Bruce B. G. Clarke senior military officer in arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union. After his first year at the State Department he was selected for brigade command but the busy pace of Soviet-American negotiations caused his assignment to be extended one year beyond the normal two-year posting. In his three years at the State Department, he regularly shuttled between negotiations in Washington and Geneva. This period include three summit meetings between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev: the November 1985 Geneva Summit, the October 1986 Reykjavík Summit and the December 1987 Washington summit where the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was
History of the Soviet Union (1982–91) were in agreement that nuclear war could not be won by either side and must never be allowed to happen. It was also agreed that Reagan and Gorbachev would carry out two more summit meetings in 1986–87. Jimmy Carter had officially ended the policy of détente, by financially aiding the Mujahideen movement in neighboring Socialist Afghanistan, which served as a pretext for the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan six months later, with the aims of supporting the Afghan government, controlled by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Tensions between the superpowers increased during this time, when Carter placed trade embargoes on