Word: reykjavã
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Before all of that there is this man-to-man exercise, the palpable event of settling into one of those big, brown leather chairs (Reagan carefully studied the advance pictures of the stark Reykjav??k meeting room) and looking into the eyes of Mikhail Gorbachev and trying to discern what they are saying even as strange language tumbles out of his lips and is unscrambled by an interpreter between them...
...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 Reykjav?...
...Reykjav??k 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...
...most contentious and important issue at Glassboro, N.J., was the same as the one at Reykjav??k: 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...
...Americans shot down over Nicaragua. White House officials, who have insisted they did not deliberately mislead the public about U.S. intentions toward Libya, were embarrassed and miffed by Kalb's dramatic gesture. One White House aide was particularly irritated that he had quit just before the summit in Reykjav??k, "when he knew full well we hadn't misled anyone on purpose. His timing could have been worse, but not much." Said Kalb, making light of such concern: "I suspect that I will dissolve very quickly under the impact of the meeting in Reykjav?...