Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev overruled their hardline counsellors to end the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. FEAR CAN paralyse, but sometimes it saves the world. More than once in the cold war a shared dread of nuclear annihilation led American and Soviet leaders to pause and seek better ways to manage arsenals whose power defied decency and reason. Sometimes the terror felt by superpower rivals averted imminent disaster, as when John F. On other occasions the salutary effects of fear took longer to show themselves. Held in a cramped, reputedly haunted seaside house, the summit was intense and claustrophobic.
A film, “The Brink of War”, has just been released to mark the 40th anniversary of a meeting between Ronald Reagan and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, in Reykjavik. Diplomats who took part recalled the two officers, one American and one Russian, who stood outside the leaders’ meeting room holding the “footballs” that controlled 60,000 nuclear warheads between them.
Talks were derailed by a dispute about Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), the doctrine that, to avoid war, nuclear attacks must end in doom for all sides. Reagan, hating the idea of seeking peace through vulnerability, refused to halt his Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), his (never-realised) dream of an interceptor shield against nuclear missiles. Gorbachev asks how he can begin to disarm, if a shield might let America renege and strike the USSR with impunity.
“I will not have future generations of Americans live in fear,” the film’s Reagan declares, echoing declassified transcripts. He dismisses Reagan’s offer to share SDI as a “fantasy”.
America long worked to stop new countries from joining the nuclear club, though for reasons of realpolitik it forgave India, Israel and Pakistan after they built nukes. Mr Trump’s views of nuclear arms races are hard to pin down. Now, in his second presidency, he has sought to sell nuclear technologies to such partners as Saudi Arabia and South Korea with fewer limits or safeguards than were seen in previous, similar deals. Belying the apparent sincerity of that ambition, he repeatedly picks fights with Canada, whose territory is needed for the radar stations that would make such a shield fully effective.
While still a candidate for the presidency in 2016 he said that it might be better for Japan to have nuclear weapons to deter North Korea than for it to rely on America for help.
At home Mr Trump has pledged to build a “Golden Dome” interceptor system to shield America from missile attack.
