Reykjavík Summit Reykjavík Summit The Reykjavík Summit was a summit meeting between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, held in Höfði in Reykjavík, on 11–12 October 1986. The talks collapsed at the last minute, but the progress that had been achieved eventually resulted in the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1986, Gorbachev had proposed banning all ballistic missiles, but Reagan wanted to continue research on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which involved the militarization of outer space. Yet Soviet suspicion of SDI
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