Guest Post: Successful Reykajavik Accords

This article first appeared on Today in Alternate History.

March 23, 1997 - A Decade of Reykjavik

The world celebrated as the Reykjavik Agreement reached its historic decade-long milestone set by Reagan and Gorbachev at the Icelandic capital. The specified period for confining testing of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to the laboratory was also reached.

Thankfully, the ever-present danger of Mutually Assured Destruction had been avoided. To his great credit, Reagan had remained faithful to his long-sighted vision in 1976 at Kansas City, when he said the Republican National Convention, "You are going to write for people a hundred years from now, who know all about us. We know nothing about them. We don't know what kind of a world they will be living in."

More importantly, Reagan had faced up to the reality that SDI would fail to deliver any time soon. Notwithstanding these welcome breakthroughs, the limitation of nuclear armaments was a problem infinitely more complex than four decades earlier when President Harry Truman of the United States set Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson onto the task of answering the question, "What to do with The Bomb?" The UN Atomic Energies Commission had "to deal with the problems raised by the discovery of atomic energy." It requested proposals, and Truman tapped "park bench statesman" Bernard Baruch to present one. Baruch had recommended America as the sole nuclear power give up the Bomb, but many Americans in the '40s felt the nation had come by the atomic bomb legitimately and had no need to give it up until the nations agreed to outlaw atomic weapons.

The successor governments of the 90's under Clinton and Yeltsin were not looking at the world a century on, but they certainly had a significantly different perspective from either Baruch in '46 or Reagan in '76 or even '86. Due to nuclear proliferation, other countries had joined the nuclear club of nations. In metaphorical terms, the genie was out of the bottle. What would be the point of handling atomic weapons over to the United Nations if they continued to be deployed around the world? Or if one of the superpowers maintained their own secret stockpile? Or a device was delivered to the target in the cargo of a ship or a terrorist organization developed a suitcase bomb? SDI had no answers for these scenarios.

Where Gorbachev had hesitated to use his conventional armed forces to keep the Soviet Union together, Yeltsin and more so his successor Vladimir Putin had done so to keep the Russian Federation in one piece. War came to Chechnya and Georgia. These conflicts only pushed Eastern European states towards the West. As the NATO Alliance expanded eastwards, Moscow feared encirclement and existential threat. In keeping with her bloody history of invasion, Russia prepared for the inevitability of war with European aggressors. When Presidential candidate Mitt Romney proposed that Russia was America's primary adversary, President Obama responded that "the 1980s called and want their foreign policy back."

Subsequent developments indicated that Romney was closer to the truth. The buffer states chose sides, as the Baltics joined NATO, and Ukraine and Georgia became candidates for future membership of the collective security agreement under which an attack on one was considered an attack on all. Belarus turned to Moscow, but Ukraine looked to Washington. When Russia occupied the Crimea in 2014, citing a Soviet-era justification, it was obvious to most that a conventional World War Three was around the corner. After decades in which Western politicians had feared the overwhelming force of the Soviet Union, the NATO Alliance was far greater in strength. This was largely due to technology advancement on the battlefield.

Events could only take one direction. In early 2015, President Putin announced that the Russian Federation would not be renewing the Reykjavik Agreement. Instead, in the interests of security, Russia would re-equip its nuclear capability with the assistance of its allies in Beijing. In retaliation, President Obama announced that the United States would resume SDI testing with its allies and partners. How to handle this changed landscape in the long-term became the core campaign issue in the 2016 presidential election. Fundamentally, all of the candidates agreed that the US would also need to take the same steps, but the larger question was whether to invest in a next generation SDI technology that could end the new arms race. Americans elected Romney on his third race for the White House, trusting him to find the answers to resolving this deepening crisis. Reversing the logic of Eisenhower's Farewell Address, he put faith in the military-industrial-complex to defeat Putin and his "potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power."

Author's Note:

In reality, the talks collapsed at the last moment over SDI.