CONFIDENTIAL
She mentioned a proposal for a meeting between Mr Daunt and French officials the following week. The French agreed that this would be useful. Monsieur Raimond said that although there was a NATO umbrella for the conventional arms initiative it was very necessary to find a comprehensive European position. Meetings between officials would be useful. The Secretary of State said that it was extremely important to take an over-view, and not be beguiled into looking only at the detail.
On Chemical Weapons, the Secretary of State said that the existing Western proposal on Article 10 of the draft Treaty was increasingly being seen as unnegotiable. Even we could not accept it, still less the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was beginning to exploit this situation. We were thinking of trying to make progress while we were in the chair in Geneva with a compromise proposal. We had discussed this with the Americans, and received some support from the State Department, though the Pentagon remained hostile. We had now decided to put the proposal to both the French and Germans as well as again to the Americans to see if we could agree on it. We were thinking of tabling it at Geneva, but had not reached final conclusions. This was a good instance where European cohesion could help to move matters forward, and also one where the blind pursuit of unity in the Alliance would force the Alliance into silence. The speaking note was handed over. Monsieur Raimond said that he would study it.
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On Salt II, Monsieur Raimond said that the French agreed on the importance of the potential abandonment of Salt II by the United States. After hearing Nitze's explanation he had found it very difficult to tell the Americans that they had to respect Salt II come what may in order to maintain their moral credibility. The French had therefore confined themselves to warning that United States allegations about Soviet violations included violations of the ABM Treaty as well as Salt II: they should therefore be very careful not to bring the ABM Treaty into the equation. The French were now working on a reply to the President's message about Salt II. Their position was not different from ours on substance, but they were deploying rather a different argument. The Secretary of State said there was both an intellectual and a tactical choice to make. It was possible to deploy an argument on the lines used by Mr Shultz that the United States needed to threaten to break out of Salt II in order to pressurise the Russians to make a sensible response in other fields. President Reagan had not specified in his statement what response the Soviet Union had to make, nor what he would do in the event of such a response. He had used the
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CONFIDENTIAL