The forty years that separate us from the Reykjavik summit are only one year shorter than the distance from the summit to the end of World War II. I am not quite sure what to do with this fact, other than to note that most of the summit participants had clear memories of the war as well as of everything that came after, just as people of my generation remember the summit and most of what happened in the four decades since.

Watching US-Soviet summitry from Moscow was quite exciting. By the fall of 1986 it was clear that the Soviet Union was changing, but inside the country things were moving too slowly to tell how dramatic this change would become. Nuclear disarmament, though, was where things were happening right then.

Reykjavik was, of course, a big deal, and I watched Gorbachev's post-summit press conference live with a group of student friends (on a small TV in a cramped room).[1] It was a pretty dramatic experience. Television was our only source of news at the time, so we had absolutely no idea how the summit had ended. And Gorbachev kept us in suspense, starting with a list of things that the Soviet Union had done in the year or so before the summit: the moratorium on nuclear tests, the plan to eliminate nuclear weapons by the year 2000, and the proposal to reduce conventional forces in Europe. He then went on to list all the things that the two leaders had agreed on: to cut their strategic forces in half across the entire triad and to eliminate all intermediate-range missiles in Europe. To make this possible, the Soviet Union agreed to cut half of its heavy ICBMs and not to insist on including the forces of France and the UK in the European arrangement. Gorbachev also stressed that the Soviet Union was ready to accept strict verification provisions.

All this looked like a genuine breakthrough, and it was hard to believe that it was real. But then Gorbachev said that none of this would happen because of the disagreement over SDI. Which was, you know, disappointing. Ultimately, most of the things Gorbachev and Reagan agreed on in Reykjavik were turned into actual agreements--the INF Treaty in 1987, START in 1991, the end of nuclear testing (also discussed in Reykjavik) and the CTBT in the 1990s. But we did not know this at the time.

The odd thing about that disagreement is that it was rather trivial. Reagan and Gorbachev had already agreed that neither party would withdraw from the ABM Treaty for ten years. The question was whether work on missile defense during this period would be limited to laboratories. What counted as a laboratory was never well defined, but it was this condition that became the sticking point. In reality, of course, there was no grand missile defense to deploy ten years after Reykjavik. Or forty, for that matter.

The outcome of the summit has been interpreted in many different ways, but one version seems to stand out--that Gorbachev was so anxious about US missile defense that he was prepared to make serious concessions to stop it. After the summit, Reagan was applauded at home for not giving in to Soviet pressure and for keeping SDI alive.

There is no doubt that Gorbachev worried about the nuclear arms race. It was clear to anyone who lived in the Soviet Union that the economy was not working and something had to be done. I am sure that the idea that the country was spending too much on defense crossed the minds of the political leadership, but I don't think it was the primary motive behind the push for nuclear disarmament.

As far as I can tell, the reasons behind that push were more complex. There was clearly a feeling that things were getting dangerous and might get out of control. I am somewhat skeptical about the Able Archer story, but the air and naval probes, as well as the aggressive rhetoric, were quite real. The sense of danger, by the way, was not confined to the Soviet Union. In many ways it was more acute in the West, if only because people had better information about what their governments were up to and no good way of knowing what the Soviet motivations were.

Not that the Soviet leaders knew exactly where the country was heading. But unlike their US counterparts, they eventually asked themselves, even if only implicitly: "What's the point of all this?" Asking this question, however, was much easier than finding a practical way out of the cycle of confrontation. By the 1980s, the military-industrial complex that sustained the arms race had become a formidable institution that commanded significant material and human resources and was difficult to control.

The defense industry saw the US military buildup as an opportunity, not necessarily as a threat. Boris Vinogradov, one of the designers of the Moscow missile defense system, described to me the reaction of his colleagues to the SDI announcement: "Now we are in business!" And the industry did not really need SDI to push its own projects. Anatoly Savin, the chief designer of the early-warning system, described to me one of his proposals as a system that would have been better than SDI: "SDI would shoot down missiles after launch; my system would hit them before launch." In 1979-1980, Vladimir Chelomey proposed building a missile defense system in space (probably building on Savin's ideas). That proposal was turned down at the time but re-emerged later.

In July 1985, the Soviet government approved a package of major programs that the industry presented as a response to SDI. It was an extensive wish list that included pretty much everything the industry was working on plus many forward-looking programs. (More details are in my old paper "Did Star Wars Help End the Cold War?" or in my even older dissertation.) The package came up for approval only a few months after Gorbachev assumed leadership, so he was not quite in a position to challenge it. To do so, he needed to build a case. Gorbachev already had allies inside the system. For example, Evgeny Velikhov was involved in an internal assessment of SDI and in a public effort to make an argument against the program. Interestingly, the military also largely supported Gorbachev in his disarmament push. But the key was getting the United States on board. And SDI was a very big part of that.

In my view, that was a major reason why Gorbachev was so concerned about SDI in Reykjavik. He needed an argument that he could take to the grandees of the Soviet defense industry to have a chance of slowing down their programs. The irony is that the Soviet Union was probably closer than the United States to the actual deployment of some weapon systems in space, and it was a dangerous process that was not easy to stop.

In the end, despite the disagreement on SDI, the Reykjavik summit showed that the United States was open to a disarmament dialogue, making it easier to divert attention and resources from expensive and dangerous programs. The Soviet Union, of course, made some serious concessions, but it was not like they made the country less secure. If anything, quite the contrary.

Writing this in October 2026, I cannot help noting that many achievements of that time have been lost. There is no INF Treaty or New START; the US is back to the idea of space-based missile defense; tensions are high again. And, of course, Russia is waging a full-scale war against Ukraine. Peace, as it turned out, was easy to lose.

If you want to be an optimist, though, imagine someone in 1983 saying that in a few years the United States and the Soviet Union would agree to eliminate all intermediate-range missiles, drastically reduce conventional forces in Europe, and cut their strategic nuclear arsenals in half. This person would have been laughed out of the room. And yet.

Photo: Höfði House in 2011. It is surprisingly small.

1. Here is the transcript of that press conference, put together by Claude from the TV broadcast and the official text published in Pravda.