Dreams for a Decade by Stephanie L. Freeman;

Author:Stephanie L. Freeman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781512824230
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)
Published: 2022-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

“One Cannot Do Business Like This”

Bitterly disappointed after the breakdown of the Reykjavik summit, Reagan slumped in the back seat of the limousine that took him from Hofdi House to the U.S. embassy. “You would have thought that he’d just lost a combination of the Rose Bowl and the Stanley Cup and the Olympics,” White House chief of staff Donald Regan said of the president after the summit collapsed. “He was so down. I’ve never seen a guy so beat in all my life.” In the hours after his failure to close a deal with Gorbachev that would have abolished U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons in ten years, the typically cheerful Reagan was forlorn. Regan recalled the president telling him in the limousine, “‘We were that close’ and he held up his left hand. Just finger and thumb. That much. He said, ‘We were that close to getting rid of all missiles.’”1 James Kuhn, Reagan’s personal assistant, described the president as “distraught” in the summit’s immediate aftermath. “I’d just never seen Ronald Reagan that way before, had never seen him with such a look.”2

After a few hours of reflection on the flight back to Washington, however, Reagan decided that the hope of reaching an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons had not been lost. Kuhn recalled, “Halfway back across the Atlantic he [Reagan] came back and there was the old Ronald Reagan, smiling, bouncing, and everything. He said, ‘I’m okay now. I gave it a lot of thought. I know I made the right decision back there. We couldn’t give up SDI, not for America’s future.’”3 Reagan still believed that SDI would facilitate nuclear abolition by ensuring against any rogue attempts to revive nuclear weapons in the future. “Well, the ball is now in his [Gorbachev’s] court and I’m convinced he’ll come around when he sees how the world is reacting,” Reagan wrote in his diary that evening.4

After presenting Reykjavik as a breakthrough in his post-summit press conference, Gorbachev privately characterized the meeting as a turning point to Chernyaev. On the flight from Reykjavik to Moscow, Gorbachev told Chernyaev, “Before that [Reykjavik], the conversation was only about limiting nuclear arms. Now it is about reduction and liquidation [of those].” He noted that the two leaders had reached dramatic informal agreements on INF and START reductions, and he hoped that Reagan would reconsider his unwillingness to restrict SDI to the laboratory for ten years. “Everybody saw that agreement is possible,” Gorbachev told Chernyaev. “From Reykjavik, we drew the conclusion that the necessity for dialogue has increased even more. That is why I am even more of an optimist after Reykjavik.”5

Yet an agreement eliminating nuclear weapons would elude Reagan and Gorbachev. This chapter contends that European peace activists’ vision for ending the Cold War through the denuclearization and reunification of an autonomous and free Europe became the prevailing one in 1987 and 1988. Although Reagan maintained his dream of a nuclear-free world for the remainder of his presidency, he was unable to translate his vision for overcoming Cold War tensions into an agreement that abolished U.

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