What brought the decades-long Soviet-American confrontation to an end? Here, Ken Adelman stakes out an answer in his book’s subtitle: He maintains that the 1986 summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev was one of the critical turning points of the 20th century. Is he right? As director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under Reagan, Adelman was in attendance at the Reykjavik conclave as one of the president’s briefers. He has also plumbed the documentary record of both sides—much of it now declassified—to make his case.
The key issue under discussion at the summit was nuclear weapons. It was the vast arsenals, possessed by both superpowers, of these awesomely destructive devices that made the Cold War so terrifying. Adelman begins his reconstruction of the episode by making evident the unsurprising fact that both leaders came to Iceland with radically diverging objectives. Reagan came in quest of nuclear disarmament. Ironically, Reagan, reputed by the left to be an incorrigible anti-Communist warmonger, had dreamed of a world without nuclear weapons long before our current nuclear-zero movement got off the ground. He saw Reykjavik as an opportunity to move in that direction without compromising on his larger objective—openly voiced to the British Parliament in 1982—of placing the Soviet system “on the ash heap of history.”
A 1979 visit to NORAD, the American strategic command center, had left Reagan appalled by what, to him (in Adelman’s telling), was a revelation: The United States had no means of responding to a Soviet nuclear strike other than by striking the Soviet Union in return, with both sides suffering millions of deaths. That bleak reality planted a question in Reagan’s mind that he voiced to an aide: “We have spent all that money, and have all that equipment, and there is nothing we can do to prevent a nuclear missile from hitting us?” Two years later, having trounced Jimmy Carter in a landslide, and now in the Oval Office controlling the levers of power, Reagan worked with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to formulate an answer to the question that so troubled him. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was born.
“Star wars” was how Reagan’s ballistic missile defense program was derisively dubbed by its critics. In their eyes, it was an exorbitantly expensive technological fantasy that knocked the legs out from under the central premise of the postwar peace: the nuclear standoff known as Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. According to MAD doctrine, security depended on the mutual ability of the United States and the Soviet Union to annihilate each other. But as Adelman points out, in many quarters “the descriptive fact that each side was vulnerable . . . became a prescriptive tenet, that each side should be vulnerable.”
That belief in the virtues of vulnerability was enshrined in the anti-ballistic missile treaty of 1972, which, by banning defensive systems, guaranteed that the United States and the Soviet Union could annihilate each other. Reagan, however, rejected MAD root and branch, believing that both sides would be better off erecting defensive systems while—and here his thinking was strikingly utopian—simultaneously reducing their offensive nuclear arsenals to zero.
Mikhail Gorbachev came to Reykjavik with very different concerns. He was desperate to curtail arms spending that was bankrupting the Soviet Union. Adelman, drawing on once-top-secret Kremlin documents, recounts how, on the eve of the summit, Gorbachev told his fellow Politburo members that if Reykjavik failed, “we will be pulled into an arms race beyond our power, and we will lose this race [because] we are presently at the limit of our capabilities.”
Of particular concern to Gorbachev was SDI, which he saw as a major new weapons program that the Soviet Union could not match. It was high-tech, drawing on the latest in computerization, miniaturization, and advanced materials, while the Soviet Union was vividly demonstrating its ineptitude in handling even more primitive technology. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster had occurred only months before Reykjavik, costing many lives and billions of rubles and spewing a plume of radioactive particles across Europe. On the very eve of the summit, a leak of seawater caused a missile to explode aboard a Soviet nuclear submarine in the Atlantic, prompting Gorbachev to tell his colleagues: “Because of the submarine which just sank, everybody knows, everybody saw, the shape we’re in.”
Of course, the irony here was that the technology for SDI that so alarmed Gorbachev was then only in its infancy. But with Reagan convincingly professing (and quite possibly believing) it to be nearly ready for deployment, and with the KGB offering the Soviet leadership an inflated estimate of its capabilities, SDI was perceived as a game-changer that would give a decisive advantage, in both military power and national prestige, to the United States.
For the Russians, Reykjavik was the arena in which the strategic disaster of SDI could be brought to a halt. In fierce exchanges with Reagan, Gorbachev declared himself ready to accept deep cuts in the Soviet nuclear arsenal if the United States would agree to confine SDI to the research laboratory. Again and again, Gorbachev insisted; again and again, Reagan demurred. The negotiations broke down. Both sides returned home with expectations dashed. Criticism rained down on Reagan for having blown an opportunity to secure world peace: “bumbling . . . a fiasco,” declared then-freshman senator Albert Gore.
Adelman recounts all of this engrossingly, taking us blow by blow through the talks and the aftermath while also offering numerous amusing asides about the comings and goings in Iceland during the summit. With little news to report while the talks were underway, the world’s media obsessed over Raisa Gorbachev, focusing on her sense of fashion. “I’m not crazy about her hair. It looks like it has a freeway or a grand canal coming down the middle,” was the quotation one news outlet garnered from Nancy Reagan’s hairstylist.
As for whether the summit really brought the Cold War to an end, the author equivocates: “Reykjavik alone did not end the Cold War,” writes Adelman at the conclusion of this book. “Only the uninformed or the sensationalistic could claim that it did.” (Never mind that this statement baldly contradicts the subtitle of his own book!) Adelman wisely switches gears to endorse the more modest claim that Reykjavik was a critically important junction on a road whose destination was, as yet, unclear.
It was critically important because, above all else, Reagan’s insistence on proceeding with SDI shook Mikhail Gorbachev and his entourage to their core. Returning to Moscow empty-handed, Gorbachev well knew that the Soviet Union could not compete with the United States if it did not embark on far-reaching reform. As he was later to acknowledge: “We were increasingly behind the West . . . and I was ashamed for my country—perhaps the country with the richest resources on Earth, and we couldn’t provide toothpaste for our people.”
Gorbachev’s chosen method of providing toothpaste and rescuing the Soviet Union from its stagnation—a sprinkle of political freedom under the banner of glasnost and a dash of economic liberalization under the banner of perestroika—destabilized a system that was both too rigid and too rotten for any leader to reform. In short order, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed.
Reagan at Reykjavik is well worth reading for its persuasive demonstration of the thesis (as stated in Adelman’s toned-down reformulation) that Ronald Reagan’s refusal to negotiate SDI away “accelerated a series of events that brought down the Soviet Union.” Along the way, Adelman does an admirable job of conveying Reagan’s extraordinary talents as a leader. Reagan knew where he wanted to take the country, and he was not reluctant to say or to do what was necessary to get there. From the inception of his presidency, he embraced the audacious goal of bringing down the “evil empire,” a characterization of America’s Cold War adversary for which he was lampooned at home but which resonated powerfully inside the Soviet Union and the captive nations. He was not afraid to challenge the Soviet Union frontally, as he did in the face of dire warnings about the consequences when he traveled to Berlin to declare, “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
If Reagan at Reykjavik has a single significant shortcoming, it revolves around its treatment of the campaign for “nuclear-zero.” Adelman credits Reagan for having “mainstreamed” this “formerly flaky movement,” a movement that he himself endorses and which President Obama has turned into national policy. Adelman approvingly notes that, on the 20th anniversary of Reykjavik, the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed a resolution supporting the summit’s goal of a world without nuclear weapons. He hails this as a “true Kellogg-Briand moment” and comments that it “would have delighted Ronald Reagan.”
That is a ridiculous inversion. The 1928 Kellogg-Briand pact, a treaty to renounce war as an instrument of national policy, was signed by some 62 countries, among them Germany, Italy, and Japan. As Adelman himself acknowledges, it was an epic failure. Reagan may have spoken on occasion of the noble aims of the pact; but if he believed anything, it was that pieces of paper like Kellogg-Briand could not be relied on to stop aggression. As Reagan told the United Nations General Assembly:
Despite what Ken Adelman implicitly suggests, the Ronald Reagan who embraced the idea of eliminating all nuclear weapons has not an iota in common with those, like Barack Obama, who embrace the same idea today and employ it as a substitute for genuine action against mounting threats. Our 40th president may have had a utopian streak, but he was not a utopian: “Trust but verify” were his watchwords, and “peace through strength” was his credo. Reagan would have had nothing but withering words for a president who calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons while simultaneously slashing the defense budget, who publicly vacillates over major national-security decisions, and who practically begs the nuclear-aspiring mullahs of Iran for a piece of paper bearing their signatures.
Gabriel Schoenfeld is the author, most recently, of Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law.
