James A. Abrahamson administration to announce the program would cease. Abrahamson accompanied President Reagan to Reykjavik, Iceland, for the Reykjavik Summit on October 11, 1986, to meet the Soviet leader, Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev. The subject of the Strategic Defense Initiative's technological advances and their effects on the strategic nuclear balance between the United States and the Soviet Union during the last years of the Cold War was raised by the Soviets at the meeting. During the post-summit press conference, Gorbachev said Reagan's insistence on deploying SDI had "frustrated and scuttled" the opportunity for an agreement. Abrahamson was promoted to lieutenant general on
Political positions of Ronald Reagan nuclear weapon was unleashed, who knew where it would end? My dream, then, became a world free of nuclear weapons... For the eight years I was president I never let my dream of a nuclear-free world fade from my min.." Reagan wrote that he believed the mutually assured destruction policy formulated by John Kennedy to be morally wrong. Reagan and Soviet leader Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987 (and ratified in 1988), which was the first in Cold War history to mandate the destruction of an entire class of nuclear weapons. Originally neutral in the Iran–Iraq War