372 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
hardly unpredicted – was that ‘our strategic success is incomplete,
inconclusive and reversible’. They accepted that the Soviet leaders were
arranging to reduce expenditure on their armed forces; they also reck-
oned that Gorbachëv would remain in power for another half-decade.
They warned against idealizing him, pointing out that the USSR still
aimed to modernize its strategic weapons arsenal.^52 As the redrafting
continued through April 1989, they asked themselves whether Amer-
ica’s priority should now be to reduce risk or to save money. Ermath’s
team was divided in its suggestions.^53 Some put their trust in a parallel
effort to modernize the American nuclear forces; others judged it safe
to cut back the military budget. There was no consensus about whether
the national interest lay in making things easier for Gorbachëv.^54 By
handing over the duties of analysis to the specialists, Bush had simply
shifted controversy down from the White House to the CIA; and it was
clear that he would never receive a set of unequivocal recommenda-
tions.
Debate broke surface around this time when Bush’s Defense Sec-
retary Dick Cheney talked publicly about the danger of tying American
strategic decisions to ‘Mr Gorbachëv’s tenure’.^55 The President’s spokes-
man, Marlin Fitzwater, dismissed this as ‘personal observations’ that
did not reflect opinion in the White House.^56 Bush, like the rest of his
administration, had private doubts about the durability of perestroika.
But he liked people to keep quiet about such thinking. Cheney’s can-
dour forced him to speak out in Gorbachëv’s favour and dissociate
himself from what his Defense Secretary had said.^57
Concerns about how to handle the USSR were not an American
monopoly. On 25 April 1989 Ambassador Braithwaite went to Viktor
Karpov in the Foreign Affairs Ministry and explained that the British
disbelieved the official claim that the USSR had only 50,000 tons of
poison gas.^58 The United Kingdom also raised an alarm about infor-
mation about an illegal biological weapons programme that came
through the defection of Vladimir Pasechnik, who had worked at one
of the secret facilities.^59 This discomfited Gorbachëv at a time when his
priority was to bring Bush back into talks. The Politburo considered a
memo that its experts had prepared about the germ warfare facility in
Sverdlovsk. Supposedly the Soviet scientists restricted their research to
defensive purposes.^60 This was never going to be the end of the matter
because the British learned everything they needed to know from
Pasechnik. The Big Five met on 27 July 1989 to draft a policy for the
Politburo using data supplied by the Ministry of Medicinal Industry.