ONE FOOT ON THE ACCELERATOR 145Lynch and Treasury Secretary who had served Reagan as chief of staff
since February 1985.^43 Shultz refused to back down and enlisted Nitze’s
help in drafting ideas for Geneva. On 16 September 1985 he took
them to the President. At the centre of Shultz’s thinking was the need
for serious negotiations. Whereas Weinberger treated the Strategic
Defense Initiative as a way of making an arms deal unlikely, Shultz
wanted to use it as a bargaining tool. Weinberger declared at every
opportunity that the Americans wanted to move from research to
deployment – and he sometimes added that the scientific laboratories
were close to finishing their preparatory work. Shultz knew that the
research was years away from completion. Funds and political sanc-
tion from Congress would continue to be necessary, and he had
doubts about whether they would be available after Reagan left the
White House. He persuaded the President to conduct a subtle
manoeuvre. The idea was for Reagan to make an offer to Gorbachëv
that he would delay a decision to deploy the initiative in return for
drastic cuts in the stockpile of Soviet offensive nuclear weaponry.^44
Shultz did not want to abjure the entire aim of deployment but
rather to maximize concessions from the Kremlin. Such an approach,
he suggested, was the best guarantee for the initiative’s survival.^45 He
had a further cause to be cheerful. On 23 September 1985 Soviet
academic Georgi Arbatov asked Henry Kissinger how America and
the USSR should try to get out of their impasse. Kissinger offered a
personal opinion along the lines that Shultz had recently agreed with
Reagan. Arbatov surprised him by saying that precisely such a com-
promise on the Strategic Defense Initiative might be ‘possible’ for the
Politburo; he asked Kissinger to understand that Gorbachëv would be
going as far as he could if he were to concede in this way. Arbatov also
indicated that Gorbachëv might be able to come to an agreement with
Reagan on Afghanistan. Kissinger assumed that no Moscow academic
could talk in such a fashion without authorization. He phoned Shultz’s
executive assistant Charles Hill and passed on the exciting news.^46
Shultz was delighted. He felt that something was in the air in Moscow;
and when he met again that month with Shevardnadze in New York,
he guessed from his smiling composure that the Soviet leadership
might be about to make some surprising moves in Geneva.^47
The President, however, had one of his frequent changes of mind.
On 17 September he suggested at a press conference that he might
proceed to deployment even at the risk of breaching the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty. Shultz, Nitze and others hastened to counteract this