PRESENTING THE SOVIET PACKAGE 163Europe’; the idea was to find ways to boost mutual confidence and pre-
vent dangerous operational misunderstanding. In Vienna the focus was
on the attempt to find ways to reduce the size of the conventional forces
of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. There were drawn-out discussions
of quantities and categories of weaponry. This involved negotiations of
fiendish complexity, and both the USSR and America assigned some
of their finest diplomats to such talks.
On 30 December 1985 Gorbachëv invited five of them to his office
at Old Square. Politburo members Shevardnadze and Zaikov were
present as Gorbachëv explained his thoughts about arms reduction.
He could achieve this, he reckoned, only by winning over American
public opinion and bringing it to bear on the President. Gorbachëv
looked forward to huge rewards for the USSR. According to his confi-
dential figures, forty per cent of Soviet industry was devoted to
military purposes. The Politburo had to cut this back so that the shops
could begin to fill with the goods that consumers needed.^14 Viktor
Karpov, leader of the Soviet talks delegation in Geneva, argued the
need for boldness. He recommended acceptance of Reagan’s ‘zero
option’ as a starting point; he reasoned that even if Reagan rejected
such a proposal, the USSR would gain credibility at America’s expense
in Western Europe. Gorbachëv liked the idea.^15 He was open to sign-
ing an arms reduction treaty even without insisting on the United
Kingdom and France being co-signatories. A deal between the super-
powers was of supreme importance. Oleg Grinevski, head of the Soviet
delegation at the European security talks in Stockholm, persuaded
him to tie this into a package to cut the number of strategic nuclear
weapons by half; he forecast that this would help to bring the Swedish
talks to completion.^16
On 2 January 1986 Gorbachëv gained assent for these ideas at the
Politburo.^17 Grinevski was witness to the atmosphere:
The feeling of the meeting with Gorbachëv is very strong. With
Brezhnev, Chernenko and even Andropov, I felt as if I was dealing
with a being from another planet. They did not understand. And
this is, at last, a normal person. He wins one’s favour with his sin-
cerity. Affable, well-wishing, and one can feel energy and firmness
behind all this.^18Gorbachëv had not gone soft on the Americans but rather accused
them of impudence. He fully expected Reagan to turn him down but
aimed to draw him towards agreement by changing world public