18. THE STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE
Moscow and Washington were silent in public about the biggest
concession that Gorbachëv made that summer. The Strategic Defense
Initiative remained an obstacle to his quest for an improved relation-
ship with America, and he came to accept that Reagan would never
abandon the project. Painful as it was for him, he had to offer a com-
promise if he wanted to break the deadlock. On 29 May 1986 he
issued a momentous order to the Soviet talks delegation in Geneva.
Until then he had demanded the total abandonment of the Defense
Initiative. Now he was willing to let the Americans conduct the
laboratory research so long as they renounced external testing and
deployment. Shultz and Nitze recognized the importance of this shift
in the USSR’s standpoint: America was in receipt of an unprecedented
opportunity.^1
The American administration agreed that the Kremlin understood
the difficulties which would ensue if it tried to finance another great
stage of the arms race. The CIA claimed that the USSR still had the
economic capacity to devote extra resources to military moderniza-
tion, but agreed that budgetary exigencies had compelled the Politburo
to engage in serious talks.^2 Whatever anyone thought about Reagan’s
Initiative, it did seem to be having a desirable effect on the Politburo.
This was a customary analysis among American officials. The State
Department’s Directorate of Intelligence and Research had always
maintained the USSR could not balance its finances unless it could
induce the Americans to drop their programme.^3 Frank Carlucci,
Poindexter’s successor as National Security Adviser at the end of 1986,
thought ‘it became an obsession with Gorbachëv’.^4 Shultz, no enthusi-
ast for Abrahamson’s boasts about the research, later recalled: ‘Well, it
worked out beautifully from the standpoint of bargaining.’ All Ameri-
can politicians and negotiators had the sense that the Initiative was