The Night Shift at Reykjavik: What ‘The Brink of War’ Tells Us about Arms Control

In Reykjavik, Iceland, on the evening of October 11, 1986, while U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev slept, their advisers sat down to draft a treaty. By morning, they had produced text for a staggering range of reductions in the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals that had once been considered impossible. But there was a sticking point.

Michael Russell Gunn’s new film, The Brink of War, with Jeff Daniels as Reagan and Jared Harris as Gorbachev, portrays that weekend and the night shift that produced a never-signed agreement. The advisers had left a blank space where the provisions limiting Reagan’s space-based missile defense initiative would have been—the point of impasse that ended the summit without a treaty. The movie tells the story of two leaders who wanted the same thing but couldn’t quite make it so.

This much is true. What the transcripts of the summit also reveal—as I explore in The Arms Control Paradox, out this month from Stanford University Press—is why they couldn’t.

Both leaders went to Iceland feeling as if they held the fate of the world in their hands. A few years earlier, after the Soviets had mistaken Korean Air Flight 007 for a spy plane and shot it down, Reagan had watched the nuclear disaster film The Day After and wrote that it left him greatly depressed. Gorbachev, meanwhile, was still reckoning with the Chernobyl catastrophe, which by his own account had changed how he understood nuclear danger, as well as the accidental sinking of a Soviet ballistic missile submarine northeast of Bermuda, when fuel from the missiles the ship carried leaked into the carrier tubes, causing an explosion days before the summit.

The pair arrived at Höfði House on the North Atlantic—which locals believed was haunted—carrying a vision of the same worry: that false warning or a misread signal somewhere below their command could start a war neither had ordered. Despite the shared fear, they pursued incompatible strategies at the negotiation table.

Gorbachev’s proposal for eliminating nuclear weapons was designed to be implemented in phases, each one beginning only after the last one was completed. He proposed halving all strategic nuclear arms in the first five years, and eliminating the remaining in the second, conditional on both sides remaining party to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which limited defenses, for those ten years. Reagan was surprised at the breadth of Gorbachev’s proposal but was game to try for it. His own Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a nuclear countermeasure nicknamed “Star Wars,” which would shoot down incoming nuclear missiles before they hit. Gorbachev told his counterpart that limitations could be placed on SDI in the later phases, once reductions were achieved. In doing so, he was trying to build a structure to leave the hardest issue for later and get the early stages of disarmament moving, banking goodwill and progress to cash in down the line.

Reagan saw his missile-shield project as insurance against leaders who perhaps did not yet exist, speaking of the danger of future “nuclear maniacs.” He invoked this madman hypothesis often enough that it began to irritate Gorbachev. His answer to an unknowable future was a machine that would protect the country no matter who inherited it.

The two leaders’ positions represented two coherent but incompatible theories of addressing an uncertain future. One develops procedures that can adjust to uncertain events; the other works to counter a particular event deemed unacceptable. When one side is trying to manage uncertainty, and the other is trying to reduce risk, no amount of genuine warmth between the two can close the gap.

Initially, the Soviets wanted the defense question settled by the clock, to be dealt with when the time arrived. The Americans wanted the issue tied to offensive reductions, allowing more defenses to be deployed as the missiles were destroyed. The same paragraph couldn’t accommodate both ideas, so that section remained blank while the rest of the agreement was drafted.

The standoff finally came down to one word. Gorbachev’s position was that Strategic Defense Initiative testing must be confined to a laboratory for 10 years. “It’s laboratory or goodbye,” he reportedly told Reagan.

Reagan and Gorbachev shared a goal, a rapport, and a deep fear about what the future held. But none of that could bridge their fundamental difference over how to deal with that future. Gorbachev was willing to accept a risk he believed could be handled later. Reagan would not accept a risk on the promise of later resolution.

That division—between eliminating a specific risk now and managing future uncertainty—outlasted both men and is visible in the United States’s current approach to nuclear arms control. When New START, the last remaining treaty between the United States and Russia limiting nuclear weapons, lapsed on February 5, 2026, Russia offered an incremental step: to continue observing the treaty’s limits to strategic nuclear weapons without onsite inspections for one year—as long as the U.S. did the same. Washington instead announced a plan to hold negotiations for a “new, improved, modernized treaty,” forgoing Russia’s incrementalism (deemed untrustworthy) in favor of a treaty with an expanded scope that would include Russia’s tactical nuclear warheads as well as China’s arsenal. China refused participation. The U.S. passed on the limit that was available, holding out for a wholesale solution that would not materialize.

Forty years after that night in Reykjavik, the United States is still trying to reduce nuclear risks on its own terms—the same way Reagan did. But comprehensive approaches rarely succeed under complex, highly uncertain conditions. This was the case at Reykjavik in 1986, and it is true for the world today. Four decades later, the U.S. is still holding out for the treaty it wants rather than the treaty it can have.