CONFIDENTIAL
B
NA
Even
be unacceptable to us. There is also an opposite danger. if the Soviet Union raised no objection to the principle of the Prime Minister transiting Moscow, the Soviet leadership might attempt to snub her by sending only a low level representative to the airport.
6.
As regards the first of these risks, by September the atmosphere for a meeting between the Prime Minister and a Soviet leader might be somewhat more propitious than it is now. We expect that the NATO Summit will reaffirm the value of keeping open East/West channels of communication, and other meetings between Western and Soviet leaders may well have been announced or be in propsect. It will already be nine months after the declaration of martial law in Poland. These factors, together with the fact that a stopover is a very different matter from a full-scale Prime Ministerial visit, should offer a defence against any suggestion that a meeting between the Prime Minister and a Soviet leader is inconsistent with Mr Hurd's Statement in the House on 18 June 1981 (in connection with Afghanistan) that: 'High level and Ministerial contacts with the Soviet Union were to be avoided for the time being.'
In any case, Mr Hurd added that: 'There are now occasional high level and Ministerial contacts where these are deemed advantageous.' A stopover would convey a signal of our willingness to talk to the Russians and give an opportunity for some useful (though inevitably abbreviated) exchanges on important issues without having the same connotations as a full scale visit.
7. As for the risk of an attempted Soviet snub, this need not worry us unduly. There is no need for the Prime Minister to ask for a meeting with a specific Soviet leader. She did not do so in 1979. On that occasion, the Russians originally said that the welcoming party at the airport would be led by Deputy Prime Minister Dymshits and only at the last minute did they tell us that Mr Kosygin would go to the airport. If we followed the same procedure on this occasion, it would be for the Russians to decide on the line to take. If they did send to the airport only Dymshits or some equivalent figure, there would be no need for us to take this as a snub; in response to press or other queries, we could could explain that the stopover had been a technical one only. But (subject to Sir C Keeble's views) it is quite possible that the Russians would not wish to lose an opportunity for an exchange with the Prime Minister, and that either the Soviet Prime Minister, Mr Tikhonov, or the Foreign Minister, Mr Gromyko would go to the airport.
8. FED think it would be worth eliciting views from Sir H Cortazzi and Sir P Cradock on likely Japanese and Chinese reactions to a stopover in Moscow.
CONFIDENTIAL
Nimbio
(droomfield
NHRA Broomfield
East European & Soviet Department 3 March 1982
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