In our previous episode, we covered President Ronald Reagan's vision for a nuclear-free world

and Mikhail Gorbachev's rise in the Soviet Union. We discussed their initial meeting in Geneva

and the Soviet nuclear disaster in Chernobyl. Reagan dreamed of a nuclear-free world, and he would

have his chance to achieve it with Gorbachev

at a summit planned for October 1986 in Reykjavik, Iceland.

How that summit and the rest of the Cold War played out under Reagan's leadership

is the subject of this episode of This American President.

Music episode of this American president. In the run up to the Reykjavik conference,, Gorbachev gave Reagan a key concession.

He could accept SDI if research for it was restricted to laboratories for 15 years.

But Reagan was still in no mood to budge in any way on SDI.

The summit was held on October 11th and 12, 1986.

Reagan discussed his thoughts with Gorbachev on human rights issues, expressing his concerns for religious persecution in the Soviet Union and for families

separated because of the Cold War. Reagan never abandoned his belief that the Cold War was a conflict

with moral implications, that Western democracy

and capitalism were on the side of right, and the communists in the wrong. But the issue of nuclear

arms dominated the discussions. Both sides went back and forth on multiple proposals. Gorbachev went

first, proposing for the U.S. and the Soviet Union to eliminate

half of their strategic nuclear weapons and to take out all intermediate range nuclear forces,

or INF weapons, out of Europe. It would be a historic agreement. Back in 1972, Nixon and Brezhnev had negotiated limitations in nuclear weapons,

but this would be the first time that they would actually be reduced. It would be a dramatic

reduction. Reagan seemed to signal that he favored this approach. It seemed like agreement

would be reached, and both men could come home

...