The Reykjavík meeting was similar to one between President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin in June 1967. That encounter too was organized on short notice, without a prearranged outcome and with only a few advisers on each side. Johnson relied most heavily on his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, later head of the World Bank and currently a director of the Ford Foundation. The following exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming book, Blundering into Disaster: Surviving the First Century of the Nuclear Age (Pantheon Books; $14.95), recounts that fateful meeting and its consequences.
The most contentious and important issue at...