In age, temperament, background, education, political orientation, Gorbachev and Reagan could hardly have been more different. And yet they were both self-confident, transformational leaders, willing to defy expectations and challenge the status quo. During their first meeting, at a Geneva summit conference in November 1985, the two men established a personal rapport and discussed how to reduce the nuclear arsenals of both nations. Gorbachev left Geneva viewing Reagan not as a right-wing caricature, a puppet of the military-industrial complex, but as a human being who seemed eager to avoid a nuclear war.
A year later, at a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, the discussion strayed onto a topic that alarmed many of Reagan’s close advisers: huge reductions in the number of nuclear weapons. Secretary of State George P. Shultz was elated by the possibility. The recent accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant had deposited radioactive fallout across much of Europe and the Soviet Union, reminding the world of the far greater danger that nuclear weapons posed. Reagan and Gorbachev seemed on the verge of reaching an extraordinary agreement, as a transcript of their meeting shows:
The President agreed this could be sorted out… cruise missiles, battlefield weapons, sub-launched and the like. It would be fine with him if we eliminated all nuclear weapons.
Gorbachev said we can do that. We can eliminate them.
The Secretary [of State] said, “Let’s do it.”
The euphoria that Reagan and Shultz felt didn’t last long. Moments later Gorbachev insisted, as part of the deal, that all Star Wars testing must be confined to the laboratory. Reagan couldn’t comprehend why a missile-defense system intended to spare lives — one that didn’t even exist yet, that might never exist — could stand in the way of eliminating nuclear weapons forever. He refused to place limits on the Strategic Defense Initiative and promised to share its technology. The Soviet Union was conducting exactly the same research, he pointed out, and an antiballistic missile system had already been built to defend Moscow. Neither Gorbachev nor Reagan would budge from his position, and the meeting ended.
Despite the failure to reach an agreement on the abolition of nuclear weapons, the Reykjavik summit marked a turning point in the Cold War, the start of a process that soon led to the removal of all intermediate-range missiles from Europe and large cuts in the number of strategic weapons. The all-out nuclear arms race was over. Gorbachev now felt emboldened to pursue reform in the Soviet Union, confident that the United States did not seek to attack his country. And the hard-liners in the Reagan administration breathed a sigh of relief, amazed that their president had come so close to getting rid of America’s nuclear weapons. Margaret Thatcher, the conservative prime minister of Great Britain, and François Mitterrand, the socialist president of France, were furious that Reagan had questioned the value of nuclear deterrence, a strategy that had kept the peace since the Second World War. Although European protest marches had focused mainly on the United States for the previous six years, it was the leadership of Western Europe who most strongly opposed creating a world without nuclear weapons.
Bob Peurifoy had become a vice president at Sandia, and his new status enabled him to lobby more effectively for nuclear weapon safety. By 1988 almost half of the weapons in the American stockpile were fitted with weak link/strong link devices, and the safety retrofit of Mark 28 bombs had finally resumed. But SAC was still loading about one thousand Short-Range Attack Missiles onto its bombers on alert. Those planes were parked on runways nationwide, ready to take off from bases in California, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, and Washington State. As tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union eased, the Air Force’s willingness to risk an accident with a SRAM became harder to justify.
