Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981–1988, Volume XI, START I

166. Memorandum of Conversation¹

Reykjavik, October 11–12, 1986

SUBJECT

• Ambassador Rowny’s Conversation with Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev at Reykjavik, October 11–12

During the 10-hour plus meeting of experts the night of October 11–12,² I had several conversations of one-half hour or more with Marshal Akhromeyev. On Sunday, October 12, in the anterooms during the Reagan-Gorbachev meetings, I again had several conversations with Akhromeyev.

Akhromeyev said he is among the “last of the Mohicans,” one of the few remaining Soviet officers who served in the “Great Patriotic War.” He started his career at draft age (17) as a naval infantryman and saw service both on a destroyer in the Baltic and on shore in Riga and Leningrad. He became interested in tanks, transferred to an armor division, and took part in the defense of Leningrad. There he was wounded and evacuated, “starving and half-frozen,” to a hospital in the south. After the war, he served with armor units in the southern USSR, the “desert,” and on the Chinese border. He rose through the ranks rapidly, “doing more staff duty” than he liked, since his “first love” was command.

Akhromeyev talked to me rather freely about SDI, saying the Soviets oppose it because the USSR does not want to enter into a technological race in space with the United States. He said he believes a mixture of offense and defense is best “in principle,” but that Soviet agreement to the ABM Treaty had changed the situation to an offense-dominant one. As a result, a favorable “correlation of forces” for the Soviet Union becomes dependent upon nuclear offensive arms uninhibited by strategic defenses.

“The real military cutting edge,” he said, “is in conventional forces: ground, sea and air.” Nuclear weapons have primarily political utility, although one could not rule out their actual use if national survival depended upon them. Nevertheless, he said, “we generals” should convince our “political masters” that greater stability lies not only in reducing offensive nuclear weapons since, as President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev agree, a nuclear war cannot be won and should never be fought. He added that in avoiding the imbalance of conventional forces they should not be so large that this resulted in an escalation to nuclear conflict during a crisis situation.

Akhromeyev said that “we military men, who have seen the devastation of war in combat and understand the destructive power of nuclear weapons, must insure that our political masters are able to carry out their political objectives without letting nuclear war—either by accident, design or escalation”—ever to occur.

Akhromeyev said this was his first experience as an arms control negotiator. He found such negotiations easier than those he has had to engage in “at home” with inter-service rivalry. He said he understands “it’s the same in the United States.” He found the Reykjavik experience exhilarating, but such jobs, he said, are best left to those who know military hardware, had studied international politics, had traveled abroad, and could speak English.

Akhromeyev said he and other military professionals deplored the over-exaggerated and polemical statements by “our political masters.” However, this he said is unavoidable in the “war of perceptions and illusions.” “We are, after all,” he said, “in a struggle for men’s minds.”

Akhromeyev said the Soviets keep alive the memory of being attacked by the Nazis and never again want to see their very existence threatened with the prospect of annihilation. For this reason most families welcome having their sons, usually an only son, do their “patriotic duty” by serving in the military.

Akhromeyev had many other interesting things to say, some of which are tangential to our negotiations. The environment, he said, must not be tampered with. Therefore, Gorbachev had made the correct decision not to allow the reversal of the flow of the Kama River to take place, even if peaceful nuclear explosions, “as Soviet studies showed,” could be done with “negligible nuclear fallout.” Peaceful nuclear explosions were nevertheless useful for creating large storage areas for oil and natural gas and for strong nuclear waste material. He said that the number of nuclear power plants in the USSR would need to be expanded, but that safety standards, “obviously need to be raised.”

Akhromeyev said that Gorbachev’s ideas for higher standards of productivity and better consumer goods were sound. He and other military officers deplore, however, Gorbachev’s idea that the military defense industry should make consumer goods. He said: “better TVs and washing machines today will cause us to have poorer tanks tomorrow.”

When I inquired about Ogarkov, he said the Marshal had provided the Soviet military with sound strategic thinking and continues to do so. He characterized Ogarkov as “creative” and “imaginative.” When I asked if we would see Ogarkov return to a more prominent role, Akhromeyev said he did not think so since the Marshal is, “enjoying his present military command too much.”

When I asked about Starodubov, Akhromeyev said he had been ill—probably tired from over-work. He added that Starodubov is much better now, and that if it were not that his cure in Carlsbad had two more weeks to run, he would have been at Reykjavik.

Marshal Akhromeyev at age 63, is highly intelligent, well-informed and non-polemical. Of medium-height, lean and bespeckled, he carries himself with a soldierly bearing. I did not see him smoke or drink. He speaks no English, but reads translations of our contemporary novels so as to “better understand the mind and soul” of Americans. He is highly alert, and exhibited a good sense of humor. He is an engaging conversationalist but a tough negotiator. He demonstrated that he can be reasonable and, for a Soviet, uncommonly flexible.

Akhromeyev said he has a son and a daughter. The son is an officer in the tank corps, married, and has a child—“despite the difficulties Army officers have in raising children because they have to move often.” His daughter, a physicist, also is married, but says she has no time in her career for children.

1. Source: Department of State, Executive Secretariat, S/S-IRM Records, Memoranda of Conversations Pertaining to United States and USSR Relations, 1981–1990, Lot 93D188, Reykjavik Conversation Oct. 1986. Secret. Drafted on October 22 by Rowny.
2. See Document 159.