THE STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE 193progress. Johnson advised Jack Matlock, who oversaw Soviet affairs in
the National Security Council, that it was far from clear that the Presi-
dent’s objectives could be realized.^12 He emphasized that Abrahamson
was exaggerating the facts about his achievements.^13 Johnson’s worry
was that the programme’s organizers were misleading the politicians;
he stressed that no segment of it would be ready for deployment for
another ten years.^14 Subsequent enquiries confirmed that Abrahamson
had arranged for ‘tests’ that were designed to fool Soviet analysts into
believing that the programme was close to completion.^15
Nevertheless the administration’s sceptics did not want to make
too much of their unease. It mattered little if Abrahamson unduly
talked up the project so long as he and his research projects continued
to worry the Soviet leaders. Everyone from Shultz downwards saw that
this strengthened the Americans’ bargaining hand in talks with the
USSR.
There remained a lot of discomfort among the NATO allies. On
3 April 1985 NATO’s Secretary General Lord Carrington talked to
Reagan on his visit to Bonn; he dwelt on the fear that Western Europe
would lie prone to a Soviet onslaught if America removed its nuclear
weapons from the continent.^16 Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mul-
roney made open criticisms of the Strategic Defense Initiative and
repeated them to Shevardnadze.^17 The State Department reacted by
putting pressure on particular allies. Shultz told Kohl that Reagan
would refuse to attend the scheduled commemoration of the Second
World War at the Bitburg cemetery in May 1985 unless he spoke up
for the project: ‘No SDI, no Bitburg’. This had the intended effect, and
Kohl issued this statement: ‘We agree it is a prudent and necessary
step.’^18 Hostility to Reagan’s project remained among other govern-
ments – and when Mitterrand visited Moscow in late 1988, he was to
reaffirm his sympathy with the Soviet standpoint on the Defense Ini-
tiative.^19 Thatcher had quietened her criticisms only after receiving
that assurance that British companies could receive contracts for work
on the American project. But the USSR’s Foreign Affairs Ministry
reckoned that the British were far from content with the kind of con-
tracts they were obtaining.^20
Few Western leaders thought the research teams would produce
the results that the President was hoping for. Nearly everyone in
Soviet public life shared this scepticism. Yevgeni Velikhov and fellow
scientists Roald Sagdeev and Andrei Kokoshin wrote a book titled
Weaponry in Space in which they pointed to the enormity of theoretical