Iceland in the Cold War a summit in Reykjavík in 1986 between United States President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, during which they took significant steps toward nuclear disarmament. Only a few years later, in 1991, when Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson was foreign minister, Iceland would become the first country to recognize the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as they broke away from the Soviet Union. The US base served as a hub for transports and communications to Europe, a key chain in the GIUK gap, a monitor of Soviet submarine activity, a linchpin in the early warning system for incoming Soviet attacks,
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