Word: sovietizers
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...President of the United States offered his vision of a safer world, and the General Secretary of the Soviet Union's Communist Party did not believe a word of it. As the two superpower leaders sat across from each other last week at the bargaining table in an elegant salon in Geneva, Ronald Reagan implored Mikhail Gorbachev to join him in his dream of "rendering nuclear weapons obsolete" with a space-based missile defense system. Coldly fixing Reagan in his gaze, Gorbachev would have none of it. "It's not convincing. It's emotional. It's a dream...
Rarely have the inexorable forces of history been so starkly revealed by an exchange between two world leaders. Despite all the public handshakes and smiles, and despite the apparent rapport that emerged between two confident and forceful men last week, they were caught by a stark axiom of the Soviet-American rivalry: neither side can afford to base the security of a nation on trust alone. For 40 years, ever since the earliest days of the cold war, each American President, each Kremlin leader, has felt compelled to counter every move by a countermove, every new weapon with a newer...
...Reagan and Gorbachev met at the summit last week, the eleventh such meeting between the U.S. and Soviet leaders in the past three decades, they knew, and reminded each other, that there can be no winners in a nuclear war. For two days, as the world warily watched, the two men groped for some kind of human understanding, some way to master the nuclear riddle. Meeting face to face for the first time, Reagan and Gorbachev tried to set some rules to contain the arms race, some guidelines to rein in their rivalries...
...other issues facing them (see chart). While reaffirming their long-standing commitment to halt nuclear proliferation, and pledging to make progress on ongoing talks aimed at reducing conventional forces in Europe and outlawing chemical weapons, they offered no guidance on how these goals would be achieved. Despite the Soviet practice of avoiding the topic of human rights, the statement offered some bland language that "the two leaders agreed on the importance of resolving humanitarian cases in the spirit of cooperation." The summiteers announced they would carry out an agreement, signed earlier, that was aimed at improving air safety...
Reagan and Gorbachev had a shared interest in putting the best face on their meeting. When American and Soviet leaders go to a summit, they are loath to come back with nothing to show after months of mounting expectation. Failure risks disappointing, and perhaps losing, domestic and international constituencies. "The pressure to succeed is enormous," says William Hyland, the editor of Foreign Affairs and, as a former aide to Henry Kissinger, the veteran of numerous summits. "These guys don't want to go into a session like this and then have to explain why it was a mistake." Gorbachev, although...