was horrified to think that the
United States would be prepared to throw away a hard-won lead in technology by making it internationally available. (Fortunately the Soviets never believed that he would.) But I did not raise this directly. Instead, I concentrated on my areas of agreement with the President. I said that it was essential to pursue the research, but that if this reached the point where a decision had to be made to produce and deploy weapons in space a very different situation would arise. Deployment would not be consistent either with the 1972 ABM Treaty or the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Both of these would have to be renegotiated. I also explained my concern about the possible intermediate effect of SDI on the doctrine of deterrence. I was worried that deployment of a Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) system would be destabilizing and that while it was being constructed a pre-emptive first strike against it would become an attractive option. But I acknowledged that I might well not be fully informed of all the technical aspects and wanted to hear more. In all this I was keen to probe the Americans, not just in order to learn more of their intentions but to ensure that they had clearly thought through the implications of the steps they were now taking.

What I heard, now that we got down to discussion of the likely reality rather than the grand vision, was reassuring. President Reagan did not pretend that they yet knew where the research could finally lead. But he emphasized that — in addition to his earlier arguments in favour of SDI — keeping up with the United States would impose an economic strain on the Soviet Union. He argued that there had to be a practical limit as to how far the Soviet Government could push their people down the road of austerity. As so often, he had instinctively grasped the key to the whole question. What would the effects be of SDI on the Soviet Union? In fact, as he foresaw, the Soviets did recoil in the face of the challenge of SDI, finally renouncing the goal of military superiority which alone had given them the confidence to resist the demands for reform in their own system. But of course this still lay in the future.

What I wanted now was an agreed position on SDI to which both the President and I could lend our support, even though our long-term view of its potential was different. I had been thinking about this over the last few days and particularly on the long flight from Peking where I had been for the signing of the Joint Declaration on Hong Kong. I now jotted down, while talking to National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane, the four points which seemed to me to be crucial.

My officials then filled in the details. The President and I agreed a text which set out the policy.

The main section of my statement reads: