When to Hold 'Em - and to Fold 'Em

The most extraordinary bargaining session in the history of arms control was reaching a crescendo. For almost two days, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had continued to up the ante. Now, as night closed in on Hofdi house, the "grand compromise" was in sight. But the whole startling package of proposals was hanging on the Soviet insistence that Star Wars research be confined to the laboratory. Ronald Reagan made a last-ditch appeal to Mikhail Gorbachev. He declared he had made a pledge to the American people not to trade away SDI. "Please," Reagan said, "don't ask me to do it." Impervious, the General Secretary replied, "Nyet."

With that, the President gathered his papers and stood up. Minutes later, as the two leaders descended the outside steps, they conducted a tense, terse dialogue.

Gorbachev: I think we can still deal. There is still time.

Reagan: I don't think you really wanted a deal.

Gorbachev: I don't know what else I could have done.

Reagan: You could have said yes.

Why did the President, who had declared that the Reykjavik meeting was supposed to be merely a "base camp" for a full-scale summit in the U.S., allow it to turn into a breathtaking marathon marked by snap decisions on some of the most complex and fateful issues of the nuclear age? Did Reagan's men let themselves get carried away by the promise of the deal of the century, when they should have been nailing down a more realistic agreement on medium- range missiles? Instead of pulling an all-nighter in Iceland, why didn't the Americans simply say, "We'll get back to you in Geneva or when you come to the U.S."?

Gorbachev set the stage for the grim Sunday denouement on Saturday morning when he plucked a typewritten page from his briefcase. The paper summarized his wide-ranging set of new proposals, including cutting the strategic arsenals of both sides by 50% and eliminating intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) from Europe altogether. Gorbachev called for ten more years of strict adherence to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, a provision that would prevent SDI from producing "weapons of any new type which would provide military superiority to that side." He also made clear that the missile cutbacks were linked to curtailment of the President's cherished Star Wars plan.

Reagan puts great faith in his ability to persuade people through the force of his personality; that is one reason why he accepted the Iceland invitation and why he felt confident about getting into a major bargaining session once there. So, rather than aggressively pursuing a more limited agreement, Reagan and his advisers found themselves scrambling after Gorbachev's vision. The U.S. negotiators pursued a strategy that was in some ways a mirror of the Soviet one: putting together enough tantalizing agreements so that when the decisive moment finally arrived, the other side would be willing to back down a bit on SDI. The President accepted the 50% cut in strategic weapons as well as the plan on intermediate-range missiles, which was almost identical to the "zero option" the U.S. had proposed in 1981. But the two leaders sparred to a draw on SDI that afternoon.