Margaret Thatcher believed public opinion would back the build-up of a western chemical weapons programme to counter the Soviet threat.
An official note of Thatcher's meeting with Jeane Kirkpatrick, then US ambassador to the UN, outlines her concern that the west had no adequate response to the impressive Soviet capability in the field of chemical weapons and that use of these weapons by the Russians might therefore force us at once to nuclear retaliation.
The comments came less than a month after the UN had confirmed the use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war and as western allies scrambled to introduce export controls on chemicals which could be used to make agents such as mustard gas.
