Always reluctant to make public a breach in the ‘special relationship’, even when she felt taken for granted, Thatcher preferred to voice her disquiet to the president personally and
privately. She was thus irritated when her new Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, publicly blurted out British concerns that reliance on SDI risked imbuing Washington with a ‘Maginot
mentality’ – in effect, a potentially false sense of security which would encourage American disengagement from the active defence of Western Europe. During her visit to Reagan at Camp
David in December 1984, she tried to dissuade him from placing blind faith in such a protective shield. ‘In the past,’ she pointed out, ‘scientific genius had always developed a
counter-system. Even if an SDI system proved 95 per cent successful – a significant success rate – over 60 million people will still die from those weapons that got through.’ She
bullied him into announcing publicly that he would pursue a system that aimed at ‘military balance, not superiority’ with the Soviet arsenal.
29
With this assurance, Thatcher felt able to sublimate her fears and support its development. Given how much Reagan was committed to it, it was clearly going to happen,
regardless of what Downing Street thought.
That being so, there was also the small matter of securing for Britain a share of the massive US investment in SDI research and
development. In return for Thatcher’s advocacy, the first collaborative contracts were signed in 1985, resulting in an injection of about $150 million into British companies and institutions
over the following fifteen years.
30
Even while it struggled to get past its theoretical stage, the prospect of SDI shook up the assumptions of both sides in the nuclear debate, forcing them to re-examine the entrenched dogmas that
they had been respectively parroting for years. Those, like Thatcher, who had argued that mutually assured destruction had successfully kept the peace found themselves – at least publicly
– backing a technological advance that threatened to undermine the assumptions upon which MAD rested. Much as she might remind both houses of the US Congress, when given the honour of
addressing them in April 1985, that the West’s ‘task was not merely to prevent nuclear war, but to prevent conventional war as well’,
31
she really feared that Reagan would unintentionally make the latter more likely, whether through negotiation or through over-reliance on the power of his space-age lasers.
The anti-nuclear campaigners were no less challenged by the US president’s potentially game-changing initiative. Having long argued that MAD offered no guarantee of peace, they now feared
that by eliminating it, SDI would create an even greater danger – offering America protection from the consequences of nuclear war and making its president more gung-ho about threatening his
enemies. In fact, it was unclear whether SDI really would put an end to MAD. Potentially, the extension of the arms race into space might spark even more cripplingly expensive research and
development on a new era of nuclear missiles that could evade being zapped from outer orbit, a point that Thatcher had grasped in her argument with Reagan at Camp David as fully as had the
spokespersons of CND.
This was a point also grasped in the Kremlin. During the early 1980s, the USSR’s economy stagnated. Manufacturing little that the Western world wanted to buy, its balance of payments was
sustained by its oil and gas sector, which by 1984 was accounting for more than half of all exports – a dependence that had dire consequences when the international price of oil collapsed in
1985. Meanwhile, socialist central planning had failed to stimulate and drive innovation in new sectors of the economy. Particularly alarming was the widening technology gap between East and West.
In developing the ‘information age’, Western, and especially United States, companies were progressing by leaps and bounds. By contrast, a communist-controlled economy in which the free
exchange of ideas and information was anathema was not structured in a way that made the same sort of advances in information technology possible. Nor was the United States going to supply the
information – an embargo on exporting high technology to the Soviet
Union and its allies accentuated the gap between the ‘free’ and communist blocs. The
best that could be hoped was that Soviet agents could steal the West’s technology, but even this prospect necessarily involved the USSR always being several steps behind US developments. That
Washington was now planning a vast new technological leap that risked making the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal redundant was understandably greeted as disastrous news in Moscow. The USA had the
economic vibrancy to shoulder the burden of starting a whole new level of the arms race from space, but the USSR did not. Just trying to keep pace with America ensured that the defence budget was
consuming, by some estimates, towards one quarter of Soviet GDP, which was an unsustainable level in an economy that had already gone into reverse and was only one sixth the size of that of the
United States.
32
Upon entering the White House, Reagan had initiated a five-year target to raise defence spending to $1.6 trillion, the greatest
peacetime expansion in US history. While his spending surge took defence spending as a proportion of US GDP from 4.9 per cent in 1980 to 6.1 per cent in 1985, this was still a far more affordable
burden than that which was crippling the USSR. Against this background, it seemed that to keep pace with Reagan’s latest Star Wars escalation the Soviets had but two stark choices – end
the arms race by throwing in the towel, or free up the Soviet economy and society so that it could compete in technological advances at this higher level. Both options threatened the future of
communism.
In the short term, the Kremlin’s response appeared to confirm the fears of those who believed SDI was a disastrous provocation, since all hopes of a new round of arms limitation talks fell
through. Neither intellectuals, commentators, generals nor politicians in Britain (or the USA) properly understood the extent to which the massive increases in defence spending heralded by SDI
would put more pressure on the USSR than it could endure. Yet the speed with which Reagan’s announcement heralded change at the top in Moscow and brought about efforts to ‘reform’
communism – which ultimately proved fatal to its survival – was remarkable. As early as 1992, Soviet diplomats of the experience of Vladimir Lukin were admitting: ‘It is clear
that SDI accelerated our catastrophe by at least five years.’
33
In 1993, a decade after the president announced his intent, Thatcher admitted
in her memoirs that, having originally ‘differed sharply’ with Reagan over SDI, not least because she thought a nuclear weapon-free world was ‘neither attainable nor even
desirable’, she had been wrong. ‘Looking back,’ she had come to realize, ‘Reagan’s original decision on SDI was the single most important of his
presidency.’
34
She wrote that appreciation in the same year in which Bill Clinton’s administration effectively wound up the programme,
without it ever having worked. Never had the threat, rather than the reality, of US know-how achieved so much. With hindsight, too, it is perhaps
surprising that so admiring
a fan of capitalism as Margaret Thatcher should have underestimated the capacity of the United States to shoulder the cost of ratcheting up the arms race and overestimated communism’s ability
to keep pace. As she said during a UN press conference in October 1985: ‘I do not think the communist bloc will change in my lifetime.’
35
Then again, she had once made similarly gloomy prophecies about the prospects of a woman in Downing Street.
Cold Thaw
During the mid-1980s, Britain assumed a political significance in the diplomacy of the Cold War that went beyond its traditional role as the second most senior power in NATO.
The primary reason was not the continued possession of the British nuclear arsenal, which was scarcely considered in the bilateral poker game played out in 1986 and 1987 between the United States
and the Soviet Union. France’s
Force de Frappe
was equally incidental to the main event. Both countries were bit-players in the stakes of global obliteration. But unlike
François Mitterrand, Thatcher found herself in an especially influential position when the only Soviet politician with whom she had succeeded in cultivating a good relationship took over the
reins in Moscow. It was not that Thatcher became an indispensible intermediary between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, a role for which neither superpower leader had need, but rather that she
was now more than America’s staunchest ally, she was also the European leader the Kremlin took most seriously. Neither Edward Heath nor John Major enjoyed anything like the same authority at
the White House or the Kremlin, let alone at both addresses. Unlike the ‘Iron Lady’, neither man proved capable of developing the necessary personal rapport, or of slipping naturally
into a show-stealing, actress-like display when in the presence of more powerful men.
Understandably, Thatcher made much of the fact that she had identified the potential of Gorbachev before others had done so. It was undoubtedly helpful for Reagan to be able to make approaches
to the Kremlin after 1985 without fear of alienating Republican hardliners by being able to point out that no less a cold warrior than Maggie Thatcher had led the way. In fact, she had even tried
her hand with Gorbachev’s predecessor, Konstantin Chernenko, at a time when Washington was still struggling to build meaningful communication with the Kremlin, and the disappointing results
had underlined how much personal chemistry it would take for something worthwhile to develop.
Admittedly, with Yuri Andropov there was little that could have been done. His past – he had been head of the KGB for a remarkably long time, from 1967 to 1982 – was even more
intimidating than his demeanour: a cold
face, framed by square, hard-rimmed spectacles. Bedridden with kidney failure for twelve of his fifteen months in power, he finally
slipped into eternity in February 1984. Taking his funeral to be an opportunity, Thatcher decided to attend and while in Moscow was introduced to his successor. Aged seventy-two, the white-haired
Chernenko was actually the same age as the dyed-haired Reagan, though physically he seemed to belong to a far more distant decade. Not trusted to talk extempore, he attempted to mumble a monologue
by reading from a succession of prompt cards containing a compendium of hackneyed clichés about the importance of dialogue. When Thatcher attempted to join it, Chernenko looked confused and
turned helplessly to his foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko. With this despairing effort eliciting nothing of importance, the new leader tried to say something friendly off the cuff. Alarm stealing
across his countenance, Gromyko, who was clearly fearful of what indiscretion might come next, immediately indicated the audience was at an end.
36
Succinctly, Thatcher later summed up: ‘I was unimpressed.’
37
But where she was unable to make an impression with the ailing Chernenko, she succeeded with Mikhail Gorbachev, the coming man in the Politburo, when he accepted an invitation to visit Thatcher
at Chequers in December 1984. The two quickly dispensed with pleasantries and got down to a series of frank and wide-ranging arguments, to each other’s immense satisfaction (and to the strain
of their respective interpreters). Sensitive to his delicate position in the Soviet succession, Gorbachev offered no hostages to fortune, but Thatcher immediately warmed to his easy, approachable
style and ability to think on his feet and debate issues rather than retreat into parroting predetermined official statements.
38
He certainly seemed
more modern-minded, a trait evinced by the fact he brought his wife, Raisa, with him (by contrast, the first confirmation that there was a Mrs Chernenko was when she turned up at her
husband’s funeral). The favourable verdict on Gorbachev was not one given purely with hindsight. As soon as he had left Chequers (nearly an hour and a half behind schedule), Thatcher
presciently announced to the world that Mr Gorbachev was a man she ‘could do business with’. According to Reagan’s National Security Advisor, she then wrote to Reagan to tell him
that ‘the overriding impression left was that the Russians are genuinely fearful of the immense cost of having to keep up with a further American technological advance’ and that,
consequently, they were preparing the ground for negotiating significant arms reductions.
39
Her endorsement of the Kremlin’s coming man was
quickly picked up on when, upon Chernenko’s death on 10 March 1985, the communist that the Western world would embrace as ‘Gorby’ assumed power.
If he thought he was in for an immediate improvement in Anglo-Soviet relations, then he was quickly disabused. Fearing his treason was about to be
uncovered, the KGB agent
Oleg Gordievsky had defected to Britain, bringing his secrets with him. Armed with his information, Britain identified and expelled thirty-one Soviet spies. In retaliation, thirty-one Britons were
duly expelled from the USSR. But this proved to be no more than a blip, for it quickly became evident that both sides were actively seeking to mend fences. During 1986, Anglo-Soviet deals were done
on trade and finance, ending outstanding claims relating back to the period of the Bolshevik revolution and thereby making possible serious Russian investment in the City of London. In March 1987,
Thatcher visited Moscow for four days of lengthy talks with Gorbachev, during which she characteristically gave as good as she got, again trading punches with her favourite communist sparring
partner. Gorbachev’s memoirs are not liberally laced with gushy effusions and his comments about Thatcher maintain a characteristically respectful tone. ‘Easy,’ he conceded, she
might not have been. ‘Still one must admit that in a number of cases she was able to substantiate her charges with facts, which eventually led us to review and criticize some of our own
approaches.’
40
As the Western leader with the greatest influence over Reagan, she was clearly deemed the one who mattered most. To her, this
was a justification of her transatlantic attitude.