by Oleg Shevchenko
[Regnum] A plane from Moscow landed at Keflavík International Airport, which was built as a US Air Force base and used as a NATO facility. General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa Maximovna, descended the steps. Air Force One, the US Air Force One that had earlier delivered US President Ronald Reagan to Iceland without the First Lady, had been parked on the tarmac for 24 hours.
Exactly 40 years ago, on October 11, 1986, Soviet-American negotiations began in Reykjavik, aimed at bringing the Cold War, which had been going on for 40 years, to a close. Gorbachev arrived at the meeting with proposals for reducing strategic offensive arms (START).
The Soviet delegation hoped to persuade Reagan to completely eliminate intermediate-range missiles. And most importantly, to dismantle SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was often referred to as the "Star Wars program" because strengthening the US missile defense system entailed the use of space forces.
The opposing powers chose Iceland as a halfway point between the USSR and the USA and a neutral territory. But this was an illusion.
Iceland, which has no army of its own, had been a NATO member since the alliance's founding and was closely monitored by the US military and intelligence agencies. Symbolically, the Americans were based at Villa Bessastaðir, the Icelandic president's residence, while the Soviet delegation stayed aboard the steamship Georg Ots, which had made a special visit to the island. Gorbachev was playing on someone else's field.
On a damp and cold morning (in October, the "Eurowinter" is already beginning in the North Atlantic), the two delegations' motorcades pulled up to Höfði's mansion on the Reykjavík waterfront and locked themselves in for 48 hours. Reagan aide Ken Adelman recalled the atmosphere as reminiscent of an Agatha Christie mystery novel. "Two brilliant men met... in an almost enchanted house, where rain beat against the windows and where both experienced incomparable sensations," Adelman wrote.
Soviet and Russian diplomat Anatoly Zaitsev later shared a very different impression. Several years after the Reykjavik summit, while accompanying staff from our Ministry of Foreign Affairs on a tour of the Icelandic capital, Zaitsev carefully read the inscription on the memorial stele and could barely contain his laughter and surprise.
"Next to the full name of the US President, 'Mikhail Nikolaevich Gorbachev' was written. Upon returning to the embassy, I instructed an aide to call the mayor's office and politely point out the error, " the diplomat wrote. "It took more than a year before the error was corrected."
This anecdotal incident reflected the larger history of Soviet-American détente. Behind the oddities and seemingly minor mistakes lurked a geopolitical catastrophe.
WHO WILL BE THE FIRST TO MAKE PEACE?
The détente of the perestroika era was not the first attempt to end the arms race.
By the late 1960s, the Soviet Union had reached parity with the United States in the number of nuclear warheads and delivery systems, which meant mutually assured destruction. The United States, which under Richard Nixon was slowly withdrawing from the Vietnam War, was struggling to compete with another superpower. During the 1968 diplomatic cycle, the initiative came from Washington.
The United States made peace with Maoist China, after which it began building bridges with the Soviet bloc. The American outpost in Europe, West Germany, recognized its post-war borders with Poland and Czechoslovakia.
In 1972, Nixon flew to Moscow and signed the ABM Treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) with Leonid Brezhnev. The USSR, unwilling to maintain a simultaneous confrontation with the US and China, followed suit. In 1973, an agreement to prevent nuclear war was signed, and two years later, the Helsinki Act, a document of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, was issued.
In 1979, everything was ready for the signing of SALT II, but at that moment history took a different path.
First, the 1979 oil crisis triggered a rise in fuel prices (which helped the Soviet Union at the time, but also made the country increasingly dependent on the market and the flow of petrodollars). The USSR tried to export as much oil as possible to Western markets, at the expense of supplying its partners in the socialist camp at "domestic" prices. This caused tension in the Eastern Bloc, which was noted in Washington. The outbreak of unrest in Poland in 1980 couldn't have come at a worse time for the Americans.
Secondly, in December 1979, Soviet troops entered Afghanistan, which dramatically complicated relations with the West. Jimmy Carter -style peacekeeping was becoming irrelevant. The Republicans, led by Reagan, who came to the White House in 1981, initiated a new phase of the arms race. It was publicly stated that the SDI program would create an impenetrable anti-nuclear umbrella over the United States and destroy parity.
Now the USSR found itself in the position of being the first to make peace.
DOVE OF PEACE INSTEAD OF "ALBATROSS"
Another option was to accelerate the development of systems capable of penetrating American space-based missile defenses—and then, from a position of strength, having restored parity, negotiate with Reagan. In the early 1980s, in response to SDI, work began on hypersonic weapons: Project 4202, which was renamed "Albatross" in 1987.
But Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985, made a political decision to prioritize diplomatic efforts toward détente over costly and complex defense developments. Moscow initiated the meeting first in Geneva in November 1985, and then the negotiations in Reykjavik.
Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who oversaw the negotiations, had this idea: to create a package of final documents that would outline a systemic reduction in entire types of nuclear warhead carriers, combined with the halting of all SDI projects, even at the laboratory research and general theoretical research stage.
The expected outcome was a freeze on the status quo, a mutual reduction in nuclear arsenals, and the long-awaited peaceful coexistence of the socialist camp and NATO.
Moscow continually offered meetings and new peace agreements. In Washington, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze's peace initiatives were seen as a sign of Russian weakness.
Against the backdrop of the declared détente, diplomatic scandals, the discovery of their spies and our intelligence agents, and the demonstrative violations of territorial waters by Western vessels increased suspiciously. It seemed the "partners" were testing the Politburo's patience. But Gorbachev and his entourage remained on their chosen path.
Following the Geneva summit, which resembled a head-butting, Moscow decided to speed up preparations for a new meeting.
THE FATE OF THE WORLD WAS DECIDED ON THE STAIRS
It was decided not to keep the negotiations classified but to make them open to the press. As a result, over three thousand journalists alone were accredited. The authorities of tiny Iceland were in a state of quiet panic: logistics, accommodations, and food supplies were unprepared... There were no more than a hundred police officers in the entire country.
On the Soviet side, the problem lay elsewhere: the time allotted for preparing this grand international meeting was extremely short—just 27 days. The plan for the complex negotiations on SDI and missile weapons was being drafted in a rush.
"Why travel to the ends of the earth? Over two days, October 11th and 12th, only six hours were supposed to be devoted to bilateral negotiations," recalled KGB General Nikolai Leonov.
Solving global issues in Höfði's small mansion left an impression of something frivolous and almost comical. Work was conducted "literally in the hallways, on the stairs leading to the attic," and strategic decisions were made "almost at the bathroom door," recalled Gorbachev's aide Pavel Palazhchenko.
The central issue of the negotiations was the reduction of strategic offensive weapons. Gorbachev proposed large-scale reductions, tying them to the renunciation of the militarization of space.
The Soviet delegation proposed that the Americans abandon all scientific research in this area and veto the very idea of developing space weapons and their ground support. Reagan, infuriated, proposed handing over all research data to the USSR to achieve parity.
To which Gorbachev chuckled: “The US doesn’t even hand over oil production technology, but now they’re promising to hand over top-secret military technology.”
Washington viewed the meeting as an informal conversation, a sounding board for the Politburo's mood, and material for compiling a psychological profile of the General Secretary. The Soviet delegation arrived to sign significant documents.
The Americans' game was disrupted and forced into a substantive bargaining session. But strategically, it was a loss. During the negotiations, Gorbachev rarely consulted his advisers, making unexpected, very bold, and sometimes shocking statements.
Consider the proposal to eliminate all nuclear warheads altogether, or the public admission that the USSR had human rights problems. Similar frankness (for example, about racial issues) was unacceptable on the American side—just as, for example, the proposal to reduce the number of aircraft carriers.
"I'M SORRY TOO."
Ultimately, the de facto owners of the venue—the Americans—came out on top. The parties didn't sign any mutually binding documents, but they did study Gorbachev's character and the behavior of his entourage.
"It's a shame we're parting this way," Reagan remarked. "I'm very sorry, too," Gorbachev replied. "I wanted an agreement and did everything I could to achieve it, if not more."
Nevertheless, after the fact, the Secretary General considered Reykjavik 1986 not a failure, but a breakthrough. "Gorby's" personal popularity in the West grew, personal contacts were being established, and the prospect of winning the Nobel Peace Prize loomed ahead.
Reykjavik did have a practical consequence: in 1987, the USSR and the United States signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). Here, too, Gorbachev proved himself a greater peacemaker: the Soviet Union destroyed 1,752 missiles, the United States 859.
The American INF program remained frozen until 2019, when Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the treaty. Russia was forced to respond in kind. But this occurred in a completely different geopolitical context.
And then, at the height of perestroika, the Americans became convinced of the Soviet leadership’s pliability.
In 1989, in Malta, Gorbachev and then-US President George H.W. Bush officially brought an end to the confrontation between the two superpowers. What followed was supposed to be either the end of history or the beginning of a harmonious world, in the spirit (according to Gorbachev) of "new thinking."
In reality, at that moment the Eastern Bloc was collapsing, paving the way for NATO's subsequent expansion, and the Soviet Union had only a few months left to exist.