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-- It was Gorbachev, not Reagan, who had blocked a drastic reduction in nuclear weapons. He did so by demanding a price he should have known Reagan would never pay: confining all work on the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative to laboratory research for ten years.
-- The President had no choice but to reject this demand, which would have killed SDI. Said Reagan at a Baltimore rally for Republican Senatorial Candidate Linda Chavez: "SDI is America's insurance policy that the Soviets will begin living up to the arms control agreements that they've agreed to. SDI is one of the chief reasons the Soviets went to the summit and one of the primary reasons they'll come back again. SDI is the key to a world free of nuclear blackmail."
-- Most important, the summit was not a failure but, in its way, an astonishing success. It brought the world to the brink of a deal that seemed unimaginable before Reagan and Gorbachev arrived in Iceland: destruction of all intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe and a radical reduction of their number in Soviet Asia; a 50% slash in the superpowers' long-range ballistic missiles in five years and their total elimination after five more -- to name only the most striking elements of the bargain that was almost struck. Now that these proposals have been made, the U.S. says they cannot be withdrawn, and the American side will bring them up again and again in negotiations in Geneva. Says Donald Regan about the Soviets: "They put it on the table, and we are going to hold them to it."
This case is not entirely consistent. If the Administration is correct in arguing that the summit showed the stopping of SDI to be Gorbachev's goal of goals, then it is hard to discern much ground for its simultaneous contention that the Reykjavik meeting brought a comprehensive arms deal much closer. Says Poindexter: "If they really want to kill SDI, which it appears is their motivation, there is no way we can come to an agreement on that. There is no way we would ever agree to eliminate all ballistic missiles without a defense system."
Nonetheless, in painting the summit as a success, the Administration got an assist from, of all people, Gorbachev. The Soviet leader launched his own spin-doctoring campaign as soon as the summit broke up, dispatching 15 diplomats to 35 countries from Austria to Zimbabwe. On successive days, Max Kampelman and Victor Karpov, the heads of the American and Soviet arms- negotiating teams in Geneva, turned up in Bonn to conduct briefings for the West German government. Tuesday night Gorbachev, like Reagan a day earlier, went on television to give his version of the summit events to his fellow countrymen.