You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.

That house, on the edge of the water, perfectly white.

Even its gables, everything painted white.

And the house itself was so small that when the soldiers stood in front, guarding it, they almost dwarfed it.

Two stories, a basement, a few rooms, in a small fishing village,

made country capital, and this week in 1986, the center of the world. That little house,

in a land where gods were real, where nature, the mountains, the volcanoes, the sky outshone man.

So far away that both the Secret Service and the KGB could agree that that house was the place

to have a talk.

Oh, we know, to have a talk. Reagan knew what he had to do.

If he could just get him to understand. And then it hit him.

Gas mask.

We need a gas mask here. I'm old enough to remember World War I. We banned the use of gas in war. We didn't ban gas masks.

The target of his comment, his negotiating partner, sometimes sparer, was younger than he.

Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the youngest people ever to lead the Soviet Union,

certainly the youngest in recent memory. During Reagan's first term, three men had died, all of them,

elderly, three leaders of the Soviet Union. Reagan wasn't talking about gas masks, really.

He was talking about strategic defense, nuclear deterrent, something that could

shoot down missiles either from the land or more likely from space, a nuclear shield that could

protect against the missiles that either nation, the USSR or the U.S. might launch at each other.

SDI in arms control parlance where everything is an acronym.

But known in the media as Star Wars. Reagan's signature program that he had announced in

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