From Reykjavik All Roads Led Down

I wonder if anybody today has the creative imagination to make a film, patterned on the old Crosby-Hope classics, called The Road to Reykjavik. For anyone who has worked at the top levels of any presidential Administration, it was a bizarre tragicomedy. Apparently President Reagan was assured by his then in-house gurus —one Naval and one Marine—that the expedition to Iceland was the equivalent of going on a picnic at Balmoral with Queen Elizabeth II. “No serious problem, boss: You’ll just charm the socks off them and then they will know you are, deep down, a nice guy who doesn’t take this ‘evil empire’ stuff too seriously. Then later we can turn the Kampelman-Nitze types, who understand all this junk about ‘throw-weight’ and ‘cold launch,’ to say nothing of that mumbo-jumbo distinction between a missile and a ‘launcher,’ loose on them. Remember, ‘Gorby’ needs a deal.”

It was a real picnic. There was no serious advance work either substantively or logistically. The details about the absence on the U.S. side even of adequate copying facilities, not to mention secure communications, are now common knowledge. Substantively, the whole affair was a setup: “Gorby’s” extremely clever briefing came down to “promise them anything—and then throw in deep-sixing Star Wars as a necessary precondition for disarming.”

JR

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John P. Roche

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I wonder if anybody today has the creative imagination to make a film, patterned on the old Crosby-Hope classics, called The Road to Reykjavik. For anyone who has worked at the top levels of any presidential Administration, it was a bizarre tragicomedy. Apparently President Reagan was assured by his then in-house gurus —one Naval and one Marine—that the expedition to Iceland was the equivalent of going on a picnic at Balmoral with Queen Elizabeth II. “No serious problem, boss: You’ll just charm the socks off them and then they will know you are, deep down, a nice guy who doesn’t take this ‘evil empire’ stuff too seriously. Then later we can turn the Kampelman-Nitze types, who understand all this junk about ‘throw-weight’ and ‘cold launch,’ to say nothing of that mumbo-jumbo distinction between a missile and a ‘launcher,’ loose on them. Remember, ‘Gorby’ needs a deal.”

It was a real picnic. There was no serious advance work either substantively or logistically. The details about the absence on the U.S. side even of adequate copying facilities, not to mention secure communications, are now common knowledge. Substantively, the whole affair was a setup: “Gorby’s” extremely clever briefing came down to “promise them anything—and then throw in deep-sixing Star Wars as a necessary precondition for disarming.”