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Selections from MT's files as Prime Minister, 1986-88

The latest release of MT's Prime Ministerial files took place at the UK National Archives in Kew on 30 December 2015.

The material was billed in advance as covering the years 1986-88, a big step in transition from the old 30 year rule to the new 20 year one, as legislated in 2010. Given that end of year releases are usually very substantial, we seemed set for a bumper crop.

Not so: there are only 58 files in total, all but 14 of them from the 1986 vintage which was supposed to have been available in full by the end of last year. Even more surprising, some 1986 material is STILL missing, including crucial files on the Westland affair. We are promised more at unspecified points during the course of 2016.

What is the problem? The likeliest explanation is that the Cabinet Office, which has charge of Prime Ministerial archives, is simply struggling to declassify documents fast enough to meet the planned schedule. Maybe it is unfair to single them out, because some other departments are no longer even meeting the 30 year rule let alone moving speedily to 20. Prime Ministerial files are the most newsworthy, so the Cabinet Office is the institution in the line of fire.

To be getting on with, here are uploads of files sent to the press for preview by TNA (21 of the 58, available in digital form only). The most important historically covers the Reykjavik summit of October 1986.

1986 Oct 11-12: Reagan & Gorbachev at Reykjavik

President Reagan refuses to step back from Reykjavik & recommends Tom Clancy

The Reykjavik Summit of 11-12 October 1986 was one the most dramatic episodes of the Cold War, a moment when the superpowers suddenly seemed close to an arms deal so comprehensive it would have set aside the whole system of nuclear deterrence, with incalculable implications for the strategic and political world order.

The summit fell apart, in some bitterness, and the two sides argued publicly about the failure. Superpower summitry was usually an intricately choreographed affair with agreements and communiqués pre-negotiated. At Reykjavik not only was nothing decided in advance, a news blackout covered the discussion itself and afterwards there was sharp disagreement as to what had been agreed - and not agreed - by those who had been there. One might have predicted a dispute between the US and Soviet versions of events, of course, but this time there were competing versions on the US side. Even close allies of President Reagan felt that they had been blind-sided, none more so than Margaret Thatcher.

What happened (or nearly happened) at Reykjavik terrified MT. By reputation a radical prepared to take risks out of conviction, a role which she came to relish, her private character contained an almost equal and opposite quantity of caution. She calculated the odds, read herself deeply into every project and often took her time to decide. Although instinct and conviction played a large part in her decision-making, she did not make leaps of faith or act on impulse, particularly in matters as fundamental as war and peace, in fact the survival of the human race. From her point of view Reykjavik introduced uncertainty and instability into the fundamentals, and the manner of it was as disturbing as the content.

1986 Jan-Oct: held at a distance

There is already a huge literature on the summit. What is new in this file from the British point of view?

One telling and important thing is present all the way through the file rather than in a single document. It shows the Thatcher Government less than closely in touch with the development of US policy towards the Soviets over summer 1986, reliant to a surprising degree on briefings given to the French, German and British Ambassadors in Moscow by their US counterpart. Number 10's relations with the White House during the short tenure of Admiral Poindexter as National Security Adviser (Dec 1985-Nov 1986), were not as close as they had previously been, or were to be subsequently. It is no accident that the file reveals an important role for the US Ambassador to London, Charlie Price, to whom one document is copied with the ususual request that he not forward it to his formal employer, the State Department, for fear that it would leak.

Almost as far from the centre of things appears to have been the Pentagon: when some of the ideas discussed at Reykjavik first surfaced in a Gorbachev letter published in January 1986, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) was quoted by the British Ambassador as thinking them propaganda but suspecting that the White House would buy them, "doubting whether the President’s resolve to accept no new restraints on SDI will hold". "One would have expected a much more sceptical response in Reagan’s first term: a sea-change has taken place", the Ambassador commented. When Britain's Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe met Caspar Weinberger and his Assistant Secretary Richard Perle in September if anything the Pentagon's alienation was even more complete. The Ambassador reported the conversation to London as a "disturbing insight into right-wing attitudes on arms control" - as if Reagan was not on the right, nor the British Government. Weinberger had once been a powerful British ally in Washington, but his influence on superpower diplomacy was now so slight that he did not even attend the Reykjavik Summit.

Attention was focussed on a summit in the US late in the year, Reykjavik appearing only late in the day as a pre-summit 'meeting' expected to prepare the way for agreements rather than conclude them. There are drafts of MT's long letter of advice to the President, premised on the idea nothing final was about to be decided.

1986 Oct 13: the Reagan-Thatcher call

During the summit itself No.10 really heard nothing beyond media reports: fragments of information in the file show how blind we were flying. It clearly came as a deep and nasty shock when we realised quite how significant an event Reykjavik really was, or might have been. On Charles Powell's advice, the earliest possible call was set up between MT and the President, though even at this point the wording of his note suggests the penny had not quite dropped.

Powell listened in on the call and made two notes of it, one for a fairly wide circulation, the other for a far narrower group. The file contains both and we publish them. We also have on this site the US record from the Reagan Library, allowing them to be compared readily for the first time. Invariably there are transatlantic differences of nuance between documents of this kind, sometimes of content, so that examining them side by side is always worth the effort. But in this case it reveals something much more stark. On the key point the White House record is utterly at odds with the British. Both cannot be right and it is hard to believe the difference was accidental, as will be seen.

Oddly enough, it was not supposed to be a particularly sensitive call, in the sense of containing deeply classified information, because US records show it was planned to take place on an open line. We have the White House talking points for the President, which have a hurried look to them. Discussion of his proposals at Reykjavik for the elimination nuclear weapons is relegated to the status of a defensive issue to be discussed only "if raised".

Some hope. It got raised. This was the issue at the heart of the summit, and though the summit had collapsed without a deal, potentially it had a big significance going forward. How far had the President gone?

Here is the British text on the key point:

The President said that, in recognition of Soviet concerns, he had put forward a radical proposal under which the United States would guarantee not to deploy a strategic defence system for ten years in return for an undertaking to eliminate all US and Soviet nuclear weapons over that same period. He had also offered a binding commitment to share a defence system with the Soviet Union, but Gorbachev seemed to doubt whether the US would in the event live up to this. He had continued to demand unacceptable restrictions on SDI research and testing … and had allowed this demand to stand in the way of an agreement which would effectively have abolished nuclear weapons.

Here is the US version. The President explained that the two sides had reached an agreement

to abolish all ballistic missiles over a ten year period. At the end of the first five- year period there would have been a fifty per cent reduction in every kind of nuclear weapon, not just ballistic missiles. During the second five year period, we would have eliminated the other fifty per cent of ballistic missiles.

Nothing here about a plan to eliminate all nuclear weapons, not even a hint of it. By contrast the US version more or less agreed with the British on Reagan saying Gorbachev demanded restrictions on SDI research that resulted in breakdown.

Charles Powell's more sensitive record, shown only to a handful of senior ministers and officials, makes the difference clearer still. A plan to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely within ten years while SDI research continued took no account, on the face of it, of the imbalance of conventional forces in Europe, which greatly favoured the Soviets. Supporters of nuclear deterrence such as MT never forgot that fact. Powell recorded the following (ellipses are in his text):

When the Prime Minister repeatedly stressed the importance of nuclear deterrence in the face of the imbalance of conventional forces in Europe, the President's responses were rather vague. "We've dealt with that for a long time and believe we can cope … The Russians don't war, they want victory by using the threat of nuclear war … I think we could have a strategy to meet that." He showed no sign of backing down from his concept of eliminating nuclear weapons within ten years, indeed showed considerable pride in it.

Powell's note rounds off the discussion:

The President strongly commended to the Prime Minister a new book by the author of 'Red October' called (I think) 'Red Storm Rising'. It gave an excellent picture of the Soviet Union's intentions and strategy. He had clearly been much impressed by the book.

Red Storm Rising is an 830 page thriller by Tom Clancy, published in the US at the end of August 1986 which portrays World War 3 being launched by the Soviets in Europe and being fought successfully by NATO without the use of nuclear and chemical weapons on either side; coincidentally the plot turns on the Soviet seizure of Iceland in a daring coup de main at the outbreak of the war. Clancy was a favourite author of the President, in fact one might almost say the President made his career because his first novel, The Hunt for Red October, became after a bestseller in 1984 after Reagan publicly mentioned it, calling the book "uputdownable" and "a perfect yarn".

It is hard to believe though that Red Storm Rising is much of a guide to Soviet strategy, or NATO's. It owes more to wargaming, and actually inspired a successful computer game. Almost certainly MT had never heard of Clancy and the reference would have meant nothing to her till explained after the call. The information will not have been a comfort. It shows how far she and the President were apart on this topic that he can have thought it a good idea to recommend it.

There is something else that is odd about his reference to the book. Clancy portrays a Gorbachev-type leader utterly misread by the West as a dynamic reformer who is really a classic product of Communist Party's cynical collective leadership. He and his foreign minister tout apparently generous peace proposals as a way of dividing the West and preparing the ground for war. If Red Storm Rising has anything to teach about Soviet intentions, it is surely not to trust them.

Perhaps then it is not surprising that the US record emerged as it did. Despite huge pressures of time, the NSC like No.10 took the trouble to make two versions, a sanitised text either replacing the original or achieving wider circulation. Maybe somewhere in the US files there is a word for word transcript yet to be declassified. We can say for sure that the document attracted special handling because there is a coversheet filed with it showing that it was 'redone' a week after the call and only signed into the record by the National Security Adviser "as modified". Poindexter's deputy Alton Keel minuted him:

JMP - plse read to rate my "edits" Al

At the very time this was being done, Poindexter was preparing a note for the President explaining "Why We Cannot Commit to Eliminating Nuclear Weapons Within 10 Years", suggesting he commit himself to exactly the formula on ballistic missiles rehearsed in the US text of the Thatcher call. From the British point of view, of course, this was all to the good - or at least better than the alternative. At the end of October the US Administration formally adopted the goal and committed itself to a much more orthodox position on nuclear deterrence, acknowledging its long-term place in NATO strategy and stressing its relationship to the conventional balance. Even as he did this Poindexter seems to have given us no hint of his thinking, one of the last items in the file being a telegram from the British Ambassador on 28 October reporting an "unsatisfactory conversation" with him in which he ducked questions about linking the conventional balance to nuclear disarmament.

Reykjavik documents from US and British sources

Selected documents from the British file

Whole file on Reykjavik

You can also read in full the files from which the selected documents are taken. These are already uploaded, exactly as they appear in the reading room at Kew. They are big files and depending on your connection will take a while to download:

PREM19/1759 Foreign Policy (East-West relations) Part 6 [1985 Dec 1 - 1986 Oct 30] Selected documents from this file

1986-88: Other files

All of the links to files below will work, but only some of the selected documents (they are in process of upload)

PREM19/1765 Germany (Prime Minister's meetings with Helmut Kohl) Part 5 Selected documents from this file
PREM19/1783 Home Affairs (Civil Disorder: the Handsworth and Tottenham Riots) Part 3 Selected documents from this file
PREM19/1826 Legal Procedure (Possible reform of law on rape) Selected documents from this file
PREM19/1850 Memorials (WPC Yvonne Fletcher Memorial) Selected documents from this file
PREM19/1855 National Health (Warnock Committee on Human Fertilisation & Embryology) Selected documents from this file
PREM19/1856 National Health (Private Medical Care) Selected documents from this file
PREM19/1858 National Health (Mental Health Bill. Draft White Paper) Selected documents from this file
PREM19/1860 National Health (Contraception for Under 16s) Selected documents from this file
PREM19/1863 National Health (AIDS) Part 1 Selected documents from this file
PREM19/1865 Nationalised Industries (Coal mines) Part 19 Selected documents from this file
PREM19/1886 Police (Future Strategy) Part 1 Selected documents from this file
PREM19/1890 Prime Minister (Meeting with Geoffrey Dickens MP about child welfare & protection) Selected documents from this file
PREM19/1906 Prime Minister (Gift of moondust to people of UK from US President) Selected documents from this file
PREM19/1907 Prime Minister's gifts (Gifts received by the PM since taking office) Selected documents from this file
PREM19/1922 Regional Policy (Review of regional policy including enterprise zones, North/South issue) Part 7 Selected documents from this file
PREM19/1991 Transport (Channel Tunnel; Euroroute) Part 4 Selected documents from this file
PREM19/1996 United Nations (Financial crisis) Selected documents from this file
PREM19/2078 Drugs (Drug misuse) Part 3 Selected documents from this file
PREM19/2115 Education (Seminar at No.10) Selected documents from this file
PREM19/2131 Education (Future of the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA)) Part 4 Selected documents from this file