THE LOST SUMMER 207race and we’ll be the losers since we’re at the limit of our possibilities.’^55
He aimed to discover how much bluff there was in their Defense
Initiative research, and he would warn that the USSR could develop an
effective response. He would call for a halving of the number of stra-
tegic weapons – this would be a way of embarrassing the Americans,
who favoured only a thirty per cent reduction.^56 On intermediate-
range missiles, he wanted all of them to be removed from Europe since
the Pershing-2s were like a pistol pointed at the USSR’s head. He
would postpone negotiations about French and British nuclear forces
as well as about the Soviet missiles on Asian territory.^57 He asked
for fresh drafts on regional conflicts, chemical weapons and human
rights.^58 On human rights he intended to focus on American abuses.
He wanted to present the USSR in a good light. He intended to relax
the Soviet regulations on exit visas and to allow emigrants from the
USSR to return freely on trips.^59 He told the planning group to go
off and devise material suitable for a General Secretary, not just for a
professional arms negotiator.^60
He ordered the Soviet media to avoid raising hopes too high.^61
Canada’s ex-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had advised him to re-
member about the constraints upon Reagan’s freedom. ‘Certain forces’
had put him in the White House, and he could not afford to neglect
them.^62 The American Sovietologist and Polish defector Professor
Seweryn Bialer told Yakovlev that Gorbachëv would be wasting his
time if he tried to cajole Reagan into abandoning the Strategic Defense
Initiative.^63 (Gorbachëv, of course, was well aware of this.) Canadian
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney assured Shevardnadze that Reagan
had a serious commitment to peace and could be trusted. Disconcert-
ingly he also remarked that he sometimes felt like a psychoanalyst
when dealing with the Americans! Mulroney warned that Soviet
human rights abuses remained a serious impediment to rapproche-
ment between the superpowers. Reagan, according to Mulroney,
sincerely believed that American military power had been fading
before 1981. Shevardnadze promised that Gorbachëv would travel to
Reykjavik in a spirit of flexibility and would arrive with a number of
‘compromise variants’.^64
The first item on the Politburo’s agenda on 6 October 1986 was the
news that one of the USSR’s fleet of atomic submarines had dis-
appeared in the Sargasso Sea. There was anxiety lest the Americans
might reach the vessel and acquire technological secrets. Gromyko
wanted to announce that no environmental damage had occurred.