Apocalypse, When?

On a new film about the Reagan-Gorbachev 1986 summit in Reykjavik

Thanks to a friend who got two free tickets I was able to see The Brink of War, the new film by Michael Russell Gunn just a few days before its official release. The movie is about the famous and fateful summit meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik in October 1986. Gorbachev came to power a year earlier and had already met Reagan in Geneva in 1985. He mulled the ideas of glasnost and perestroika, but it was a very early time and their meaning was as yet unclear. In foreign policy, Gorbachev, his key adviser Aleksander Yakovlev, and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Eduard Shevardnadze (who also appears in the movie) promoted the so-called New Thinking. The Reykjavik meeting was to provide substance, or to test, the New Thinking. Reagan was in the sixth year of his presidency, with only two left. So while Gorbachev was, in a way, in the beginning of his mandate, Reagan was approaching the end. The age difference between the two leaders was substantial: Reagan was twenty years older.

The story of the Reykjavik summit is quite well known. The movie uses transcripts of the meetings and the memoirs of participants to present an almost documentary rendition of the two days of intense meetings, some of them tête-a-tête between Reagan and Gorbachev, and others with the full delegations. Raisa Gorbacheva and Nancy Reagan do play a role too, perhaps less in the movie that in real life.

The summit is famous because the two leaders came very close to the decision not only to limit nuclear arms, but to eliminate 50% of the stock held by each side within ten years. That was Gorbachev’s proposal. But them in a flight of fancy Reagan went even further and proposed total elimination of nuclear weapons. Obviously, his advisers were shocked. So was Gorbachev, who incredulously asked –--bested after having made an already extravagant proposal to destroy half of the arsenals—“All?”. Reagan nodded: “Yes, all”. But the idea then failed on one issue on which the leaders just could not compromise: Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). When Gorbachev came to Reykjavik with the extravagant proposal of reducing nuclear weapons by half, he did it because he was aware that the Soviet Union could not maintain the arms race with the United States. It could not continue spending 15% of its GDP on weapons and simultaneously improve the welfare of its people. It had to go beyond Brezhnev’s “stagnation”. But he could not give nothing to his Military Industrial Complex, eager like all such complexes for more weapons and more money. He promised to give them the stop on the work on American SDI (with which Soviet marshals and generals were obsessed) in return for their acquiescence to deep nuclear cuts. So, for Gorbachev, a stop to the development of the SDI was a non-negotiable consideration; it was make-it or break-it.

For Reagan, SDI was seen as his legacy to the security of the American people. Sure, as he acknowledged to Gorbachev, US will not have to fear the USSR if all Soviet nuclear weapons were destroyed, but there could be other, “rogue”, actors that could still attack the Homeland. Who such nuclear-armed “rogue” actors in 1986 were is unclear. When we look at the countries that possessed nuclear weapons at the time, other than the two super powers (that held more than 90% of all weapons), there were only UK, France, China, India, and probably Israel. UK and France would be, Reagan assured Gorbachev, involved too in the massive cuts. Reagan would see to it. China was not mentioned by either leader; nor were India and Israel. So, it was probably Reagan’s feeling that he needed to leave a palpable legacy of complete invulnerability to the United States’ population that prevented him from considering abandoning SDI. He rejected that the development be done only in labs; SDI had to be tested in real life. But then in an incredible turn, he proposed to give to the USSR all technological secrets linked to SDI so that they could make their own SDI. “Yes—he said--I would give you the entire SDI”. That led to the most heated exchange in the movie with Gorbachev reminding Reagan that the US limits even low-technology exports to the USSR, including “milking machines for cows”, and “now you are offering to give me the most sophisticated military technology ever made? Does this sound reasonable? Will Congress, Pentagon, your own administration ever approve it?”

On this stumbling stone the movie, and the Summit, end. Afterward, as we know, US and USSR however continued with limitation and reductions of both strategic and medium-range missiles. It was a great success for the two countries and the world. Perhaps for the first time ever development of weapons was under some control, following some rules, and thousands of offensive weapons that could end civilization in matters of minutes were scrapped. Reykjavik, even if it did not produce anything by itself, was a key post on the path to nuclear disarmament.

Both Gorbachev and Reagan were idealists. Reagan truly believed in the advantages of the American system of free enterprise, freedom of worship, and freedom of speech. Gorbachev equally earnestly believed in the advantages of Soviet socialism in providing material equality, similar chances of success for all, and social mobility (himself being the illustration of all these three aspects, as indeed Reagan’s own career illustrates the advantages of the American dream). However different their ideologies, it is not impossible to think that each recognized in the other elements of idealism; different idealisms for sure, but idealisms nevertheless, and not sheer pragmatism and Machiavellian scheming.

In the movie, Gorbachev is better served by the actor (Jared Harris) who plays him; by his facial expressions, bursts of anger when he bangs the table, and then, at times, pensive, and even nostalgic or soft expressions, Gorbachev comes alive. Reagan who was famously avuncular and who would utter most bellicose statements but then cover them with his brilliant smile, comes out, in the interpretation of Jeff Daniels, as wooden, stiff, almost cardboard-like character. Thus, two-thirds of the movie that consists almost entirely of conversations of the two leaders are dominated by Gorbachev. The momentum is clearly on his side.

Was it like that in real life? One is left wondering. Gorbachev is shown not only as an excellent negotiator, but deeply in control of the numbers and the roles of different parts of Soviet and American nuclear triads. Reagan is much less sure. Perhaps he was already somewhat senile (as we know from other sources) and perhaps numbers were not his forte. But how is it that Gorbachev comes across as such an able negotiator when from multiple other sources, including his many negotiations with Americans, Germans, French, NATO etc., we know him to be naive and rather incompetent negotiator? This is at its most obvious at the negotiations about the Soviet military withdrawal from East Germany, and NATO guarantees on non-expansion. It would seem, not just ex post, but in real time, that even a modestly competent negotiator would be able to use the “cards” that the Soviet Union then possessed to extract better terms and written commitments regarding future relations. This was not something that nobody thought about at the time, including in Gorbachev’s entourage. Was he just much better in 1986 than in 1989? I do not know. I am sure there are others who know, or at least have hypotheses, and have written about it. Vladislav Zubok, for example, in Collapse (my review here) rightly ridicules Gorbachev for taking abroad on serious trips, delegations composed mostly of artists, writers, musicians and composers. Whether Raisa played a role in choosing such motley crews when the negotiations were going on about serious matters of arms control, borders, and finance, we do not know.

At the end of the movie, one is left with melancholy thoughts. Now, forty years after the Reykjavik summit, and after the victory of democracy (briefly profiled at the end of the movie with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the usual pictures), the world has no controls on the deployment of new nuclear weapons; all four arms agreements between the US and the Soviet Union (and afterwards Russia) have lapsed; there are nine countries that possess nuclear weapons and probably as many that plan to acquire them; we hear daily threats about the use of nuclear weapons, and the world is much closer to the Apocalypse than even in the dark days of mutual incomprehension between the two superpowers. One wonders, How did we get here?

PS. In a movie that is almost documentary in its aspirations, one would have thought that the fact-checker would not allow Raisa Gorbacheva to twice refer to her husband as the Soviet Premier. Gorbachev was never a Soviet premier and one expects that his wife knew the job title of her husband.