Schadenfreude

Letters

Vol. 15 No. 24 · 16 December 1993

From Norman Dombey

R.W. Johnson (LRB, 2 December) makes many telling points about Mrs Thatcher’s time as prime minister. One point that he gets completely wrong, however, is her claim to have influenced Reagan’s SDI policy. She in fact played a decisive role in ensuring that the United States did not ‘break out’ of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which was the goal of Edward Teller and many SDI-backers in the Pentagon. Mrs Thatcher’s role in converting the US Administration’s policy on this issue from anti-ABM Treaty to pro-ABM Treaty was spelt out in detail by John Newhouse, the American writer on arms control, in the New Yorker (22 July 1985). According to Newhouse, Mrs Thatcher told President Reagan ‘to his face’ at Camp David in December 1984 ‘what is wrong with Star Wars’. He goes on to say: ‘she may be the only one who could do so without creating friction, because their relationship is such a strong one.’

The outcome of that meeting was a joint Reagan-Thatcher agreement drafted by the British, setting out four fundamental points which would govern the SDI programme: 1. the US would not seek strategic superiority; 2. potential deployment of SDI systems would be a matter for negotiation, as required by the ABM Treaty; 3. the goal of SDI would be ‘to enhance, not undercut deterrence’; 4. arms-control negotiations based on the existing ABM and SALT Treaties would be pursued. Although the clear purpose of SDI, as stated initially by President Reagan, would have been to deploy ABM-systems in space in violation of the ABM Treaty, the acceptance of these four points implied that the SDI programme was only a research programme, and as such allowed by the treaty.

Immediately after the Reagan-Thatcher meeting the US State Department arranged to send a telegram to its embassies abroad explaining the new policy, but the Pentagon vetoed the telegram. Inter-agency fighting in Washington followed until June 1985, when the decision to abide by the treaties was accepted formally by President Reagan as a result of further pressure from Mrs Thatcher and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It is difficult to think of any previous situation in modern times where a British politician played so important a role in determining US policy. The only remotely similar episode which comes to mind is the Quebec Agreement between Churchill and Roosevelt when the US agreed not to use nuclear weapons against third parties without UK consent.

Mrs Thatcher may well claim that her mastery of SDI issues followed from her scientific training. While it is easy to be snide about this by pointing to her ‘Second in Chemistry’ and her making ‘the filling for jam rolls’, the important point is that her background in science allowed her to take a serious interest in the technicalities of SDI and nuclear deterrence theory and not leave those matters to the ‘experts’. It is difficult to imagine her successor or any of the other management consultants, accountants and lawyers on the Government Front Bench following her example. Mrs Thatcher’s achievement on SDI paved the way for glasnost and may well be seen by future historians as the most important of her term of office.

Norman Dombey
University of Sussex