When Reagan and Gorbachev Nearly Abolished Nuclear Weapons

Expectations were low when President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in Reykjavík, Iceland, for a hastily arranged meeting in 1986. But what was anticipated to be an informal discussion to revive stalled nuclear negotiations instead became one of the Cold War’s most dramatic encounters.

Over two days of discussions on a windswept island, the United States and the Soviet Union came closer than anyone imagined to eliminating their countries’ entire nuclear arsenals. Though the negotiations ultimately collapsed, the talks planted the seeds for landmark treaties that dramatically reduced the world’s nuclear weapons.

In the mid-1980s, the threat of nuclear destruction from an accidental or intentional attack hovered over the world. The United States and the Soviet Union amassed staggering nuclear stockpiles that reached their zenith in 1986 at some 70,000 warheads.

While a November 1985 summit in Switzerland between Reagan and Gorbachev broke the ice between the leaders of the two nuclear superpowers, the Cold War remained in a deep freeze. “The mid-1980s were the peak of nuclear warheads, so it’s a really dangerous time,” says Guillaume Serina, author of An Impossible Dream: Reagan, Gorbachev, and a World Without the Bomb. “Both leaders realized this is a big problem and it was costing a lot of money to maintain that arsenal.”

With arms reduction talks at a standstill and massive military spending complicating his economic reform plans, Gorbachev proposed “a quick one-on-one meeting” with Reagan in mid-September 1986 to break the impasse. The two men agreed to meet three weeks later in neutral Iceland.

American officials expected little from the encounter. “We were briefed that Gorbachev needed a grip-and-grin photo-op meeting with Reagan to enhance his domestic standing and that this wasn’t going to be very substantive,” says Ken Adelman, Reagan’s arms control director and author of The Brink of War: Inside the Reagan-Gorbachev Weekend That Changed the World. “It turned out just the opposite.”

On the morning of October 11, 1986, the two leaders convened at the Höfði House on the outskirts of Reykjavík, where the rivals found themselves in close quarters. “There was such a lack of space that people were even working in the bathrooms,” Serina says.

“There was a unique sense of uncertainty in the air,” U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz recalled. “The meeting had come about so suddenly. Nothing seemed predictable.” Adelman remembers a haunting image from the summit, one that underscored the meeting’s gravity. “Two army officers—one Soviet, one American—each held a briefcase with the nuclear codes to blow up the other country. And they stood feet apart from each other all weekend while the leaders met in the conference room.”

After a private one-hour conversation with Reagan, Gorbachev placed a dramatic offer on the negotiating table. He proposed cutting strategic nuclear weapon stockpiles in half and dismantling all American and Soviet intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

“It was quite clear that Gorbachev had come with a briefcase full of proposals and wasn’t there for a grip-and-grin summit,” Adelman says. Reagan agreed in principle to the 50 percent reduction as long as any agreement left both sides with equal arsenals.

For the next two days, the two leaders huddled around a rectangular table, often joined by only a pair of translators, a notetaker, Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. “Neither of them followed any script. They were really saying what was on their minds,” Adelman says.

Following all-night negotiations by their teams, Reagan and Gorbachev returned to the bargaining table the next day. On October 12, the talks had yielded a stunning proposal: total elimination of American and Soviet nuclear weapons within 10 years. It was a desire Reagan had expressed days earlier, telling an adviser, “I want to get rid of those atomic weapons, every one!”

The liquidation of all nuclear missiles was a monumental aspiration—one that would have faced significant resistance from America’s European allies and required other nuclear powers to also disarm. But for a brief afternoon, the rival leaders contemplated a nuclear-free future.

One word, however, halted the historic discussion.

Announced by Reagan in 1983, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)—a proposed space-based anti-ballistic missile defense system—had become a cornerstone of his military policy. Critics derided the futuristic shield as “Star Wars,” and many scientists thought it impractical. Gorbachev, however, feared that SDI would compel the Soviet military-industrial complex to demand continued high levels of defense spending.

At Reykjavík, Gorbachev expressed willingness to permit the research and testing of SDI in laboratories—but not in space. Reagan, however, maintained that it would be necessary to eventually test the technology beyond labs.

The arguments grew increasingly acrimonious and Gorbachev implored Reagan to concede. The stalemated negotiations collapsed over SDI testing, leaving their agreement unsigned. “At the time, SDI was not even technologically feasible,” Serina says. “But it came down to that one word—'laboratory.’”

“To agree on the elimination of weapons on Earth while at the same time opening an arms race in space was not acceptable to me,” Gorbachev wrote.

“He wanted language that would have killed SDI,” Reagan penned in his diary. “The price was high but I wouldn’t sell.”

The two sides agreed on one thing: The other was to blame. “I don’t think you want a deal. I don’t know what more I could have done,” Gorbachev said in their final exchange.

“You could have said ‘yes,’” Reagan replied.

The press widely panned the meeting as a diplomatic failure. “It is not a failure, but a breakthrough,” Gorbachev told journalists in Reykjavík. “We looked beyond the horizon, to consider a world without nuclear weapons.”

In a prime-time address, Reagan told Americans, “I am still optimistic that a way will be found. The door is open and the opportunity to begin eliminating the nuclear threat is within reach.”

The lengthy discussions at Reykjavík paved the way for two historic nuclear arms treaties once Gorbachev dropped his insistence on linking missile reductions to SDI testing limits. In December 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev inked the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty to eliminate short and medium-range missiles. Four years later, the Soviet leader and Reagan’s successor, President George H.W. Bush signed the START I Treaty, which reduced strategic nuclear weapon levels.

Gorbachev later told Shultz that his meeting with Reagan in Reykjavík was the Cold War’s turning point “because for the first time the two leaders talked directly, over an extended period in a real conversation, about key issues.”