Reykjavik Summit, October 1986 - 17 October 1986

There is a small town in Texas which bears the luminous name of Noonday.

Twenty-four years ago, an oil company wanted to buy up a sizeable farm property which ran alongside a creek, useful for rigging operations. The land was owned by an old man, named Hunsucker. He was getting on in years and quite willing to sell his land – with one proviso, he wanted to keep his acres that adjoined the town cemetery on the north. They, he felt, should remain protected from any development.

The oil company saw his point and readily agreed. They sat down with old Mr Hunsucker and his lawyer and the negotiations began. That was in 1962. Nineteen years later, in 1981 the negotiations, which had continued through two generations of Hunsuckers and three different companies' lawyers, the negotiations broke down. So far, as I know, the land remained unbought. The oil company blamed the Hunsuckers and accused them of bad faith. Why? Because they would not yield the old man’s original condition. They would not sell the acreage north of the cemetery.

To the Texans who live close to Noonday, the outcome of the Iceland summit was no surprise at all. And it’s true that when Mr Gorbachev and Mr Reagan were bundling up for the summit or mini-summit, Mr Reagan said he was ready to push forward with all sorts of nameless concessions, but not at the price of yielding on the strategic defence initiative.

And Mr Gorbachev made quite plain, before he left Moscow, that much might be done if only, and only if, the United States would back away from its strategic space research. So they behaved exactly according to the script they had published before the meeting. Whereupon correspondents from all over the world rushed into print or into studios to announce the bleak news, that, after all, Mr Hunsucker was not going to sell the acreage north of the cemetery.

Mr George Shultz, the American secretary of state, appeared just before he left for home looking sad and distraught. "We are deeply disappointed," he said, "with the outcome." On Soviet television, Mr Gorbachev – looking, I must say, as genial and composed as ever – said, "We stood within one or two or three steps of a decision that could become historic. But our partners lacked ultimately the courage, responsibility and political determination." Mr Gorbachev in, I think, the only bit of nasty rhetoric he used, said that the United States wants to bleed the Soviet Union white, economically, in a new, expensive arms race.

That was, I believe, the only hint he gave of being aware of the considerable literature of doom, that has been growing in the west, about the sluggishness – one distinguished economist calls it the shambles – of the Soviet economy, about Mr Gorbachev's urgent need to reduce his country's enormous outlay on arms, both conventional and nuclear, on the armies in Afghanistan, on the – what is it – upwards of three-quarters of a million men on the Chinese border, in order to bring back to bearable health the domestic economy.

I ought to say that I myself am always sceptical of this particular insight into a potential enemy's forlorn economy. In the late 1930s, it wasn’t only the appeasers who saw the German people already stretched on the rack of austerity and Hitler himself actually unable to afford a war. I remember a famous British editor, whose Sunday pontifications were memorable because they always sounded like lines from Browning, he had a leader in the summer of 1939 headlined, "The Crisis in Europe or No War, and Why".

An American friend of mine, a wise and greatly-respected pundit made a long tour of Europe in the late spring and summer of 19939 and came back to write a short, cogent book with the title, "No War in Europe". The book came out two weeks before Hitler invaded Poland. The book didn’t do very well.

So, back to the rather frosty farewell between Mr Gorbachev and Mr Reagan, when Mr Gorbachev said, "All these wonderful things were possible, but only if the strategic defence initiative were put in the freezer in the laboratory". Mr Reagan picked up his papers said "I don’t think you really wanted a deal" and went off to his car in what one onlooker described as a mood of controlled anger.

It's tempting, and I have been tempted, to look back to the commentaries and analysis written by well-informed people before the summit took place. Not to read what they thought was going to happen, that's that's a mean pleasure because nobody should ever say or write, what is going to happen. But to read what the most thoughtful or experienced people believed would be the best, and the worst, outcome.

One of my favourite news magazines, not American, wrote the best thing would be for the two men to talk bluntly but amiably together, go over the range of problems, identify the knotted points they disagree on and then settle on a date for a real summit.

The same magazine said the worst ending, though it’s not clear whom it would be worse for, is a stomp out by Mr Gorbachev saying that this impossible man, Reagan, won’t give up his Star Wars, and there is no point in meeting him again.

Well,of course, that is what happened, except that Mr Gorbachev didn’t need to stomp out, he could leave the stomping to Mr Reagan. Mr Gorbachev knew from the start that Mr Reagan had sworn to the faithful at home he wouldn’t yield an inch on SDI, the strategic defence initiative.

He did yield much more than an inch – two and a half years in fact – by the terms of the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty. Both countries were bound not to deploy any new type of missile defence for another seven and a half years – Mr Reagan offered to stretch this ban to ten years.

At that advanced point in the talks, both sides had agreed to reduce all their strategic defence forces by 50% over five years. Mr Reagan then went on to the heady proposal, far beyond anything ever suggested, to eliminate all nuclear ballistic missiles at the end of ten years.

Then came the clincher, which was bound to be turned down by Mr Reagan. Mr Gorbachev now insisted that the 1972 ABM treaty be changed or amended to forbid not only the deployment, the actual use, of defensive missiles, but all research and testing outside the laboratory.

Now there is no way that a weapon, from a rifle to a laser shield, can be known to work until the laboratory work is tested on the outside. Mr Reagan dug in and said, absolutely not. Then Mr Gorbachev, according to Americans who were sitting in on the talks, asked a question that has occurred to very many people, and would be repeated rhetorically on Soviet television later, as a question to which there is no sensible answer.

The question was, if all ballistic missiles on both sides are abolished in ten years, why would anybody need to have a missile defence system – defence against what? Considering the Soviet record of ducking or bypassing the prohibitions of previous treaties, and some bypassing the Americans also, Mr Reagan could have replied, "to defend us against the strong possibility of cheating".

What he said was, "for insurance" and I don’t think there is any doubt that if the Russians were as far along with their space defences as the Americans, they would have said the same thing. Mr Reagan then made his final pitch – keep the original provisions of the 1972 ABM treaty, both countries would go ahead with work on their defence systems, and since both sides knew the Americans were well hid, Mr Reagan then proposed that once the SDI was sufficiently advanced to look as if it were workable, the United States would share the whole technology with the Soviet Union. Later, in his television speech, Mr Gorbachev said he didn’t believe this promise, since the United States had been unwillingly, so far, to share even such mundane stuff as oil technology.

I suspect that Mr Reagan was genuinely excited when he resorted to the 50% cut in strategic weapons by proposing their total abolition after ten years. Maybe he really believed, that moment, that the Russians had gone to Iceland to make the big move, towards accepting a joint defensive system on which the Russians have done some research and on which the Americans have gone much further.

When Mr Gorbachev pulled out his ace about restricting all such work to the labs, Mr Reagan was not merely disappointed or even, in Mr Shultz’s words, deeply disappointed – he must have been angry, or realised then that he had been snookered or trapped into the meeting. In other words, it's accepted here anyway, that Mr Gorbachev's script was written beforehand within the ending that actually happened. Why should that be?

Well, Mr Gorbachev has some first-rate advisors on American affairs including Mr Dobrynin, who was here for 11 years as ambassador. He knew that barely three weeks from now, the whole House of Representatives comes up for election, and a third of the Senate. Mr Reagan is determined to have his party keep control of the Senate, but if he had yielded substantially on SDI he would very likely have alienated hard-line conservatives who hold his balance in the Senate.

If he could be made to appear to have failed in Iceland he might very well disappoint large numbers of the voters, and the Democrats might then take over the senate, and the Russians always believed they can persuade the Democrats more easily than the Republicans.

From the Russian point of view, the trap was worth setting. So, Mr Reagan departed in controlled anger. But now what followed was, I believe, totally unexpected – two national polls revealed that as many as 70 Americans in 100 approve of Mr Reagan’s walk-out. Mr Gorbachev's ace was trumped. Not by Mr Reagan, but by the American people. After a preliminary interval for recrimination and snide remarks, it will, I believe, make both sides think again about a realistic summit based on the recognition that their survival rests no longer on the outward doctrine of mutual assured destruction, but on a shared defensive system.

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