The Men Who Broke the Ice in Iceland

Ten years ago this week, the Reykjavik summit on nuclear disarmament between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev looked like a miserable failure:

After hammering out tentative agreements on missile cutbacks, Gorbachev suddenly demanded that the United States stop work on the anti-missile Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan refused. And both sides went home from Iceland grumbling.

Subsequent events, however, have revised the negative assessment, according to key summit participants who reunited Monday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to reexamine the apparently failed faceoff.

Later arms talks led to sharp cutbacks and calmer relations between the United States and the Soviets, they said. And Communist rule over the Soviet Union state eventually fell apart.

Now, with the two superpowers’ nuclear arsenals either limited by treaty or lying in pieces, the world can look back on the summit in Iceland as a pivotal moment in the Cold War, said former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

The Reykjavik summit “was so widely misunderstood, even at the time perhaps by the participants,” Shultz told the library audience of more than 300. “It was a conceptual breakthrough. Suddenly, thinking big became possible.”

Shultz recalled Gorbachev telling him years later that the summit had been a turning point in relations between the superpowers, “because really, for the first time, there was a deep, genuine conversation between the leaders of the two sides. We really went at it and talked about the things that mattered.”

In a letter read publicly Monday at the conference, Gorbachev recalled Reykjavik as a place where “President Reagan and I were able to look over the horizon to a world where mankind would be free of the threat of nuclear war.”

The two years leading up to the October 1986 summit were a dark period in U.S.-Soviet relations.

Unable to persuade the Soviets to remove nuclear missiles from Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had deployed missiles of its own. Soviet warplanes shot down a Korean Airlines jet. And Soviets in Moscow arrested U.S. journalist Nicholas Daniloff on spying charges.

Meanwhile, the KGB and the Soviet military-industrial complex tightly controlled Soviet negotiators’ best attempts at disarmament, recalled Alexander Yakovlev, a former Gorbachev advisor and top official in the Communist Party.

“To this day, I’m amazed, and I don’t know how we managed to break that machine,” Yakovlev said Monday.

At the Reykjavik summit, Gorbachev’s translator remembered watching a change in the once chilly stance between the Soviets and the Americans:

“Toward the end, when I saw what could be a crisis because of SDI, I saw, too, that the two men were at it,” said Pavel Palazchenko. “There was beginning to be a change in chemistry. . . . Trust [between them] changed.”

On the American side, Reagan held fast to his demands, especially that the United States continue to build SDI to guard against missile attack by rogue countries, recalled Kenneth L. Adelman, who ran the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

And the Soviets eventually softened their stance, tossing aside plans to denounce the United States and its policies as a threat to the world. Instead, arms treaties were hammered out, and eventually revolution throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union broke the rein of communism.