would not abandon deterrence. Of course she knew that Shultz and others in the American administration shared her doubts and welcomed her support: she could not have done it alone. But she knew exactly what she wanted and played her hand skilfully to obtain it. When Reagan sent a long cable to allied leaders setting out the American negotiating position for the resumed arms-control talks in Geneva a few weeks later it specifically included Mrs Thatcher’s four points – though he also reiterated his personal dream of eventually eliminating nuclear weapons entirely.93
She got her ‘comprehensive briefing’ in London two weeks later from the director of SDI.94 But she was not yet ready to relax. ‘Margaret Thatcher… was on the rampage for a year or more about SDI’, Macfarlane recalled. ‘She wouldn’t let us hear the end of it.’ She flew over to Washington again in February, looking for another ‘concentrated discussion of the substantive problems’.95 Accorded the rare honour of addressing both Houses of Congress, she contrived a neat quotation from Churchill speaking to the same audience in 1952, in the very early days of nuclear weapons. ‘Be careful above all things,’ the old warrior had warned, ‘not to let go of the atomic weapon until you are sure and more than sure that other means of preserving peace are in your hands.’ Implicitly repudiating Reagan’s vision of a world without nuclear weapons, she emphasised that the objective was ‘not merely to prevent nuclear war, but to prevent conventional war as well’ – and nuclear weapons were still the surest way of doing that.96
At her meeting with Reagan she raised a new worry, as she reminded him when she got home:
As regards the Strategic Defense Initiative, I hope that I was able to explain to you my preoccupation with the need not to weaken our efforts to consolidate support in Britain for the deployment of cruise and for the modernisation of Trident by giving the impression that a future without nuclear weapons is near at hand. We must continue to make the case for deterrence based on nuclear weapons for several years to come.97
‘Bud, you know, she’s really missing the point,’ Reagan told Macfarlane. ‘And she’s doing us a lot of damage with all this sniping about it.’98 In fact, Mrs Thatcher was very careful not to snipe in public, but kept her criticism for the President’s ear alone.
In July she was back in Washington, where she had persuaded the White House to set up a seminar on arms control attended by Reagan, Shultz,Weinberger and the whole American top brass. Over lunch she confronted the President directly with the implications of his enthusiasm for getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether. ‘If you follow that logic to its implied conclusion,’ she told him, ‘you expose a dramatic conventional imbalance, do you not? And would we not have to restore that balance at considerable expense?’ In response, Macfarlane recalled, Reagan ‘looked her square in the eye and said, “Yes, that’s exactly what I imagined”’.99
In truth, no one else in the administration believed in Reagan’s naive vision of a nuclear-free future. Though Reagan would never admit it, the real point of SDI was that it was a massive bargaining chip, which raised the technological stakes higher than the struggling Soviet economy could match. Gorbachev recognised this, which was why he tried to rouse Western public opinion against it. Mrs Thatcher initially did not: she was more concerned that the Russians would meet the American challenge, leaving Europe exposed. But she assuaged her anxiety by concentrating on the lucrative crumbs she hoped British firms might pick up from the research programme. ‘You know, there may be something in this after all,’ she responded when Macfarlane dangled the prospect of contracts worth $300 million a year.100 In fact Britain gained nothing like the commercial benefits she hoped for from SDI – no more than ?24 million by 1987 rather than the ?1 billion the MoD optimistically predicted in 1985. But by the time she came to write her memoirs she realised that her fears had been misplaced. SDI, though never successfully tested, let alone deployed, achieved its unstated purpose by convincing the Russians that they could no longer compete in the nuclear arms race, so bringing them to the negotiating table to agree deep cuts in nuclear weapons, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And she gave the credit to Reagan for having, in his artless way ‘instinctively grasped the key to the whole question’. By initiating SDI he ‘called the Soviets’ bluff. They had lost the game and I have no doubt that they knew it.’101
But that revelation lay ahead. In October 1986 she was horrified when Reagan met Gorbachev at Reykjavik and offered off his own bat not only to cut strategic nuclear weapons by half in five years, but to eliminate them entirely in ten years. The moment passed: Gorbachev overplayed his hand by trying to get Reagan to scrap his beloved SDI as well. This Reagan would not do, since his dream of eliminating nuclear weapons was dependent on SDI being successful. But it was a bad moment for Mrs Thatcher when she heard how far Reagan had been willing to go.
What alarmed her was not just that she regarded talk of abolishing nuclear weapons as a utopian fantasy. More immediately, in blithely proposing to eliminate a whole class of weapons in a bilateral deal with the Russians, Reagan was completely ignoring Britain’s Trident and the French independent deterrent. Implicitly Trident would have to be scrapped too: there was no way Britain could have continued to buy a weapon that the Americans themselves had abandoned. But the merest suggestion of scrapping Trident would play straight into the hands of the British peace movement which she had spent so much energy combating over the past five years. In 1983 maintaining the British deterrent had been her trump card against Michael Foot’s unilateralist rabble. Now, with the next election looming and Labour posing a serious challenge, her best friend in the White House was casually threatening to tear it up. British press coverage of Reykjavik largely blamed Reagan for blocking a historic deal by refusing to give up ‘Star Wars’. Mrs Thatcher was much more worried about what he had been willing to give up.
So she lost no time in getting back to Washington as soon as she could, inviting herself to Camp David for another flying visit on 15 November. The Americans were anxious to help her, recognising that she was ‘in a pre- election phase’, while Labour’s unilateralism ‘would deal a severe blow to NATO’.102 ‘Mrs Thatcher’s overriding focus will be the British public’s perception of her performance,’ an aide noted. ‘Our interest is in assuring that the results of the meeting support a staunch friend and ally of the US.’ Nevertheless,White House staff were determined not to be bounced again, as they believed they had been in 1984, by Mrs Thatcher arriving with a document already up her sleeve. ‘We have found,’ Poindexter noted, ‘even with friends like Mrs Thatcher – that joint statements, which are usually a compromise, do not serve our policy interests.’103 This time they took care to have their own text prepared in advance.
US objectives, Shultz explained to Reagan, were first, to ‘strengthen Alliance cohesion… by reconciling your commitment to eliminate offensive ballistic missiles within ten years with Mrs Thatcher’s commitment to deploy UK Tridents within the same time frame’; second, ‘to find a mutually acceptable formula [five or six words are here blacked out] that drastic nuclear reductions… are inadvisable as long as conventional and chemical imbalances exist in Europe’; and third, to secure British endorsement of US policies.104[k] It is clear that the Americans’ real objective was the last. Just as she had done on SDI two years earlier, Mrs Thatcher secured the assurance she wanted that nuclear deterrence remained central to NATO policy and Trident would go ahead. This was spun to the British press as another triumph of Thatcherite diplomacy. The reality was rather different.
The Americans were happy to let her claim a triumph. But the truth is that this time the paper she came away waving was written in the White House. The assurances she secured were part of an ‘agreed statement to the press’ which explicitly endorsed Reagan’s Reykjavik objectives and most of his specific proposals: a 50 per cent cut in strategic weapons over five years, deep cuts in intermediate nuclear forces – which Mrs Thatcher did not like at all – and a ban on chemical weapons, plus continuing SDI research. Only the aspiration to phase out strategic weapons altogether in ten years was tactfully omitted.
Mrs Thatcher was still deeply worried about where American policy was heading. To her mind, even talking about abolishing nuclear weapons in the future dangerously undermined the West’s defensive posture. It was only the balance of terror – ‘mutually assured destruction’ – which had kept the peace in Europe for forty years. Not only would it be foolish to abandon nuclear weapons: it was even more foolish to imagine it was possible to abandon them. ‘You cannot act as if the nuclear weapon had not been invented,’ she told the American interviewer Barbara Walters in January 1987. ‘The knowledge of how to make these things exists.’ New countries were acquiring that knowledge all the time. ‘If you cannot be sure that no one has got them, then you have got to have a weapon of your own to deter other people.’105 Her unapologetic enthusiasm invited the charge, both at home and in America, that she was a nuclear fanatic. On the contrary, she insisted, she was simply a
