Reagan and Gorbachev: Warming of a Relationship - latimes Reagan and Gorbachev: Warming of a Relationship June 02, 1988 |STANLEY MEISLER | Times Staff Writer MOSCOW — A handclasp and a walk in the woods in Geneva. Frigid stares and tight lips in the blustery cold of Reykjavik. The signing in Washington of a historic treaty on medium-range nuclear weapons. And now in Moscow, a walk through the heart of the "evil empire." The moods and images of the four summits of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev have differed in ways both subtle and striking. And the pattern tells the tale of the evolving relationship between the two men and the long-antagonistic nations they lead. Both leaders proclaimed Wednesday that they have built up trust over four meetings in less than three years. Any doubt about this surely vanished when President Reagan put his arm around Gorbachev in Moscow's Red Square this week and told a group of Russians nearby, "I'm glad we are standing here together like this." Unsteady Growth But the line of trust has not grown steadily from summit to summit.

The mood, in fact, turned so down and dark at the second summit, in Reykjavik, that anyone there could hardly imagine the two men meeting again, let alone embracing each other in genuine warmth less than two years later. President Reagan met Gorbachev for the first time on Nov. 19, 1985, the first day of their celebrated summit in Geneva. Reagan was 74 years old, a politician who had built his career on rigid, steadfast anti-communism. Four years earlier, in one of his first presidential speeches, he had described the Soviet Union as "the evil empire" and had never seemed to change his mind. But in his second term as President, he was hoping to fix a place in history for himself by starting a disarmament dialogue with America's most powerful antagonist. Gorbachev, then 54, had taken over half a year earlier as leader of the Soviet Union. Not much was known about him. He seemed more sophisticated than previous leaders. He had a shrewd sense of public relations, and he had pledged to transform Soviet society. American Kremlinologists believed he needed a breather in the arms race to salvage his economy.

The image of that first meeting was etched by a handshake and a walk. Gorbachev, wearing a coat and clutching his hat on a wind-chilled morning, rushed to the portico of a mansion by Lake Geneva to take the outstretched hand of President Reagan. The President smiled and seemed to joke. Gorbachev pointed at Reagan, a show of polite wonder at the hardiness of the President standing in the cold without a topcoat. Later in the afternoon of the wintry, clouded day, Reagan led Gorbachev in a tranquil walk in the woods by the lake. Their sessions, it was learned later, sometimes bristled with sharpness and bite and produced little, but the cordial handshake and the peaceful walk seemed to tell the world that two very different men had made contact, a start, and that seemed to count for something. In Moscow on Wednesday, Gorbachev could not keep from reminding Reagan of one of those images. When photographers called on the two leaders to shake hands for the cameras, Gorbachev told the President: "This recalls our first handshake in Geneva. The spontaneous handshake. The photographers at that time captured the atmosphere.

It was a very interesting photo." American officials billed the second meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev at Reykjavik, Iceland, in October, 1986, as a mini-summit, a kind of trial run for an expected major summit a few months later. But Gorbachev came to Reykjavik prepared to do major business. The two men, extending their talks for several hours, came close to a dramatic agreement to eliminate half their long-range nuclear weapons in five years and all of them by the end of the century. But the deal foundered on Reagan's refusal to give up testing for his Strategic Defense Initiative, his cherished plan for a space-based "Star Wars" defense against nuclear weapons. Two Glum Men Failure and anger lined their features as they stepped out of the Icelandic government mansion where they had negotiated for two days. The smiles, the joking, the banter--all were gone in the cold dusk. The two men could manage no more than a perfunctory handshake, a cold stare with tight, rigid lips as they turned away from each other. In the gloom of an Icelandic capital shivering under wind and rain, summitry seemed over for the two glum men.

Gorbachev and Reagan would not meet again until their lieutenants finally negotiated a treaty eliminating all the ground-launched intermediate-range missiles of the two superpowers. Gorbachev came to Washington last December, 14 months after Reykjavik, to sign the treaty with Reagan. In ceremonies that symbolized the third summit, Gorbachev and Reagan signed the treaty in the East Room of the White House on a heavy wooden table that once served Abraham Lincoln and his Cabinet. A new mood was set as well. Until then, whether in the first cordiality of Geneva or in the rancor of Reykjavik, the two men had always addressed each other by formal title, "Mr. General Secretary" and "Mr. President." Fred Kaplan Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. He was the Boston Globe's military reporter from 1982-91 and its Moscow bureau chief from 1992-95. This is an uncomfortable position for an opinion columnist (and occasional Cold War historian ) to take, but it turns out that both views have their merits; neither position by itself gets at the truth.

Reagan the well-known superhawk and Reagan the lesser-known nuclear abolitionist are both responsible for the end of that era—along with his vital collaborator Mikhail Gorbachev. Advertisement The Gorbachev factor—too often overlooked in this week of Reagan-hagiography—was crucial. If Yuri Andropov's kidneys hadn't given out, or if Konstantin Chernenko had lived a few years longer, Reagan's bluster and passion would have come to naught; the Cold War would probably have raged on for years; indeed, Reagan's rhetoric and actions might have aggravated tensions. Still, at some point, some Kremlin leader would have had to mount a major reassessment of the situation. The Soviet system was dysfunctional; its empire was collapsing; the cupboard was bare. And Reagan's surging military budgets, without question, brought this internal crisis to a head. Get Slate in your inbox. Here was Gorbachev speaking at a session of the Politburo in October 1986, days before he traveled to Reykjavik, Iceland to offer Reagan a groundbreaking disarmament plan, including a 50 percent reduction in nuclear arsenals.

If he didn't propose these cuts, Gorbachev told his colleagues: [W]e will be pulled into an arms race that is beyond our capabilities, and we will lose it because we are at the limit of our capabilities. … If the new round [of an arms race] begins, the pressures on our economy will be unbelievable. Advertisement This was not a sudden development. Three years later, in a November 1989 phone conversation with Egon Krenz, the general secretary of the East German Communist Party, Gorbachev recalled when he first became a member of the Politburo and some of its members wanted to look at the state budget: "But Andropov said, 'Do not get in there, it is not your business.' Now we know why he said so. It was not a budget, but hell knows what." The precise effect of Reagan's "Star Wars" speech—his high-profile and insanely impractical plan to build an antimissile "shield"—is hard to gauge.

On the one hand, documents reveal that Gorbachev asked Yevgeny Velikhov, his chief science adviser, to evaluate whether Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, as it was formally called, would pose a threat. Velikhov replied that the project was fanciful and that the Soviets could build countermeasures—or deploy additional offensive missiles to saturate the Star Wars system—much more cheaply than the United States could construct additional defenses. However, at the same time, perhaps succumbing to pressure from his own military-industrial complex, Velikhov advised that it might be a good idea to build more missiles, just in case. This analysis may have calmed Gorbachev a bit, but not entirely. At a Politburo meeting in March 1986, Gorbachev said, "Maybe we should just stop being afraid of the SDI! Of course, we cannot be indifferent to this dangerous program. But [the Americans] are betting precisely on the fact that the USSR is afraid of the SDI.

… That is why they are putting pressure on us—to exhaust us." If somebody says, "Maybe we should stop being afraid of the bogeyman," it usually means he is afraid of the bogeyman. It's pretty clear that in the spring of 1986 Gorbachev and all those around with him were at least a little afraid of the SDI bogeyman. The next month, April '86, brought the Chernobyl disaster, which, among other things, made Gorbachev realize that information had to circulate more openly (the beginnings of glasnost) and made him think that the ultimate enemy may be nukes themselves. Advertisement He didn't realize it, but Reagan viewed nukes the same way. Samuel Wells, a Cold War historian at the Woodrow Wilson Center, who has examined all the relevant documents, put it this way in a phone conversation: "His staff, for all of the first term and most of the second, kept this out of the press, but Reagan was terribly, deeply opposed to nuclear weapons—he thought they were immoral." Reagan's vision of SDI—a shield that would render nuclear weapons obsolete—was scientifically preposterous but, by all accounts, genuine.

Many of his hawkish aides (most notably the still-active Richard Perle) scoffed at it; they liked SDI because it would scare the Russians and, if it worked, might give us nuclear superiority. But Reagan believed what he said. At their face-to-face summit of October 1986 in Reykjavik, Reagan went far beyond Gorbachev's proposal of a 50 percent strategic-arms cut. To the alarm of some aides, who were not let in on the discussion, he suggested that the two sides get rid of nuclear weapons altogether and jointly build an SDI system to guard against a nuclear revival. Gorbachev initially dismissed the idea. "I do not take your idea of sharing SDI seriously," the minutes (which were declassified by the Soviets 12 years ago) show him saying. "You don't want to share even petroleum equipment, automatic machine tools, or equipment for dairies, while sharing SDI would be a second American revolution—and revolutions do not occur all that often." Reagan replied, "If I thought that SDI could not be shared, I would have rejected it myself." The Reykjavik talks finally fizzled.

Gorbachev said he'd accept the zero-nukes plan if Reagan pledged not to test nuclear weapons in outer space (a crucial element of SDI). Reagan wouldn't accept that condition. Advertisement However, Gorbachev returned to Moscow persuaded that Reagan—who had earlier struck him as a "caveman"—honestly had no intention of launching a first strike against the Soviet Union, and he made this point clear to the Politburo. He could continue with perestroika, which involved not just economic reforms but—as a necessary precondition—massive defense cuts and a transformation of international relations. He needed assurances of external security in order to move forward with this domestic upheaval. Reagan gave him those reassurances. Subsequent conversations between his foreign minister, Edvard Shevardnadze, and Secretary of State George Shultz reinforced his confidence. In the last couple years of the Reagan administration, Reagan would propose extravagant measures in arms reductions. His hawkish aides would go along with them, thinking the Soviets would reject them (and the United States would win a propaganda victory). Then, to the surprise of everyone (except perhaps Reagan, who meant the proposals without cynicism), Gorbachev would accept them.

In the end, Reagan and Gorbachev needed each other. Gorbachev needed to move swiftly if his reforms were to take hold. Reagan exerted the pressure that forced him to move swiftly and offered the rewards that made his foes and skeptics in the Politburo think the cutbacks might be worth it. Gorbachev wasn't the only decisive presence. If Reagan hadn't been president—if Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale had defeated him or if Reagan had died and George H.W. Bush taken his place—Gorbachev almost certainly would not have received the push or reinforcement that he needed. Those other politicians would have been too traditional , too cautious, to push such radical proposals (zero nukes and SDI) or to take Gorbachev's radicalism at face value. (There's no need to speculate on this point. When Bush Sr. succeeded Reagan in 1989, U.S.-Soviet relations took a huge step backward; it took nearly a year for Bush and his advisers to realize that Gorby was for real.) The end of the Cold War may be the most oddball chapter in the history of the 20th century.

How fitting, then, that the two most oddball leaders, Gorbachev and Reagan, made it come to pass. Reagan-Gorbachev Talks End in Stalement as U.S. Rejects Demand to Curb  - Star Wars - - NYTimes.com Reagan-Gorbachev Talks End in Stalement as U.S. Rejects Demand to Curb Star Wars By BERNARD GWERTZMAN, Special to the New York Times Published: October 13, 1986 REYKJAVIK, Iceland, Oct. 12 — President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev ended two days of talks here today with no agreement on arms control and no date for a full-fledged summit meeting in the United States. While officials said that the two leaders had succeeded in developing tentative understandings on most arms control issues, a possible accord foundered over Soviet insistence that the United States scrap its space-based missile-defense plans. Secretary of State George P.

Shultz said at a news conference, ''We are deeply disappointed by this outcome.'' Future Outlook Is in Doubt It was not immediately clear whether Soviet-American relations would worsen because of the failure to achieve an agreement, or whether the tentative understandings on medium-range and long-range forces and on nuclear testing could be revived even in the absence of an understanding on the missile-defense issue. The two leaders, after 11 hours of talks and all-night discussions by their experts, displayed frustration and disappointment. Each held the other responsible for the lack of results. Mr. Reagan, speaking to American forces at the Keflavik Air Base near here, before returning home, said, ''We came to Iceland to advance the cause of peace and, though we put on the table the most far-reaching arms control proposal in history, the General Secretary rejected it.'' Mr. Gorbachev, at a news conference, attributed the failure to American intransigence on the plan for a space-based missile defense, known officially as the Strategic Defense Initiative, and popularly as ''Star Wars.'' Gorbachev Sees Chance Missed The Soviet leader said he had told the President at the end of their meeting: ''We missed a historic chance.

Never have our positions been so close.'' When the Iceland meeting was first arranged, it was expected to set a date for a regular summit meeting in the United States in the coming months, as called for by the two leaders at their first meeting in Geneva last year. But Secretary of State Shultz said at his news conference after an unscheduled final three-and-a-half-hour session that no date was set. He said the United States would not pay the price for having Mr. Gorbachev go to the United States if it meant accepting constraints on the missile defense program. He said that the tentative package of ''extremely important potential agreements,'' extending into areas other than arms control, failed when Mr. Gorbachev insisted that the 1972 treaty limiting defensive missiles, known as the antiballistic missile treaty, be changed to prevent research, testing and development of the proposed defenses beyond the laboratory. ''As we came more and more down to the final stages,'' Mr.

Shultz said, ''it became more and more clear that the Soviet Union's objective was effectively to kill off the Strategic Defense Initiative program, and to do so by seeking a change - described by them as strengthening, but a change in the ABM treaty - that would so constrain research permitted under it that the program would not be able to proceed at all forcefully.'' Mr. Gorbachev said, ''This has been a failure, and a failure when we were very close to a historic agreement.'' He said the United States had come to the talks ''with empty hands.'' Talks Called 'Hard and Tough' President Reagan, in listing the potential understandings, said, ''The talks we have just concluded were hard and tough, and yet, I have to say, extremely useful.'' Although the emphasis was on arms control, Mr. Shultz said human rights questions had been raised ''on a number of occasions and some very signfiicant material was passed to the Soviet Union, which they accepted.'' The allusion was to lists of Jews who are set to seek emigration, but have been refused visas. Mr. Shultz said that the emigration issue was specifically mentioned in a joint statement that was drafted, but not issued.

Emigration from the Soviet Union in general is heavily restricted, but Jews and some other groups have been permitted to leave in substantial numbers over the last 20 years. The Soviet Union contends that most of those who wanted to leave have done so by now. Jewish groups abroad dispute this. Of all the Soviet-American meetings, this was one of the most unusual. American officials had said that the best they expected was an effort to stimulate the Geneva arms talks and a date for a summit meeting. The Tentative Understandings In fact, the two sides seemed to rush through every outstanding issue, with the Soviet Union apparently offering a variety of compromises to extract a commitment that would have paralyzed the American missile-defense program. These potential understandings were reached, but not made final because of the missile-defense issue: * On medium-range forces, Mr. Gorbachev agreed to a global limit of 100 warheads each, with the Soviet Union deploying its 100 in Asia and the United States its 100 on its own territory, and all Soviet and American medium-range missiles removed from Europe. * On nuclear testing, the Soviet Union agreed to seek a phased accord, starting with verification of existing treaties and working toward an ultimate reduction of tests.

* On strategic offensive nuclear forces, the two sides agreed to a 50 percent cut in bombers and missile warheads and in the number of missile launchers. Breakdown Late in the Day 1 Mikhail Gorbachev . Reagan . WGBH American Experience | PBS Other Biographies In 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to end the Cold War. Time Magazine named him Man of the Year and Man of the Decade. Former President Richard Nixon believed the Soviet leader should have been named Man of the Century for "risk[ing] his power…to save his reforms." But in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev could not control the reforms he had implemented, poor economic conditions worsened instead of improved, and he was eventually driven out of power. Mikhail Gorbachev was born to peasants on March 2, 1931, in the famine-stricken Caucasus region. In 1950 he received a coveted invitation to Moscow State University, where he studied law and joined the Communist Party. He became a full member in 1952.

Gorbachev did not rise in the ranks of the Kremlin hierarchy until 1982, when premier Yuri Andropov adopted him as his protégé. On March 11, 1985, following the deaths of Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party. At 54, younger and healthier than his predecessors, the reform-minded Gorbachev was openly critical of Party excesses. Gorbachev inherited from his predecessors severe domestic problems and an escalated Cold War. In 1983, to protect against the Soviet nuclear threat, Ronald Reagan had approved massive military buildup and proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), believing that only defense, not the threat of mutual annihilation, could prevent nuclear war. An expensive arms race in space threatened to tax a weak Soviet economy and overwhelm Soviet technological capabilities. Domestically, Gorbachev began to implement reforms that he hoped would improve living standards and worker productivity. By adding a measure of democratic freedoms, he hoped to achieve glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructure).

Gorbachev established ties with Western leaders, underscoring the common interests of Soviets and Europeans by discussing missile reductions. But Reagan didn't trust the Soviet Union. In 1983 he had labeled the Soviet Union "the evil empire." Two years later, at the first arms summit in Geneva, Gorbachev put a human face on the enemy for the President. That November, Reagan said of Gorbachev, "There was warmth in his face and his style, not the coldness bordering on hatred I'd seen in most senior Soviet officials I'd met until then." He sensed then "the moral dimension in Gorbachev." Gorbachev, in turn, called Reagan a great American and a great leader. In the three years and four summits that followed, Gorbachev and Reagan worked toward ending the Cold War, and developed a warm relationship. But there would be setbacks. When a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded on April 26, 1986, the Soviet Union did not provide a full account of the accident until May 14. Gorbachev's commitment to glasnost was questioned when he failed to apologize for the disaster in his long-overdue address.

In the 1985 Geneva summit, progress on arms control had foundered over Gorbachev's insistence on scrapping SDI, and Reagan's commitment to its development. The October 1986 summit between Reagan and Gorbachev, in Reykjavik, Iceland, also ended in a stalemate. At this second summit, Reagan still refused to budge on SDI, and Gorbachev refused to make further concessions without compromise. But at the third summit, in Washington, DC, in December 1987, Gorbachev yielded to Reagan's terms. The USSR was in dire economic straits, and Gorbachev needed a respite from the arms race. When Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty in Washington, in 1987, the first treaty to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, the United States and Western Europe rejoiced. Later when they called each other "friend" in Moscow, many saw it as "the ratification of their mutual desire for peace." For the Soviet Union, however, the end of the Cold War triggered new problems.

Gorbachev's economic reforms were failing, and the far-flung Soviet republics were using glasnost to demand independence. By the time Gorbachev was elected president in the USSR's first multi-candidate elections in March 1989, his popularity was in sharp decline. Rather than boosting the Soviet economy, his democratic reforms had an unintended outcome: the collapse of Communism throughout Eastern Europe. Receiving the Nobel Prize did nothing to raise Gorbachev in his people's esteem, and in 1991 Gorbachev was kidnapped by hard-line Communists in an armed coup. He was restored to power with the help of his enemy Boris Yeltsin, but Gorbachev's leadership was irreparably damaged. On December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union, but only after dissolving it. Two years after his resignation, Gorbachev founded Green Cross International. In GCI Gorbachev created a mechanism for converting military bases to civilian use, remedying the effects of nuclear contamination (particularly on children), and destroying chemical weapons stockpiles in an environmentally responsible way.

In 1996 Gorbachev ran for reelection but received only about one percent of the vote. Just as America has not forgotten Gorbachev, neither has Russia; the two countries simply remember different things. WashingtonPost.com: Superpower Summits Archive Reagan-Gorbachev Summit Talks Collapse as Deadlock on SDI Wipes Out Other Gains By Lou Cannon Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, October 13, 1986; Page A01 REYKJAVIK, ICELAND, OCT. 12 -- The summit meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev collapsed tonight after the two leaders had tentatively agreed to sweeping reductions in nuclear arsenals but deadlocked on the crucial issue of restricting the U.S. space-based missile defense program widely known as "Star Wars." Secretary of State George P. Shultz, reporting in a strained voice on a meeting that began with bright promise and ended gloomily after more than seven hours of negotiation today, said he was "deeply disappointed" and no longer saw "any prospect" for a summit meeting in Washington between the two leaders in the coming months.

Gorbachev, in a news conference tonight, painted a bleak picture of U.S.-Soviet relations leading up to this weekend's summit and said that the talks had "ruptured" over the fundamental differences between the superpowers on the Strategic Defense Initiative and the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. He said Reagan's insistence on deploying SDI had "frustrated and scuttled" the opportunity for an agreement. The United States, Gorbachev complained, had come to Reykjavik "empty-handed," with the same "mothballed" proposals that the Soviets opposed in Geneva. But after the talks here, he said, he had told Reagan that "we were missing a historic chance. Never had our positions been so close together." Reagan, in remarks to U.S. service personnel at the airport before leaving Iceland, said, however, that "though we put on the table the most far-reaching arms control proposal in history, the general secretary (Gorbachev) rejected it." "We moved toward agreement on drastically reduced numbers of intermediate-range missiles in both Europe and Asia," Reagan said. "We approached agreement on sharply reduced strategic arsenals for both our countries.

We made progress in the area of nuclear testing, but there was remaining at the end of our talks one area of disagreement" -- the American SDI program. (Reagan returned to Andrews Air Force Base late Sunday night, where he was met by Nancy Reagan. He had no comment on the talks, saying only "tune in tomorrow night," a reference to his televised report to the nation scheduled for 8 p.m. Monday.) Shultz told reporters that the two leaders, aided by groups of experts, had reached a contingent agreement to eliminate all nuclear ballistic missiles within 10 years and also had made progress on human rights issues. But Shultz said that the two days of talks here had ended without agreement because the Soviets insisted on a change in the 1972 ABM treaty that would have limited Reagan's SDI antimissile program to laboratory research. (Returning to Washington on Air Force One, President Reagan's national security affairs adviser, Vice Adm. John M.

Poindexter, told reporters that before the summit collapsed, the two leaders had agreed tentatively to limit intercontinental nuclear weapons to 1,600 delivery vehicles and 6,000 warheads on each side, which he termed "a breakthrough." The talks foundered, Poindexter said, because "the Soviet side is holding all agreements hostage to the rest of the ABM treaty.") The meeting here, which had been billed by the Reagan administration as only a preparatory session before a Washington summit, turned into a full-blown summit involving marathon meetings and extraordinary negotiations that moved far beyond the limited agenda that officials on both sides had suggested would be the case. The foundering of the talks on the missile defense issue also raises doubts about the future of the long-running superpower negotiations on nuclear arms at Geneva. Instead of nuclear arms reduction, the fate of Reagan's SDI program now looms as the dominant issue in superpower relations. But both Shultz and Gorbachev said the two sides would present their arms reduction proposals at Geneva, holding out a slim hope that some progress could be made if the impasse over SDI can ever be resolved.

The impasse seemed certain to sharpen debate on the Reagan administration's arms-control strategies in the final three weeks of the midterm election campaign and could heighten the difficulties of persuading Congress in 1987 to increase funding for SDI. Key House Democrats predicted last night that there would be a fresh flurry of debate about the compromises reached late last week on arms-control issues embedded in the continuing resolution now before Congress, which contains the money for operating the government in the current fiscal year. But adjournment pressures are expected to work to keep the compromises intact. The contingent agreement reached by the two sides would have reduced all strategic strike forces by 50 percent in the first five years. In the following five years all ballistic missiles on both sides would have been eliminated. Tonight, in a 1-hour-and-40-minute news conference, Gorbachev said he had proposed the Iceland meeting because "we could not have allowed the failure" of a summit in Washington. And he indicated that he would not agree to come to the United States unless the deep dispute on defensive systems can be solved. "If we had a third meeting in Washington that would have no results, I think that would be a scandal, unacceptable, impermissible," he said.

Reagan, weary and unsmiling when he left the white-shingled Hofdi House here after his negotiations, displayed some of his buoyancy when he spoke to U.S. service personnel and their families at Keflavik International Airport, praising them for their service and joking that he was returning home late for dinner. But Reagan was defiant when he discussed SDI, which he has called a "peace shield" that will someday protect civilian populations from nuclear destruction. "While both sides seek reduction in the number of nuclear missiles and warheads threatening the world, the Soviet Union insisted that we sign an agreement that would deny to me and to future presidents for 10 years the right to develop, test and deploy a defense against nuclear missiles for the people of the free world," Reagan said. "This we could not and would not do." The two leaders met for more than 11 hours yesterday and today, including an unscheduled afternoon meeting today of nearly four hours. U.S. officials said they were hopeful last night of an agreement because both sides wanted deep cuts in offensive nuclear weapons. They remained optimistic this morning when they reached tentative agreement on what Shultz called "a breathtaking reduction" on intermediate-range missiles in Europe and Asia.

But the discussions foundered this afternoon when it became apparent that Reagan was unwilling to accept the revision in the ABM treaty that U.S. officials said would have made development of SDI impossible. The account given by the U.S. side was that Reagan agreed, for the first time, to delay deployment of a missile defense system for 10 years while research and development testing continued. Reagan wanted to deploy the system at the end of this time, while Gorbachev wanted the decision on deployment to be reserved to the end of the 10-year period. "As we came more and more down to the final stages, it became more and more clear that the Soviet Union's objective was effectively to kill off the SDI program," Shultz said, "and to do so by seeking a change, described by them as a strengthening, . . . in the ABM treaty that would so constrain research permitted under it that the program would not be able to proceed forcefully." Shultz, his eyes red and his voice occasionally cracking, made no attempt to hide his evident disappointment at the failure of the leaders to reach an agreement. Max M. Kampelman, the chief U.S.

representative at the nuclear arms talks in Geneva, appeared to be fighting back the tears as he watched Shultz answer questions in the White House briefing room here. The collapse of the summit talks on the SDI issue left both leaders in an uncertain political position. Reagan had persuaded a reluctant Congress to remove restrictions on his arms programs from a pending budget bill largely on the hope that he could make progress on arms accords here and at a prospective future summit meeting in the United States. Gorbachev has unilaterally observed a 14-month nuclear testing moratorium despite skepticism in Soviet military circles, hoping he could persuade the United States to join the moratorium. Instead of returning with an agreement to cut nuclear arsenals and reduce testing, as seemed possible earlier today, both leaders are returning home empty-handed. Reagan's explanation for the failure of the Iceland summit in his departure speech tonight appeared to differ in one important particular from the account given by Shultz and White House officials who briefed reporters on the meeting on condition they not be identified.

In his speech Reagan said that he made to Gorbachev "an entirely new proposal" for a 10-year delay of SDI and added, "So long as both the United States and the Soviet Union prove their good faith by destroying nuclear missiles year by year, we would not deploy SDI." But Shultz said that the United States intended to deploy a scaled-down SDI at the end of the 10-year period. In his news conference Shultz took issue with the notion that Reagan's insistence on SDI had killed the prospects for an arms agreement. He said "the existence of the strong research program about strategic defense and its undoubted promise" had caused the Soviets to engage in negotiations on arms reductions and that continuation of such a program was "the best insurance policy" that Soviet interest in arms reductions would continue. When the two leaders met last November in Geneva for the first time they reaffirmed their commitment to deep cuts in strategic weapons and agreed to hold successive summits, in 1986 and 1987, in Washington and Moscow.

Instead, Gorbachev last month proposed a meeting in Iceland to give an "impulse" to the arms negotiators and Reagan accepted it, saying the meeting would be a preparatory one for a full-dress summit in the United States. But White House chief of staff Donald T. Regan also indicated that there would not be a Reagan-Gorbachev summit in the United States. In a news conference here, Regan said, "No, there will not be another summit in the near future that I can see at this time. The Soviets are the ones who refused to make the deal. It shows them up for what they are." Reagan had vowed before he left Washington to raise human rights issues face-to-face with Gorbachev, and Shultz said tonight that the president had. But progress in this area was blocked by the final disagreement on the SDI provision. "The issue of human rights was brought up on a number of occasions and some very significant material was passed on to the Soviet Union," said Shultz. He said that this included lists of Jews who had been denied permission to emigrate and numbers of people who had signified their desire to leave.

Shultz said that the subject would have been explicitly referred to if the two sides had issued a statement at the end of the talks. He said also that the two sides had reached a tentative agreement today on reducing intermediate-range missiles on terms favorable to the U.S. position. He said the two sides had agreed to global limits on these missiles that would have eliminated them entirely from Europe. Each side would have been permitted "a global ceiling on INF missiles of 100 warheads," Shultz said. The Soviet missiles would have been stationed in Asia and the U.S. missiles in the United States. Asked why the two sides did not at least go back and take up the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces part again, which they agreed on at least in principle, Shultz cited fatigue as a factor in the break-up of the talks: "Human beings being what they are, and the hour being what it was, to say, 'Well now let's just go back and talk about this, that and the other thing' -- there was just no mood to do that in any effective way," Shultz said.

The failure to conclude an INF agreement that would have removed all missiles from Europe because of American determination to continue Star Wars could also produce renewed friction with U.S. allies in Europe. The Soviets in recent months had led the United States to believe that INF and other aspects of the arms package could be achieved independently of an SDI agreement but yesterday it appeared that they had restored the linkage between all the elements. Gorbachev indicated to reporters that all of the arms reductions were necessarily conditioned on limiting SDI. Shultz said the meeting just "adjourned" when the two sides, after their long negotiations, could not reach accommodation on the missile defense issue. Asked whether he thought the Soviet position was "set in concrete," Shultz replied, "I don't know what concrete is like, but it seemed fairly firm." © Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company GORBACHEV CALLS FOR 'STAR PEACE' - NYTimes.com GORBACHEV CALLS FOR 'STAR PEACE' By STEVEN R. WEISMAN, Special to the New York Times Published: November 28, 1986 NEW DELHI, Friday, Nov. 28— Mikhail S.

Gorbachev, bringing his campaign against President Reagan's space-based missile defense program to India, said Thursday that ''what we need is Star Peace and not Star Wars.'' The Soviet leader, in some of the toughest language he has used against ''Star Wars,'' denounced the research program as a ''voracious monster'' derived from a ''fundamentally inhumane'' concept. Mr. Gorbachev, speaking at a Soviet cultural center here on the third day of his four-day visit to India, accused the United States of showing the ''arrogance of power'' in pushing for the anti-missile system, officially called the Strategic Defense Initiative. He called on India and other developing countries to join in opposing it. Mr. Gorbachev's visit was his first opportunity to take many of his themes to the developing world since the collapse of the summit meeting with Mr. Reagan in Iceland in October. 'Hostage to S.D.I.' ''Many people everywhere are legitimately wondering why, by virtue of what right, should the whole world be held hostage to the S.D.I.,'' Mr. Gorbachev said.

''One may ask, where will the United States, with its $2 trillion national debt, obtain the resources to finance it?'' At a news conference this morning before his departure, Mr. Gorbachev assailed the United States for its reported action in exceeding ceilings set in the second treaty limiting strategic arms, which was agreed upon by Washington and Moscow but never ratified. He said such a step demonstrated ''contempt'' for the treaty and was ''contradictory to the entire logic of the Reykyavik talks'' and he called on countries throughout the world to protest to Washington. Mr. Gorbachev said he had only seen press reports to the effect that the United States had exceeded the treaty limits by arming additional B-52 bombers with cruise missiles, and had not received any official confirmation. But he said, ''If this was done, we regard this as a major mistake which will make it more difficult to search for the approaches to disarmament.'' In a earlier speech to members of Parliament Thursday night, Mr.

Gorbachev said that outer space was the ''common property of mankind'' and that ''what we need is Star Peace and not Star Wars.'' To this end, he called for creation of an international center to carry out research and development in space at the request of developing nations. He said he would welcome its establishment in India, which already has an extensive space program, with its own rockets and satellites. As he has found repeatedly this week, Mr. Gorbachev's audience was highly receptive to his appeals. The Parliament members in the cavernous central hall of the 60-year-old building repeatedly applauded and pounded their desks in agreement. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had earlier repeated his own denunciations of ''Star Wars.'' On Tuesday, the day Mr. Gorbachev arrived, he hailed the Soviet leader as a ''crusader for peace.'' Many Public Ceremonies Until Thursday, Mr. Gorbachev had confined his public remarks to generalities and had only indirectly referred to the United States. Instead, he has held long meetings with Mr. Gandhi and attended many public ceremonies, as has his wife, Raisa.

The meetings culminated in a series of agreements signed by the two leaders Thursday, including one calling for $1 billion in economic aid over the next several years for the construction of power plants and industrial modernization. The new aid plan goes beyond a separate $700 million package signed after Mr. Gandhi visited the Soviet Union last year. Indian economists said the main advantage of the new package derived from its more favorable terms. Under the new plan, the Soviet Union is expected to help finance a larger share of the industrial projects, freeing India of the need to contribute from its own resources. The new agreement also calls for Moscow to develop entire projects itself and then turn them over to India. Mr. Gandhi and Mr. Gorbachev also issued a ''Delhi declaration'' calling for ''complete destruction of nuclear arsenals before the end of this century'' and for barring all weapons from outer space, banning nuclear weapons tests and chemical weapons and reducing conventional arms. Visit Is Carefully Watched Diplomats have been carefully watching how much Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Gandhi would strengthen Indian-Soviet ties. It appeared that although they have not changed their positions on specific issues, they went out of their way to express solidarity.

Mr. Gorbachev also held two less-publicized meetings Thursday with the leaders of India's two Communist parties. He did not refer to certain contentious issues in the region, including those involving Pakistan and Afghanistan, where Soviet forces are fighting Islamic guerrillas. Instead, he emphasized in his speeches Thursday the need to reduce foreign military forces in the Indian Ocean. He called also for ''confidence-building measures in the military field'' in Asia and the Indian and Pacific Oceans, including prior notifications of military maneuvers. Gorbachev and Reagan previous | next Gorbachev and Reagan The President of the United States since 1981 was Ronald Reagan. He had been calling the Soviet Union an evil empire. He was afraid of nuclear war and was committed to developing a perfect defense system called Star Wars. Reagan's critics complained it would seem to the Russians to give the US a first strike capability – eliminating the possibility of retaliation. President Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, writes that Reagan wanted to end the arms race and wanted to convince the Soviet leaders that it was in their interest to come to an accommodation with the West. Matlock writes: Reagan set out to construct a framework for negotiation that would stress accommodation rather than confrontation.

NOTE: Matlock, Superpower Illusions, p. 31 – a book endorsed by Reagan's Secretary of State, George P. Shultz. William F. Buckley Jr. (above) and some other conservatives were disturbed by Reagan's friendliness with Gorbachev. The columnist George Will complained that "Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy." Khrushchev and Brezhnev had believed that Soviet military prowess was necessary to restrain the capitalist powers from attacking the Soviet Union and its satellites, and they believed that foreign policy should be a part of the class struggle. Gorbachev was on a different tack. A part of Gorbachev's plan to improve the economy was to reduce military spending. He believed that the Soviet military was absorbing too much wealth and scarce resources, and he believed that one way to reduce military spending was to make an arms agreement with the United States. Gorbachev saw US leaders as rational, as not interested in destroying the Soviet Union through war and as wanting to avoid a nuclear holocaust. Gorbachev believed that the capitalist powers were not in need of restraint provided by the Soviet Union.

He remained a Marxist but rejected applying the class struggle to foreign policy. There were many who had favored belligerence and threats against the Soviet Union in order to diminish Communism. But the opposite was happening. It was a friendly US, represented by Reagan, that was diminishing Soviet Communism. Matlock writes that, Reagan knew very well that cordiality alone was not enough. He had to convince Gorbachev, among other things, that the United States was not trying to break up the Soviet Union or to use arms reduction in order to create a military advantage. (p. 48) Some were to describe Reagan as having forced Gorbachev to adopt his new policy toward the Cold War because of the Soviet Union's inability to keep up with US advances in military spending. But this is not quite what happened. The Soviet Union's military wanted to keep up with the US, but Gorbachev argued with them. Reagan's Star Wars idea and his hostile attitude toward the "evil empire" made Gorbachev's arguments more difficult, but Gorbachev remained convinced that reductions in military spending were necessary to improve the Soviet economy, and Gorbachev let military spending decline with the decline of the Soviet economy in general.

Back in April, 1985 – his first month in office – Gorbachev had announced his first unilateral initiative: a temporary freeze on the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe. Gorbachev met Reagan at Geneva a few months later, in November, and they met again in October 1986 at Reykjavik in Iceland, and yet again in May 1988 at a summit meeting in Moscow. Gorbachev and Reagan became friends, Gorbachev recognizing that Reagan sincerely wanted to avoid a nuclear holocaust and that he was a man of decency and sincerity – a former actor who was not faking it. And Reagan saw Gorbachev as something other than an evil Communist robot. Gorbachev convinced Reagan that he was sincere in wanting to end the arms race and in collaborating with the West in restructuring relations. Reagan and his advisor concerning Soviet affairs, Jack Matlock, ambassador to the Soviet Union, were pursuing a strategy of achieving change by offering the Soviet Union what they could see was in their interest. They were not trying to bully the Soviet Union – which, according to Matlock, would have been counter productive.

Reagan became the leading "dove" in his administration while he was being attacked by conservatives outside his administration. Howard Phillips called Reagan "a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda" and "an apologist for Gorbachev." William F. Buckley complained that, "To greet it [the Soviet Union] as if it were no longer evil is on the order of changing our entire position toward Adolf Hitler." There proved to be a benefit from Gorbachev having judged President Reagan as someone he could trust and as wanting peace. Gorbachev stunned Reagan's advisors by agreeing to disarmament proposals that these advisors had put forth merely as a bargaining ploy. Meanwhile, Gorbachev's attitudes were making him popular in Western Europe and the United States, where people were calling him "Gorbie." And soon Gorbachev would win the Nobel prize for peace. According to Matlock, Reagan writes, Let there be no talk of winners and losers. Even if we think we won, to say so would set us back. (p.41) President Reagan would visit the Soviet Union in May, 1988. He was received warmly by ordinary citizens and enthusiastically by students responding to his speech at Moscow University.

In Moscow he would be asked by journalists whether he still thought the Soviet Union was an evil empire. "No," he replied, "that was another time, another era." (p. 46) The Reykjavik Summit: The Story — The Reagan Vision The Reykjavik Summit On October 11, 1986, halfway between Moscow and Washington, D.C., the leaders of the world’s two superpowers met at the stark and picturesque Hofdi House in Reykjavik, Iceland. Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev had proposed the meeting to President Ronald Reagan less than thirty days before. The expectations for the summit at Reykjavik were low. Reagan and Gorbachev had established a personal relationship just one year before at their Geneva Summit. In Geneva they attempted to reach agreement on bilateral nuclear arms reductions. Since then, their negotiators had reached an impasse. Both leaders hoped a face to face meeting at Reykjavik might revive the negotiations. The talks between Reagan and Gorbachev at Reykjavik proceeded at a breakneck pace. Gorbachev agreed that human rights issues were a legitimate topic of discussion, something no previous Soviet leader had ever agreed to.

A proposal to eliminate all new strategic missiles grew into a discussion, for the first time in history, of the real possibility of eliminating nuclear weapons forever. Aides to both leaders were shocked by the pace of the discussions. A summit that began with low expectations had blossomed into one of the most dramatic and potentially productive summits of all time. At one point Reagan even described to Gorbachev how both men might return to Reykjavik in ten years, aged and retired leaders, to personally witness the dismantling of the world’s last remaining nuclear warhead. But one point of contention remained. Reagan was committed to see his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to completion. Gorbachev, fearing an imbalance of power, was equally determined to make sure SDI would never be implemented. Reagan offered assurances to Gorbachev that the missile defense shield, which he had championed and funded despite widespread criticism at home, was being developed not to gain an advantage, but to offer safety against accidents or outlaw nations. Reagan offered many times to share this technology with the Soviets, which Gorbachev refused to believe.

Toward the end of the long and stressful final negotiations Gorbachev would accept continued development of SDI as long as testing was confined to the laboratory for the next ten years. Reagan would not agree. He could not and would not allow the division of his two-part strategy of the simultaneous elimination of nuclear weapons with the creation of a missile defense shield. After the negotiations broke down without a final agreement, Reagan wrote that he left the meeting knowing how close they had come to achieving his long goal of eliminating the threat of nuclear destruction, and that this was the angriest moment of his career. Despite failing to achieve either man’s ultimate goal, Reykjavik will be recorded as one of the most important summits in history. A year after Reykjavik the U.S. and Soviet Union signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), for the first time eliminating an entire class of nuclear weapons. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) was signed a few years later during President H.W Bush’s term. None of this progress would have been possible without the courage of two leaders to look beyond past hostilities and forge a new and lasting relationship, that would soon provide greater security for people around the world.

Question: Where did Reagan and Gorbachev have their Star Wars summit in October 19865?
Answer: Iceland