THE REYKJAVIK SUMMIT : Reagan Views: ‘More Progress Than Anticipated’

Here is a transcript of President Reagan’s comments Sunday to U.S. service personnel and their families at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization base and airport at Keflavik about his talks with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev:

It’s good to feel so at home.

And I want to apologize for being so late.

As you know, General Secretary Gorbachev and I were to have concluded our talks at noon after more than 7 1/2 hours of meetings over the last two days. But when the hour for departure arrived, we both felt that further discussions would be valuable.

So I called Nancy and told her I wouldn’t be home for dinner. She said she understood. In about 6 1/2 hours I’ll find out.

The talks we just concluded were hard and tough and I would have to say extremely useful. We spoke about arms control, human rights and regional conflicts. And of course Mr. Gorbachev and I were frank about our disagreements. We had to be.

In several critical areas we made more progress than we anticipated when we came to Iceland. We moved toward agreement on drastically reduced numbers of intermediate-range missiles in both Europe and Asia. 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.

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 future Presidents for 10 years the right to develop, test and deploy a defense against nuclear missiles for the people of the Free World.

This we could not and will not do.

So late this afternoon I made to the general secretary an entirely new proposal, a 10-year delay in deployment of SDI in exchange for the complete elimination of all ballistic missiles from the respective arsenals of both nations. 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.

The general secretary said he would consider our offer only if we restricted all work on SDI to laboratory research, which would have killed our defensive shield.

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.

However, we made great strides in Iceland in resolving most of our differences, and we’re going to continue the effort.