Did It Get Done? Really? It Did?
John Warnock / You Might Want to Know

(August 20, 2026) — The way to stop the nuclear arms race is to stop it.
Randall Forsberg, “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race.”

If we are right in what we take the Creation Myth in Genesis to be saying, then the contemporary world must doubly fear the compulsions of Empire, as two mighty world orders, each homicidally armed to the point of suicide, confront each other. As with dominion always, each is much beset with anxiety. And in keeping with the “curative” role of victimage, each is apparently in acute need of blaming all its many troubles on the other, wanting to feel certain that, if the other and its tendencies were but eliminated, all governmental discord (all the Disorder that goes with Order) would be eliminated….
Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion, 1961, 1970, 4-5

On May 14, 1986, eighteen days after the terrible accident at the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine, Mikhail Gorbachev gave a televised address in which he finally told the Soviet people about the accident.

He seems to have realized that failing to tell them earlier didn’t comport with his new policy of openness (glasnost). This had no doubt been pointed out to him, though I suspect it hadn’t needed to be.

Still, it was hard to get one’s arms around the extent of the disaster caused by the explosion of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. The accident may have caused Gorbachev to realize more than just what maintaining glasnost called for.

Four months after the accident, in January 1986, he had made a dramatic statement in Moscow, though I don’t think much was made of it in this country. He had proposed that nuclear weapons be “eliminated.” Within ten years. Within ten years? Really?

In October 1986, nine months after Gorbachev’s public statement in Moscow, Gorbachev and Reagan met again, this time in Reykjavik.

Gorbachev seems to have surprised President Reagan by not being content just to make plans for a later summit meeting which is what they’d said would be the agenda in Reykjavik.

Gorbachev wanted to go ahead and get into things.
He put on the table three proposals:

• all strategic offensive arms should be not just capped, as in the SALT Treaties, but cut, by 50%,
• all of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces the two sides had in Europe would be eliminated,

And, last but obviously not least,

• the two countries would commit themselves to doing what Gorbachev had proposed in Moscow in January—eliminate, within ten years, all nuclear weapons.

After President Reagan recovered his composure, he seemed to have agreed with Gorbachev’s proposals, even the one about eliminating nuclear weapons.

But, Reagan said, he wanted to keep going his Strategic Defense Initiative. In fact, he insisted on it. He had promised this infallible, invulnerable shield to the American people, he said. A lot of us, including many important scientists, didn’t think this was a promise that could be delivered on, but Reagan seemed to have been made to believe it could be. He wasn’t just acting.

Gorbachev argued that as they went about eliminating nuclear weapons, SDI would keep the two sides from being on an equal footing. He said it would be okay if we worked on SDI “in the laboratory” for the next ten years but said “his generals” wouldn’t let him agree to live testing. Live testing would also be, it seemed pretty clear, a violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty President Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev had signed in 1972 that both countries were still bound by.

Reagan insisted on being able to do live testing. Gorbachev said he couldn’t agree to it.

They couldn’t get past this.

The meeting was called to an end by President Reagan without even a date having been set for the summit they had met to plan for.

Gorbachev was deeply disappointed. You could see it in the news photographs taken on October 12, 1986 as they walked out of the meeting. Reagan seemed just as deeply disappointed. But he’d let himself be talked into believing in SDI.

It might not have taken much talking into. Even before he’d been elected President, Reagan had been to our Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado and seen how, while we now had satellites that could track all incoming ICBMs, we could do nothing to defend against them. In the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers movies he’d seen as a kid, he had seen how a defensive system could defend against missiles using advanced technologies. Like ray guns.

Not after the meeting in Reykjavik, Gorbachev, despite his deep disappointment at not being able agree finally to eliminate nuclear weapons, seems to have realized that even though no formal agreement had been arrived at, he and President Reagan had, at one point, agreed that nuclear weapons should be eliminated.

Gorbachev knew that in 1981, at the very beginning of President Reagan’s administration, Reagan had proposed that the Soviets remove their MIRved SS-20 IRBMs from their launch vehicles in the Soviet Union in return for the United States not deploying in Europe the new Pershing II missiles we’d started working on in the Carter administration and some new ground-launched cruise missiles we were also developing from the Tomahawk cruise missiles our Navy had.

Reagan had called this proposal the Zero Option. Leonid Brezhnev had rejected it. Brezhnev had died in 1982. In 1983, we had started to deploy both new weapons in Europe despite the huge protests against this that had been going on there. The new missiles would need to be defended, it was clear, not just against the Soviets but against angry Europeans. Maybe even more than against the Soviets.

In late 1986, however, Gorbachev had learned from something Andrei Sakharov, the great Soviet physicist, inventor of the Soviets’ hydrogen bomb, who had published an essay that argued that SDI wasn’t something to fear because it could be defeated simply by sending more missiles. As indeed, if you thought about it, any missile defense system probably could be.

Gorbachev had then realized that he could, for openers, propose to join with Reagan in eliminating all intermediate range nuclear missiles held by both sides without requiring that SDI be abandoned.

Negotiations on an Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that would do this began in April 1987, less than a year after Reykjavik. They went unbelievably smoothly. The Soviets even threw in the large number of a very scary mobile short-range nuclear-capable missile they’d deployed called the SS-23 Oka, even though “short-range” missiles weren’t actually on the table. The Okas were much more numerous and much more of a threat in military terms than the few short-range Pershing I missiles that we still were keeping in West Germany.

And—this was big—the Soviets agreed, for the first time ever, to on-site inspections at military sites to verify destruction of the missiles. Visits would be made right away to sites where the missiles had been deployed to ascertain how many missiles needed to be destroyed. Later, observers would actually be able to watch the missiles being crushed. Inspectors would be posted outside missile factories to be sure replacements weren’t being built and shipped. Each side could make a certain number of surprise no-notice inspections.

For the SALT treaties signed in President Carter’s administration, all we’d had for “verification” had been our “national technical means” of verification—our satellites, that is. And a promise by both of us we wouldn’t try to hide things from them.

All this was agreed to in the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed by President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at a summit in Washington, D.C., in December 1987.

It had taken only ten months to get here.

The process of missile destruction began. How would it go?

Spoiler alert: it would go very well. By May 28, 1991, now in the administration of President George H. W. Bush, the last missile covered by the treaty would be destroyed. Two thousand six-hundred ninety-two intermediate range missiles had been destroyed. Of the total, 1,846 had been Soviet weapons, more than twice the number destroyed by us, which had been 846.

Imagine that. A whole class of weapons, Intermediate Range missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads—gone. Eliminated.

How exactly should we feel about this? Good, of course. But had we won here? Did we both win? Can you do that?

An agreement had been reached to destroy a whole class of nuclear delivery systems and it had been quickly accomplished.

Now what?
On to ICBMs?

Next: 1991 and 1993 and Thereabouts—the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties, START I and START II

Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” all from a somewhat different angle—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see other entries, go to the You Might Want to Know Archive.

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