Sword and Shield: The Anglo-American Nuclear Relationship in the Reagan-Thatcher Era (1981-1989)

A university essay originally written March 8th, 2024

The American President and British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, at 10 Downing Street in 1982.

INTRODUCTION

During the final decade of the Cold War, the Anglo-American special relationship appeared stronger than ever, but was actually strained by far-reaching challenges over nuclear strategy. President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, considered “political and philosophical soulmates” due to their ideological affinity on most matters, had very opposite dispositions which ultimately interacted together advantageously to impact their respective nuclear strategies during a pivotal moment in history. A study of Anglo-American nuclear relations in the 1980s thus contributes to many essential historiographic controversies in the field, including the functional-evangelical and dependence-interdependence debates. These Anglo-American nuclear disputes, essentially stemming from differences in the personalities and perceptions of the two leaders, were ultimately resolved by reaffirming mutual political interests and proactive diplomacy between both countries.  

In 1979, the Cold War had resumed after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and, along with the Iranian Revolution, unravelled President Jimmy Carter’s credibility. Reagan filled the vacuum with a dramatically belligerent anti-Soviet rhetoric in the 1980 US presidential election. As only a former movie star could, Reagan campaigned intuitively and emotionally. He criticised the logic of detente as “weak”, and passionately demanded the nuclear modernisation of the Western Alliance to confront the “evil” Soviet Empire. Only from this “position of strength”, he believed, could NATO afford to negotiate with the USSR. On this, he and Thatcher, as quintessential “Cold Warriors”, seemed entirely aligned. However, in a concurrent emotional appeal, Reagan declared his objective to eventually abolish all nuclear weapons, detesting “mutually assured destruction” logic as a “mutual suicide pact”. Thatcher, who had originally studied chemistry at Oxford, saw things differently. She was a firm proponent of deterrence theory: she adamantly believed nuclear weapons had prevented superpower conflict since 1945. Almost predictably, Reagan’s emotive and intuitive “shooting from the hip” approach to nuclear strategy strongly clashed with Thatcher’s scientific and objectivist views throughout their eight years in power together. 

Nonetheless, the Reagan and Thatcher governments’ mutual attachments to neoliberalism and anticommunism ultimately outweighed their nuclear disagreements and prevented an Anglo-American diplomatic breakdown. Both parties went to unprecedented lengths to maintain the other’s domestic and international standings due to a perception of mutual benefit. Compatible with Reagan’s belligerent rhetoric, for instance, was Thatcher’s consistent advocacy for the revitalisation of the “independent” British submarine-launched nuclear deterrent, Polaris. Carter had signed an agreement with Thatcher in 1979 to replace Polaris with the more advanced American missile, the Trident C4. After Reagan’s election, however, the new president offered Thatcher a better deal for the more advanced Trident D5. The subsequent Trident Talks, furthermore, exerted geopolitical importance throughout the 1980s, as the actual installation of the missiles would not occur until 1994.

During this time, however, Anglo-American conceptual disagreements on nuclear strategy appeared to put Trident at substantial risk. Considering the 1962 Skybolt affair, Thatcher and her cabinet were wary of sudden shifts in US nuclear policy. The most problematic turn of US nuclear strategy as perceived by the British was Reagan’s announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or “Star Wars”, in 1983. SDI was a hypothetical, hyper-advanced technological research programme aimed at developing space-based missile-destroying lasers capable of intercepting incoming offensive nuclear warheads. Many in both the US and UK perceived the programme as unworkable, infeasible, and illegal according to the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972. Moreover, an emphasis on missile defence, coupled with Reagan’s proclaimed goal to eliminate all nuclear weapons, obscured the relevance of Trident to US interests through undermining the British-preferred overall Western offensive deterrence strategy. SDI played a key role not only in Reagan-Thatcher relations but also in wider geopolitics at the end of the Cold War. A third component of Anglo-American relations in the 1980s was thus the trilateral dialogue between Reagan, Thatcher, and Mikhail Gorbachev at and between the Geneva (1985), Reykjavik (1986), and Washington (1987) summits. Reagan and Thatcher’s divergent leadership styles threatened to have truly cataclysmic consequences here, but the dynamic was ultimately balanced by both leaders’ prioritisation of a strong, functional, and remarkably interdependent Anglo-American relationship. 

MISC 7 AND THE TRIDENT TALKS (1981-2)

In 1981, Thatcher had come under criticism for her economic mismanagement, particularly on defence spending. Reagan’s D5 offer was intended to ease Thatcher’s political difficulties by replacing the inferior and expensive Polaris program while bolstering NATO's nuclear strength. John Louis, US Ambassador to the UK, had warned in July that if Thatcher’s popularity decreased any further, the US might “have difficulty counting fully on our usually staunchest ally”, marking a high price for disagreement over Trident. 

Thatcher had created the “Miscellaneous 7” (MISC 7) group in 1979 to investigate the purchase of the Trident C4s from Carter, and in November 1981, these officials discussed the Trident D5 offer. The MISC 7 hoped to persuade the Reagan administration to reduce Trident’s price in return for “offsets.” This was related to a mild confrontation over cutbacks in UK conventional military spending, intended to relieve the British economy, announced in the British Defence Review. The White House objected to nuclear modernisation as “the only key strategic area for the UK’s defence budget”, emphasising the continued importance of British conventional forces abroad. Subsequent meetings between Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and UK Defence Secretary John Nott soon laid the groundwork for conventional force commitments that might “offset” price reductions on Trident.

At the Trident talks in February 1982, US officials were “immediately forthcoming” in accepting initial UK requests for “offsets” and waived the minimum overheads charge for Trident, estimated at around $106 million. However, Robert Wade-Gery, the lead British negotiator, questioned the Research and Development (R&D) surcharge, which the Americans insisted remained proportional to the scale of the UK’s participation in the Trident programme.

By the second round of talks, US negotiators tried to resolve the R&D issue through additional conventional British defence commitments, including the retention of the HMS Invincible and a delay in the British military departure from Belize. Although the British had already planned to sell the Invincible to Australia, Wade-Gery offered to retain the amphibious assault ships HMS Fearless and Intrepid instead, which the US found acceptable. While the Belize issue was left nebulous, retaining the Fearless and Intrepid proved enough to satisfy congressional opinion. Ultimately, the Trident Agreement was economically favourable to Thatcher, with much better terms than the original Trident C4 agreement.

This general “convergence of interests” implicit in the Trident Agreement was assured on the British side by a desire to maintain their independent nuclear deterrent; on the American side, as US official Richard Perle later observed, it was “one more arrow in the quiver” in securing British alignment behind US global strategy. However, US nuclear strategy began to shift in 1983, and Trident, as much as the Anglo-American relationship itself, soon appeared under threat.

THE STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE (1983)

Signs of a divergence in Anglo-American nuclear strategy began to appear in March 1983. Thatcher objected to the harshness of Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech on the 8th, which demonised the Soviet Union as an implacable, untrustworthy, and morally corrupt enemy. Yet still more controversial in Britain was Reagan’s “Star Wars” speech, delivered just two weeks later, announcing SDI. The minimal notice which the White House gave 10 Downing Street before announcing this major policy development was not nearly enough to offset what became the most difficult US policy issue Britain faced since 1945. Because SDI posited the introduction of defensive components into nuclear strategy, it obscured the purely offensive nature of traditional “massive retaliation” deterrence. For this reason and more, Thatcher was immediately sceptical of the technological feasibility and strategic desirability of SDI, and soon came to view it as an existential threat to Western nuclear credibility.

Thatcher was also aware that she could not publicly object to SDI without putting Trident at risk nor undermining the solidarity of the Western camp. For these reasons, she pursued a policy of “limited support” for the SDI research, insisting that the “deployment” of such a system remain a matter of future negotiation. In June, after winning a conservative victory in Parliament, Thatcher also began to pursue a new, softer Soviet strategy apparently at odds with Reagan’s approach: her engagement with Communist Europe initiative involved cultivating a correspondence with rising star Mikhail Gorbachev and making publicised visits to Warsaw Pact countries like Hungary. However, in 1983, a concurrent increase in East-West tensions after the Soviet destruction of Korean passenger aircraft KAL 007, the US invasion of Grenada, and the NATO Able Archer exercise upped the ante of Reagan’s increasingly hostile anti-Soviet posture even further. SDI, furthermore, was quickly perceived in the Kremlin as an American attempt to achieve “first strike capability” or “assured survival”, and prevented effective disarmament negotiations during the remainder of Yuri Andropov’s tenure. Thatcher’s continued appeals to Reagan to reapproach the Soviet Union amounted to naught, and by the end of 1983, the United States and Great Britain appeared to be confronting the Soviet Union in strategically contradictory ways. 

In 1984, Thatcher, cautioned by her Defence Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe to not let “rhetoric… run ahead of reality”, attempted to reconcile Reagan’s space dreams within a rational NATO strategy in December at Camp David. On behalf of multiple concerned European leaders, Thatcher procured a four-point agreement from Reagan on Star Wars, creatively resolving many doctrinal controversies launched by Reagan’s initial foolhardy speech; “1. The US, and Western, aim is not to achieve superiority, but to maintain balance, taking account of Soviet developments, 2. SDI-related development would, in view of treaty obligations, have to be a matter for negotiation, 3. The overall aim is to enhance rather than undercut deterrence, 4. East-West negotiation should try to achieve security with reduced levels of offensive weapons on both sides.” The Camp David Four Points attempted to resolve the defensive-offensive debate initiated by SDI by framing the initiative's purpose as a means of enhancing deterrence, and avoided violating the ABM Treaty through emphasising SDI’s research purpose. However, many US officials still continued to pursue SDI as a means of winning the Cold War, despite Thatcher’s best efforts. 

SDI, Thatcher soon realised, was unlikely to fade away anytime soon, despite its scientific infeasibility and debatable strategic utility. Perle, among others, had lauded SDI as the “ultimate weapon against arms control”, and therefore in the Pentagon’s best interests. SDI aligned perfectly with Reagan’s narrative of confronting the Soviet Union from a “position of strength”, Rebecca S. Bjork argues, by rhetorically fusing the initiative within larger American attitudes towards technological innovation, manifest destiny, and moralist triumphalism. Moreover, SDI indirectly appealed to all three of the world’s largest military-industrial complexes in the United States, USSR, and Britain. British research firms had consistently pressured Thatcher to bid for greater UK participation in the project, at times undermining her better political and scientific judgement. On the whole, the UK position of limited support for SDI was rooted in fear of losing Trident, but this position seemed increasingly untenable as Reagan shifted US policy into yet another unexpected direction. 

THE END OF THE COLD WAR (1985-7)

In 1985, the man whom Thatcher had declared she could “do business with” finally came to power. By cultivating personal relationships with both Gorbachev and Reagan, Thatcher pursued the goal of reducing the threat of nuclear war more rationally and constructively than Reagan had through SDI. Ironically, it appears that Thatcher did her job too well. By fostering US-Soviet rapprochement, she inadvertently put Trident, and the Western deterrence strategy she favoured, at unprecedented risk. At the successful summits between Reagan and Gorbachev she engineered, the two leaders would find common ground through their shared desire to eliminate all nuclear weapons, but fell short over SDI. 

Shortly after coming to power, Gorbachev declared a goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons remarkably similar to Reagan’s own “Zero Option” introduced years before. To demonstrate the legitimacy of his intention, Gorbahcev imposed a unilateral moratorium on nuclear weapons testing in the USSR. He appealed to Thatcher for British support behind this initiative, which he believed would doom existing nuclear arsenals to “gradual obsolescence”. However, as this would by design make Britain’s own nuclear deterrent obsolete, Thatcher declined to do so. Nonetheless, she suggested to Reagan that he adopt a more conciliatory approach towards Gorbachev at the upcoming Geneva summit. Meanwhile, Gorbachev had sent Reagan a letter outlining his specific criticisms of SDI, to which Reagan replied; “I have made it repeatedly clear… (that) it is indeed my view that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” adding that he envisioned, through SDI, a “cooperative transition to more reliance on defenses… (which could be) jointly undertaken.” Thatcher, writing to Reagan, made further suggestions moderating American SDI rhetoric, favouring the argument that the United States has “never made use of (nuclear) superiority to attack the Soviet Union or to threaten it…on the contrary, we want to live in peace with you.” At the same time, Perle and Weinberger wanted to push forward with SDI at full speed, not waste time negotiating it with the Soviets. George Shultz, however, who enjoyed frequent and productive communications with Thatcher, emphasised to Reagan the unpopularity of SDI in Britain and Europe, and the real progress in East-West relations which now seemed finally possible with Gorbachev. 

At the Geneva Summit of 1985, however, SDI continually held up negotiations, and it would not be until the next, unexpected summit at Reykjavik in 1986 where any real progress would be made. The Reykjavik summit had its roots in June 1986, when Weinberger pleased Reagan and Shultz with a proposal to eliminate all ballistic missiles acceptable to the Pentagon. It was intentionally designed to be unacceptable to the USSR, however, as it prioritised the elimination of the Soviet ballistic missiles most dangerous to NATO. Weinberger and Reagan avoided mentioning SDI in the proposal, believing that “any negotiation that even mentioned SDI would kill the program.” The proposal, however, inspired Gorbachev to suggest an informal meeting in “Iceland or in London… (for a) strictly confidential, private and frank discussion” on disarmament. The leaders arrived in Reykjavik with their entourages on 11 October 1986.

The Reykjavik summit threatened to cause possibly the largest break in Anglo-American nuclear strategy in history. Historian Archie Brown suggests that both Reagan and Gorbachev had their sights set on international opinion at Reykjavik, with each attempting to make the larger gesture without granting any truly disastrous concessions: Gorbachev proposed to eliminate all nuclear weapons by 2000, to which Reagan replied “why wait until the end of the century?” The sincerity of these proclamations is difficult to gauge, but the effects on Anglo-American relations were distinct. In Thatcher’s opinion, Reykjavik’s “failure was the only good thing about it.” Gorbachev and Reagan could not broach their differences over SDI at Reykjavik, although both left with convictions that substantial progress had been made. Thatcher, however, was left shocked that “the whole system of nuclear deterrence which had kept the peace for forty years was close to being abandoned.” Gorbachev had exempted British and French nuclear deterrents from the disarmament negotiations, but most West European leaders viewed Reagan as having “narrowly avoided falling into a Russian trap” to rid Europe of the American nuclear umbrella. Thus, whereas before it had been the British who had encouraged rapprochement and the Americans confrontation, their positions nearly reversed overnight. 

Indeed, after Reykjavik, Thatcher now tried to restrain Reagan, arguing that behind his “veneer,” Gorbachev was the same kind of “Soviet Communist that we have known in the past”. But she also directly pressed British concerns regarding Trident, which now seemed at greater risk than ever. In advance of the Washington Summit planned for December 1987, she met with Reagan at Camp David. Perhaps intentionally, Thatcher had chosen to press Reagan after the Iran-Contra affair had become public knowledge earlier the same November. She stated, boldly, that the Reykjavik proposals, if accepted, would “undermine the security of Western Europe,” and “cause you to lose me and the British nation.” Reagan had to assure Thatcher in the most definitive terms possible of the e enduring US commitment to the Trident Agreement. Her attitudes, reciprocated by many of Reagan’s own officials, had lasting effects within the White House. Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, Weinberger’s successor after Iran-Contra, among others, records telling Reagan frequently “If you move to get rid of nuclear weapons, Margaret will be on the phone in five minutes,” to which Reagan invariably responded, “Oh, I don’t want that.”

In December, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty in Washington, D.C., which dramatically reduced the number of Intermediate-Range Nuclear missiles in Europe. It was an incredibly productive but not dangerously over-ambitious step toward a lasting peace. While the Soviet Union slowly -- and then rapidly -- disintegrated in the following years, the Anglo-American relationship remained a beacon of stability in a geopolitical situation that could easily have been tremendously chaotic. The benefits of Anglo-American solidarity in the nuclear field, as demonstrated by the actions and reactions of both leaders throughout the 1980s, truly outweighed the individual interests of either government. 

CONCLUSION

Reagan and Thatcher’s personal differences led to nuclear policy disagreements in the 1980s, but it was also their personal as well as strategic relationships that allowed these crises to be overcome. Reagan’s rhetorically moralistic “cowboy” approach to the Cold War and nuclear strategy, while divergent from the “Iron Lady’s”, resulted in incalculable benefits; it would have likely been impossible for America to recover from the 1979 shocks without Reagan’s policies, nor attain the “position of strength” which made the end of the Cold War possible. Thatcher’s scientific objectivity, however, scythed through the emptier regions of US rhetoric to assure Britain’s best interests, but also performed the essential service of moderating some of Reagan’s more extreme rhetorical adventures. On SDI, she ultimately supported the initiative because she knew it could never work; her decision to shape a UK policy suited best to SDI “fading away” therefore assured the fulfilment of Trident. In the trilateral dialogue with Reagan and Gorbachev, Thatcher stood firm for British nuclear interests, and her own intuitions about deterrence, without impairing effective American-Soviet rapprochement. 

Because of the personal influence Thatcher held over Reagan, this view of Anglo-American nuclear disputes in the 1980s contributes to an “interdependent” view of the relationship. While Thatcher was limited in her manoeuvrability by a British dependence on American technology, she was capable of furthering British interests by identifying weak areas within US policy wherein British support was especially integral. Thatcher’s more proactive role in assuring her country’s interests also contributes to the functionalist interpretation of Anglo-American relations, as she navigated an essentially unequal Anglo-American relationship strategically. However, in many cases, her objections reflected criticisms Reagan’s own cabinet members harboured, and served to consistently point Anglo-American strategy in the most rational direction. The perseverance of Anglo-American nuclear relations throughout the 1980s ultimately speaks to both nations’ shared commitment to international stability, despite their slightly different understandings of how to get there.