The Downing Street Years by Margaret Thatcher

Author:Margaret Thatcher
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780062029102
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1993-01-10T10:00:00+00:00

SDI

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.

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