19861776 Club
Reagan and Gorbachev sit down in Reykjavík to talk missiles
A hastily arranged weekend in Iceland was supposed to set up next year's summit; instead the two sides nearly agreed to scrap their nuclear arsenals.
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in Reykjavík, Iceland, on October 11, 1986, shortly after a spy swap had defused a diplomatic crisis between Washington and Moscow. The meeting had been arranged in a matter of weeks, intended only to clear ground for a bigger summit planned for the following year. Instead, over two days inside a wind-battered house called Höfði, the two men found themselves discussing eliminating entire classes of nuclear weapons from Europe and beyond…
