186 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
1986 Shultz went to the White House and persuaded Reagan to
modify his stance on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Gorbachëv, he
argued, was operating within heavy political constraints and needed
America to show a spirit of compromise. Shultz’s idea was to continue
the research programme while reserving the ultimate right of deploy-
ment. In this way the Americans could continue to do what was in
their interest while allaying the Soviet leadership’s fears about military
security. Shultz suggested a scheme to ‘give them the sleeves from
our own vest and make them think it’s our overcoat’. Don Regan
and John Poindexter liked what they heard. So too did the President
after receiving the assurance that the Defense Initiative would be
safeguarded.^41 They all agreed to proceed on this basis. Shultz asked
Reagan to receive Dr Robert Gale, who had treated some of the Cher-
nobyl disaster victims; he also recommended the sending of a personal
letter to Gorbachëv.^42
But the Americans had yet to come to a settled decision on Shultz’s
ideas. Gorbachëv and Shevardnadze in disappointment looked for
other ways of breaking the deadlock in world affairs. At the Politburo
on 29 May 1986 Gorbachëv accused Gaddafi of ‘revolutionary primi-
tivism’. The Libyan leader needed to be brought down to earth. The
USSR was not going to start the Third World War on his behalf.^43 But
what was to be done? Soviet leaders were coming to the conclusion
that policy had been unduly occupied with America and that the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs had almost ignored Europe. They worried
too that Asia had been overlooked – it was essential to improve rela-
tions with China. They wished to surmount what they regarded as the
dis aster for the USSR in Afghanistan.^44
A meeting of the Political Consultative Committee was arranged
for 10 June 1986 in Budapest with a view towards briefing the Warsaw
Pact allies on Moscow’s latest thinking. Gorbachëv was on ebullient
form as he rejected the old objective of achieving strategic parity with
America in every military category. The USSR, he declared, now
required only reasonable sufficiency. He said that Western politicians
told him that America was trying to bring the communist countries
to economic ruin by means of the arms race. Gorbachëv intended to
prevent the Americans from developing offensive space weaponry.
Accepting criticisms by the French and British, he aspired to a drastic
bilateral reduction in conventional forces in Europe. He urged the
need for sober analysis, recognizing that it was pointless to try to
divide NATO: ‘We cannot isolate the United States; we cannot split the