Reykjavik Summit (1986): Reagan and Gorbachev Near Disarmament

The Reykjavik Summit was a meeting between US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland’s capital on 11–12 October 1986. In two days of talks at Höfði House, the two leaders came closer than ever before to agreeing to drastic cuts in nuclear weapons, and even discussed abolishing them. The meeting broke down over Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, yet it set the course for the arms-control treaties that helped end the Cold War.

Background

By the mid-1980s relations between the superpowers had gone through one of the most dangerous phases of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had deployed SS-20 missiles aimed at Western Europe, NATO had answered with Pershing II and cruise missiles, and Reagan had launched the Strategic Defense Initiative, a research programme for a missile shield that Moscow saw as destabilising.

Gorbachev, who became General Secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, wanted to reduce military spending to make room for economic reform. He and Reagan first met at Geneva in November 1985, where they agreed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” but reached no arms deal. The Chernobyl disaster of April 1986 strengthened Gorbachev’s sense of the danger of nuclear catastrophe.

In September 1986 Gorbachev proposed a quick working meeting before a full summit in Washington. Iceland, a NATO member roughly halfway between the two capitals, offered to host. The preparations were overshadowed by the Daniloff affair, the arrest in Moscow of the American journalist Nicholas Daniloff, which was resolved in late September.

Both sides expected a modest, preparatory meeting. The Americans brought a relatively small team and had not prepared detailed new proposals, while Gorbachev arrived with a carefully worked-out package approved by the Soviet Politburo. Around 3,000 journalists descended on Reykjavik, a city of under 100,000 people, and the Icelandic government had less than two weeks to organise security and accommodation.

The first day

The talks opened on Saturday 11 October in Höfði House, a white wooden building on the shore of Reykjavik. Gorbachev surprised the Americans with a sweeping package. He proposed cutting strategic nuclear forces by 50 per cent, eliminating all US and Soviet intermediate-range missiles in Europe, and strengthening the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty by committing both sides not to withdraw from it for ten years.

Overnight, expert groups worked on the details. The American team was led by the veteran negotiator Paul Nitze, the Soviet team by Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, chief of the General Staff. They made rapid progress on how to count strategic weapons and on reducing intermediate-range missiles to zero in Europe, with each side keeping 100 warheads elsewhere.

The negotiators agreed in principle on equal ceilings of 1,600 strategic delivery vehicles and 6,000 warheads for each side, figures that later reappeared almost unchanged in the START I Treaty. For arms-control specialists who had spent years on small technical steps, the speed of the progress was astonishing.

The second day and the breakdown

On Sunday 12 October the leaders extended the talks beyond the planned schedule. The discussion moved toward eliminating all strategic ballistic missiles within ten years. At one stage Reagan said he would favour getting rid of all nuclear weapons, and Gorbachev agreed that this could be done.

The obstacle was SDI. Gorbachev insisted that during the ten years, research and testing on missile defence be confined to the laboratory. Reagan regarded SDI as insurance against cheating and as a way to make nuclear weapons obsolete, and refused. He offered to share the technology with the Soviet Union, an offer Gorbachev did not find credible.

For the Soviet side, the laboratory restriction was essential. Soviet leaders feared that a working American missile shield, combined with an offensive arsenal, could give the United States a first-strike advantage, and that the Soviet Union could not afford to compete in a new high-technology arms race. For Reagan, the defensive system was a moral commitment he had made in public, and his advisers had warned him not to trade it away. The disagreement turned on a single word in the draft, laboratory, which neither side was willing to concede.

In the late afternoon the meeting ended without agreement. Television pictures of the two grim-faced leaders leaving Höfði House were seen around the world. Secretary of State George Shultz told reporters he was deeply disappointed.

Key people

• Ronald Reagan: US president, committed both to SDI and to the idea of a world without nuclear weapons.
• Mikhail Gorbachev: Soviet leader seeking arms cuts to ease the burden of military spending.
• George Shultz and Eduard Shevardnadze: the two foreign ministers, who later did much to turn the Reykjavik ideas into treaties.
• Paul Nitze and Sergei Akhromeyev: led the overnight working group that narrowed the technical gaps.

Reactions

The first verdict in many Western newspapers was that the summit had been a failure. Some US officials and allied leaders were relieved that no deal had been struck. Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and other European leaders worried that abolishing ballistic missiles would leave Western Europe exposed to the Soviet Union’s larger conventional forces, and Thatcher flew to Camp David in November to press her concerns. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff were also uneasy, as nobody had studied what the elimination of all ballistic missiles would mean for American security.

Gorbachev, at his own press conference in Reykjavik, struck a more positive note and presented the meeting as a breakthrough that showed what was possible. In Moscow, the Soviet leadership used the outcome to argue that SDI was the main obstacle to peace.

Consequences and legacy

The ideas agreed in principle at Reykjavik did not disappear. In February 1987 Gorbachev dropped the link between intermediate-range missiles and SDI, opening the way for the INF Treaty signed in Washington on 8 December 1987, which abolished a whole category of nuclear weapons. The 50 per cent framework for strategic weapons shaped the START I Treaty of 1991. Through 1987 Shultz and Shevardnadze met repeatedly to turn the Reykjavik understandings into treaty language, and the Soviet side accepted intrusive on-site inspections that it had long rejected. The missile-defence question was never fully settled: SDI research continued, but it was scaled back under later presidents and no space-based shield was ever deployed.

The summit also changed how the two leaders saw each other. Each came away convinced that the other was serious about reducing the nuclear danger, which built the trust needed for later agreements. Many historians now regard Reykjavik as a turning point in the end of the Cold War, though they still debate whether Reagan’s refusal to give up SDI helped or hindered the outcome.

A plaque at Höfði House commemorates the meeting, and the house is now one of Reykjavik’s best-known landmarks.

Timeline

• 1985, 19–21 November: Reagan and Gorbachev hold their first summit in Geneva.
• 1986, 30 September: The Reykjavik meeting is announced after the Daniloff affair is settled.
• 1986, 11 October: Talks open at Höfði House; Gorbachev presents his proposals.
• 1986, 11–12 October (overnight): Nitze and Akhromeyev lead expert talks.
• 1986, 12 October: The summit collapses over SDI.
• 1987, 28 February: Gorbachev separates the intermediate-range missile issue from SDI.
• 1987, 8 December: The INF Treaty is signed in Washington.

Why it matters

Reykjavik showed that the superpower leaders were willing to imagine radical nuclear disarmament. Although it ended without a treaty, it broke the deadlock in arms control and led directly to the first agreement to eliminate an entire class of nuclear missiles.