Word: thatchers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...woman who is as punctual as she is punctilious, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher seemed to lose all track of time. The occasion was a five- day official visit last week to the Soviet Union that she breathlessly declared her most "fascinating and invigorating" ever. At a performance of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake in Moscow's Bolshoi Theater, Thatcher and Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev delayed the second act for 20 minutes while they conferred over smoked sturgeon about arms control. The next day Foreign Minister Sir Geoffrey Howe was forced to improvise at a British embassy luncheon when the Prime...
...grand diplomatic breakthroughs were achieved. But Thatcher, who is ! expected to call elections sometime this year, certainly bolstered her stature among voters at home -- and among Britain's allies on the Continent. Indeed, she had prepped for the trip by meeting with key West European leaders, and she was anxious to register their measured and skeptical reaction to Gorbachev's proposal for withdrawing all U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range nuclear forces from Europe...
...fiercely argumentative. Her defense of nuclear deterrence was so impassioned that Soviet officials seemed at a loss to describe the chasm that separated the two leaders. Said Georgi Arbatov, director of the Soviet Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies: "On nuclear issues, President Reagan is more forward-looking than Thatcher. At least Reagan understands that he, humanity and America can't live forever with nuclear weapons...
...told Gorbachev of her public support for the "zero option" proposal for complete withdrawal of INF weapons, she insisted that any agreement would have to be accompanied by a buildup of U.S. short-range nuclear missiles, a category in which the Soviets currently hold a 9-to-1 advantage. Thatcher pulled no punches. "A world without nuclear weapons may be a dream," she declared at a state dinner in the Kremlin's richly paneled Hall of Facets. "But you cannot base a sure defense on a dream. A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous...
Gorbachev, though seemingly invigorated by Thatcher's directness, nonetheless responded to her views bluntly. "It is beyond our understanding how one can heap praise on nuclear arms," he said. The Soviet leader dismissed nuclear deterrence as a "safety fuse attached to an explosive device capable of annihilating our civilization." Gorbachev said he saw "no serious obstacles" to an INF agreement with the U.S. Even so, he complained, the West seemed to be asking for a "whole new package of additional conditions and demands" that threatened to bog down U.S.-Soviet INF negotiations...