The Long Road to Reykjavik

The Reykjavik 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 Glassboro, N.J., was the same as the one at Reykjavik: Do the U.S. and the Soviet Union have a "moral" obligation to erect antimissile defenses? Or would such systems stimulate a new and dangerous arms race, in which one side's defenses would provoke the other side to proliferate offenses? In 1967 the U.S. argued that offense was "good" and defense was "bad." McNamara explained to a skeptical Kosygin that if both sides restricted their defenses, they could afford to limit their offenses; while each would need enough weapons to retaliate against an attack, neither would feel it needed a surplus to overwhelm enemy defenses. Thus the arms race could be regulated and mutual deterrence assured.

The logic of the American position eventually prevailed. The Glassboro meeting led to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). At a summit in Moscow in 1972, Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev signed a pair of agreements embodying McNamara's recommendation to Kosygin at Glassboro: a treaty restricting antiballistic-missile defenses and an interim accord on offenses. The ABM treaty is still in force; the offensive agreement was replaced in 1979 by SALT II, which was never ratified and which expired last year but still serves as a check on the arsenals of the two sides while they try to negotiate a new set of agreements in Geneva.

Meanwhile, the superpowers have passed in the night on the issue of strategic defense. In March 1983 Reagan proclaimed his dream of a comprehensive, impregnable, space-based shield that would render offensive nuclear forces "impotent and obsolete." He has argued that deterrence based on the threat of retaliation is immoral and a "defense that really defends" is benevolent, an eerie echo of Kosygin's rebuttal to McNamara at Glassboro. Proponents of the Strategic Defense Initiative charge that the Soviet offensive buildup proves that the U.S.S.R. never really accepted the logic of McNamara's argument and has violated the spirit (as well as the letter) of the SALT agreements.

The Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev seems to realize that unless it brakes and perhaps reverses its buildup, the result may indeed be a new round of the defensive-arms race, one in which the U.S. would, at least initially, have the advantage of superior technology. Gorbachev has been pressing for an updated version of the original SALT deal: restrictions on SDI (which is a latter-day ABM system) in exchange for significant reductions in offensive weaponry, especially the most threatening Soviet systems.

Some members of the Reagan Administration hope for a so-called grand compromise before the President leaves office. In recent months, Reagan has hinted that in exchange for the right Soviet concessions, SDI may be negotiable. One of his most conciliatory statements came on June 19 in a speech to a high school graduating class. He praised the Soviets' latest proposals in Geneva and said he was hoping that Gorbachev would "join me in taking action--action in the name of peace." The site of that speech was Glassboro.

The Soviets, who do not believe in coincidence, were struck not only by what Reagan said but by where he said it. According to a senior Soviet diplomat, Reagan's Glassboro speech contributed to Gorbachev's interest in a minisummit similar to the Glassboro meeting.

In the excerpt that follows, McNamara describes an eerily similar debate over offensive and defensive systems that took place 19 years ago but was very much on the minds of American and Soviet officials as they prepared for the weekend meeting in Reykjavik.