Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (44 page)
The clearest barometer that the Soviet Union was undergoing a new openness –
glasnost
– was when Thatcher was not merely accorded a fifty-minute interview on state television
but that it was broadcast unedited despite the fact it contained her characteristically unflinching criticisms of communism. Rather than accept the offer of making a long speech to camera, she
asked to be subjected to the questions of a three-man interviewing panel. It quickly became clear that a lifetime of soliciting officially worded statements had not prepared the three interviewers
for the easy freedom with which this woman tossed up and fired back ideas like tennis balls, seamlessly covering economics, contrasting philosophies, nuclear escalation (which she blamed on the
Soviet deployment of the SS-20s) and the practical realities of her own public and private life. Touring the drab streets, she decked herself up in a fur hat and expensively tailored coat and was
duly surrounded by ordinary Russians mobbing her with undisguised adulation. This was new (she certainly wasn’t welcomed this enthusiastically back home) and not something any of the greying
and fattening men who led the other European countries could have pulled off. She met dissidents like Andrei Sakharov and lit a candle for freedom of conscience in a Russian Orthodox church –
previously unthinkable parts of an official tour. History was being made, with the member for Finchley, dressed like a tsarina, attempting to steal the show. Even her most entrenched critics in the
British press pack trailing her admitted that she alone of her European contemporaries had star quality.
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Yet hers could only be a supporting role. The speed with which Reagan and Gorbachev began to discuss nuclear disarmament was bewildering to hawks and doves alike. The two
men had their first face-to-face negotiations in Geneva in November 1985. The personal chemistry worked, even though the talks broke up without a deal. Reagan’s commitment to persevering with
SDI prevented an agreement. Yet SDI remained the West’s trump card. Even though the Star Wars shield did not yet exist – and some wondered whether it would ever be technically possible
– the prospect of it was sufficient to scare the Soviets into increasingly desperate offers to conclude a far more comprehensive deal than had ever been on the table during the détente
of the 1970s. What, back then, had been dubbed SALT (strategic arms
limitation
talks) now enjoyed the acronym START (strategic arms
reduction
talks). The difference was one of
substance, not just semantics. Certainly, it was Reagan’s good fortune to have a counterpart in Gorbachev. But it was Gorbachev’s good fortune to be negotiating with what the leading
historian of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis, has described as ‘the only nuclear abolitionist ever to have been president of the United States’.
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Unlike Thatcher, Reagan was genuinely motivated by a desire to ban the bomb. Because he did not share their tactics, CND supporters failed utterly to comprehend that he
shared their goal. They had taken his threats to the Soviet Union at face value, but never his olive branches. Yet, as Kenneth Adelman, then director of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency,
later conceded, the more National Security Council meetings he attended with the president, ‘the more I was surprised that for an anti-Communist hawk, how anti-nuclear he was. He would make
comments that seemed to me to come from the far left rather than from the far right . . . many times [Reagan] would pop out with “Let’s abolish all nuclear weapons”, to the clear
consternation of his advisors.’
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By the time Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik in October 1986, their minds had been further focused by a terrible disaster. On 26 April 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine
exploded. In the efforts to contain the catastrophe, heroes were made. But the causes of the disaster went to the heart of what was wrong with a secretive command economy, as Gorbachev was quick to
recognize, and reinforced more widespread fears that nuclear power represented a threat rather than security. When the two leaders met in Iceland’s capital, Gorbachev was ready, as his
predecessors had not been, to see if Reagan’s ‘zero option’ offer was genuine. He discovered that it was – the president really did want to eliminate all intermediate-range
nuclear missiles from Europe. In addition, Gorbachev suggested cutting all Soviet and US strategic missiles by half. Reagan trumped him by suggesting the abolition of the two superpowers’
entire arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles by 1996, at which time:
He and Gorbachev would come to Iceland, and each of them would bring the last nuclear missile from each country with them. Then they would give a
tremendous party for the whole world . . . The president . . . would be very old by then and Gorbachev would not recognize him. The president would say, ‘Hello Mikhail.’ And
Gorbachev would say, ‘Ron, is it you?’ And then they would destroy the last missile.
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After forty years of holding the world in thrall to a nuclear Armageddon and funding countless proxy wars against one another all over the globe (American funds were at that
very moment being channelled to the mujahideen to repel the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan), was this to be the uplifting end to the story? Gorbachev’s courage to face hard realities and
Reagan’s Hollywood ability – so long derided by the peace movement – to dream beyond reality seemed a transformative combination.
Thatcher was aghast. In 1986, Reagan had advocated a ban on all new ballistic missiles, a proposal that would have axed her Trident-purchasing programme, upon which the future of the whole
post-Polaris ‘independent’ British nuclear deterrent rested. Thatcher wrote to Reagan to protest. But his efforts to mollify her were now shown to be a fleeting nicety, for he put the
idea back on the table at Reykjavik. When Thatcher learned what the ‘leader of the Free World’ was ready to sacrifice, it was, as she later put it, ‘as if there had been an
earthquake beneath my feet’.
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She was amenable to halving the number of strategic nuclear weapons in five years, but horrified at the
prospect of abolishing them all within a decade and signing away the next generation of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, without British agreement. (Although the British deterrent was outside the
remit of the Reykjavik discussions, it would not survive if the Americans stopped manufacturing it – unless Britain wanted the vast expense of developing its own system, or buying one from
the French.) Britain retained its ability to buy Trident thanks to the SDI, which Thatcher had originally disparaged. For the initiative that had done so much to bring matters to a head was still
standing in the way of a US–Soviet agreement. Ignoring – or disbelieving – Reagan’s offer to share the technology, Gorbachev made the deal conditional on SDI’s
non-deployment. The president promised not to deploy it for ten years but refused, as he put it, ‘to sign an agreement that would deny to me and future presidents the right to test and deploy
defences against nuclear weapons’ – from whichever emerging nuclear power they might emanate.
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Upon this sticking point, the deal
collapsed.
In Britain (beyond Whitehall), there was palpable disappointment that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to end the arms race had been scuppered because the American president’s obsession
with his Star Wars fantasy had obscured his grasp of what could be attained on the ground. To Thatcher,
the breakdown of the Reykjavik summit was a relief and she flew out to
Camp David in November to seek reassurance that the president had not become a peacenik – only to leave with a joint statement that, while appearing to safeguard Trident’s future, was
nevertheless far closer to Reagan’s doctrine of disarmament than to her own of deterrence.
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Reykjavik, however, was not the end. Gorbachev
remained desperate and returned for a third summit – via a stopover in London to take soundings from Thatcher – in Washington in December 1987. There, on 8 December, Reagan and
Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which put into practice the ‘zero option’ that Reagan had offered shortly after becoming president in 1981. The US
would remove all cruise and Pershing II missiles from Europe if the Soviet Union did likewise with its SS-20s and other comparable missiles. For the first time, an entire class of nuclear weapons
– those of intermediate (300- to 3000-mile) range – would be abolished.
In compliance with the treaty’s terms, the cruise missiles began leaving Greenham Common on 1 August 1989, and from the second (not fully operational) base at Molesworth the following
month. They were bound for Arizona, where they were to be destroyed. Soviet inspectors were formally welcomed to Greenham and allowed to poke around the silos and verify that the missiles truly
were being confined to history. Satisfied, they joined their former foes for some traditional conviviality down at The Coach and Horses in nearby Midgham. The women peace protesters did not join
them. Andrew Brookes, who was RAF operational commander at Greenham (1989–91), noted that ‘when the last missiles came to be flown out, some women tried to lie down on the runway to
prevent the airlifter from taking off. Just being there had become their life.’
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Truly, it was a bewildering moment for the Greenham women. Their objective had been achieved but, incomprehensibly, by those they continued to distrust and despise. One of the stalwarts of the
camp, Ann Pettitt, defended the purpose of the protest as an attempt ‘to gatecrash a bunch of nobodies into a private party at which the future of the world was being decided’. Doing so
made Greenham women ‘one of the globally recognized symbols of the eighties’.
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Nevertheless, the reality was that they had never been
admitted to the party. The summits that ensured cruise’s removal and elimination succeeded as a result of the very power politics the women abhorred. They were not even mentioned when Reagan
and Gorbachev published their memoirs, and had they managed to gatecrash The Coach and Horses they would doubtless have found that the US and Soviet military men toasting peace and prosperity
displayed much more empathy for each other than towards the peace protesters. When the US air force vacated Greenham in September 1992, some of the women packed up and went
home – a remote place after so long away from it. Others found excuses for staying on, much to the irritation of local residents who were desperate to reclaim their common.
Still singing ‘You Can’t Kill the Spirit’, the women’s protest outlived the cause. The last of them finally packed away their benders for good on 5 September 2000, nineteen
years after their protest began and eleven years after the cruise missiles left the base.
Thatcher also had to readjust to the collapsing moral certainties of her changed world. As she admitted after leaving Downing Street: ‘I had always disliked the original INF “zero
option”, because I felt that these weapons made up for Western Europe’s unpreparedness to face a sudden, massive attack by the Warsaw Pact; I had gone along with it in the hope that the
Soviets would never accept.’
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Her defence of nuclear weapons had been predicated on her belief that they prevented a conventional war. But
she – along with received opinion – assumed the Warsaw Pact would remain armed and belligerent, with massed tank divisions awaiting the command to push west through the Fulda Gap and on
to the Rhine. What was not comprehended was that the Kremlin had lost the will to fight, lost even the will to uphold the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’ and defend Marxism–Leninism wherever
it was wilting. Had the West but recognized the fact, the doctrine had actually died in 1981 when the Kremlin preferred to let the Polish authorities crush the Solidarity movement rather than do
the dirty work itself. That this reluctance to get involved was the reality was publicly admitted only when Gorbachev stood before the UN General Assembly on 7 December 1988 and announced that the
Soviet Union would unilaterally cut half a million soldiers from its commitment to the Warsaw Pact. It was an unmistakable signal that Moscow would not prop up floundering communist regimes. The
division of Europe would not be sustained through force. Communism really was about to throw in the towel.
Paying the Piper
In 1981, the National Theatre on London’s South Bank rejected Pearl Assurance’s £750,000 sponsorship offer because, it announced, ‘It seems to us wrong
to be into a position where we had to have private sponsorship to do the job we are paid to do by public money.’
1
The notion that major cultural
entities would have to start engaging in fundraising on top of – or even instead of – relying on state subsidies was seemingly not to be countenanced. Between the 1940s (when the
taxpayer-funded Arts Council of Great Britain was formed) and the 1970s, the state had become so pre-eminently the cultural patron that private sector funding had largely withered away. In 1976,
the total amount raised from the latter was a derisory £750,000.
2
Without needing to be legally nationalized, a large sector of British culture
had become as dependent on state handouts as British Steel or the National Coal Board.
When the Conservatives returned to power in 1979, the arts community had little inkling of just how fundamentally their expectations of entitlement to state support were about to be challenged.
The National Theatre’s director, Sir Peter Hall, fed up with his staff going on strike for the fifth time in four years, in disputes that had cost up to £500,000 a time in lost revenue,
had even broken the habit of a lifetime by voting Conservative in the general election.
3
Given that Thatcher’s first arts minister, the
exuberant, opera-loving Norman St John Stevas, had promised that there would be ‘no candle-end economics in the arts’, Hall and his colleagues could be forgiven for having subsequently
felt duped. Compared to the amount of taxpayers’ money directed down the coal mines (£300 million of additional subsidy in 1981 alone, on top of £2.5 billion over the preceding
seven years), the total government subsidy to the arts in 1981 (£180 million, of which £80 million was distributed through the Arts Council) was but a small drag on government finances,
especially since the arts had an estimated turnover of £900 million and employed over two hundred thousand people.
4
But the sector was no less
immune to public spending cuts for that. Among the bodies that consequently proved unable to survive the loss of grants was the D’Oyly
Carte Opera Company, which,
having performed Gilbert and Sullivan for over one hundred years, folded in 1982 (though it was briefly resurrected at the end of the decade).