It was a top-level secret correspondence. The one between Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the summer of 1985. Letters back and forth to ‘Dear Mr. Secretary General’ and to ‘Dear Mr. Prime Minister’. The correspondence can be seen as the ultimate attempt to give the nuclear arms race, symbol of the Cold War, a decisive turn. With the help of the Netherlands. The letters were shared with the House of Representatives at the insistence of the then opposition leader Joop den Uyl (PvdA).
For a moment, The Hague seemed to play a prominent role on the world stage. That was in the early 1980s when tensions between East and West rose to new heights with the proposed deployment of 572 US medium-range nuclear-charged missiles (cruise missiles) in Europe. The Western response to the Soviet Union’s deployment of SS20 nuclear missiles targeting Western Europe.
In the Netherlands, where, according to the NATO distribution key, 48 of the 572 cruise missiles should be stationed, a broad protest movement had arisen from churches to various parties. Prime Minister Lubbers, who took office in 1982 with his ‘no nonsense cabinet’, but also leader of the CDA, which was divided internally on this issue, tried to find a solution so that the Netherlands would not have to place the missiles. The allies in the West watched with concern. The fear was that if the Netherlands were to drop out, it would benefit the Soviet Union.
cruise missiles
The Netherlands once again warned Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union for the last time. On July 12, 1985, Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers wrote a confidential letter to the Soviet leader. Under strict secrecy because, as Lubbers wrote, “we are serious” and he wanted the addressee to consider the letter’s comments “in all tranquility and seriousness.”
Core of Lubbers’ message: the decision whether or not the Netherlands would proceed to deploy cruise missiles was in the hands of the Soviet Union. By June 1, 1984, the Soviets had deployed 378 medium-range missiles. If a year and a half later, on November 1, 1985, it turned out that no more missiles had been added on the Soviet side, the Netherlands would refrain from installing 48 American cruise missiles.
The date of 1 June 1984 was the day that the Lubbers cabinet, after years of heated discussion in parliament and society, decided that the Netherlands would also place cruise missiles aimed at the Soviet Union, following the example of other NATO countries. A decision with an escape clause: the Netherlands would not place the missiles if the Soviet Union did not deploy new missiles.
Lubbers’s letter of July 1985 to Gorbachev, who had taken office a few months earlier, was a final attempt to dissuade the Netherlands from the decision. Nothing Lubbers wanted more. The cruise missiles had torn the Netherlands and him apart. Hence that letter, according to Lubbers, written “in the spirit of forty years of liberation, noting that our peoples who then worked together must now be able to live in peace with the lowest possible levels of armament.”
‘Dear Prime Minister’
Gorbachev’s also “top secret” negative answer came a month later. Yes, “the vicious circle of the arms race on continental Europe” had to be broken. The Soviet Union was willing, but “unfortunately” no initiative found “positive response from the US.” The Soviet Union placed missiles in response to the Americans doing the same. “The NATO member states were warned about it,” Gorbachev told Lubbers. He made a counter-request to the “Dear Prime Minister”. There were still opportunities to “interrupt the dangerous course of events and avert the threat of a nuclear confrontation that has gathered over Europe and the world.” According to him, every country was called to make a contribution „in this noble matter”. Much depended on the position of the Netherlands in the ‘cardinal questions of European security’.
As the deadline (November 1, 1985) approached, Gorbachev wrote a letter to Lubbers pointing out that the number of medium-range missiles in the Soviet Union’s European zone was much less than a decade earlier. To which Lubbers replied a week later to Gorbachev that only the number of Russian missiles placed on Western Europe since 1 June 1984 was decisive for the Dutch decision. That was more than the 378 on the reference date. “That being the case, I nevertheless allow myself, in the spirit of our earlier correspondence, to once again submit to you the possibility of wanting to observe the level of June last year (378) also for the Soviet Union as a whole. In that case, the Netherlands will refrain from placement.”
Gorbachev did not. And so a few weeks later, on November 1, 1985, the cabinet informed the House of Representatives that the stationing of 48 American cruise missiles at the military air base in Woensdrecht would be initiated.
They never got there. In October 1986, Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan agreed to withdraw all new Russian and US nuclear weapons from Europe. At the end of 1987, construction work for the missile installations was stopped.