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October 2007
About the Project > Activities & Events> 2006 Reykjavik Summit 20th Anniversary Conference
2006 Reykjavik Summit 20th Anniversary Conference
 Session One. The participants reviewed the historic event and examined the build up to and preparations for the Summit. They also discussed the agenda of the Summit and its impact on arms control, human rights and bilateral and regional issues. |
At their October 1986 meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev agreed on the need to eliminate nuclear weapons. That historic meeting ultimately helped lead to the end of the Cold War. "Since that time, the nature of the nuclear threat in the world has changed, but the 20-year-old lessons of Reykjavik may well help us achieve the goal of a modern world free of nuclear weapons," said former Secretary of State George P. Shultz.
Implications of the Reykjavik Summit on Its Twentieth Anniversary: Conference Report (Hoover Institution Press, 2007), edited by Sidney D. Drell and George P. Shultz, contains essays drawn from presentations at the 2006 Hoover Institution conference on the legacy of the Reykjavik meeting. The contributors examine a range of topics, including the implications of the summit for current nuclear arms control efforts.
Along with these insightful essays, the book includes the declassified official transcript of the discussions between Reagan and Gorbachev at Reykjavik as well as official Soviet documents. The Soviet documents, now available in the Hoover Archives, provide insight into Soviet preparations for the summit, including key positions and an assessment of their research and development with respect to nuclear weapons relative to the United States. Taken as a whole, the contributions in this collection reassert the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and underscore the need for new, practical measures to achieve that goal.
A paper version of the report can be purchased from Hoover Press here.
Full-text PDF versions of each chapter can be accessed here.
Sidney D. Drell is a senior fellow, by courtesy, at the Hoover Institution and professor of theoretical physics (emeritus) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He coauthored The Gravest Danger: Nuclear Weapons with James Goodby. George P. Shultz, the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution, served as U.S. secretary of state under Ronald Reagan.
Watch the video of the 2006 Reykjavik Summit 20th Anniversary Conference.
See the photos taken at the 2006 Reykjavik Summit 20th Anniversary Conference.
See the photos of the 1986 Reykjavik Summit.