The Foreign Service Journal, November 2022

14 NOVEMBER 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL out the president’s policy and often said so. When asked by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher after the Reykjavík Summit how he, “a man with his feet on the ground,” could have let Reagan talk with Gorbachev about eliminating nuclear weapons, Shultz replied: “Mag- gie, he’s the president. Besides, I agree with him.” Reagan’s loathing of the idea of using nuclear weapons in war led him to declare in his 1984 State of the Union Message: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Those words were repeated in a joint statement issued by Reagan and Gorbachev in 1985 when they met for the first time at a U.S.-Soviet summit meeting in Geneva. In 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavík, Iceland, and seriously discussed the elimination of nuclear weapons. In 1987, building on the Reyk- javík meeting, a U.S.-Soviet treaty was concluded that resulted in the elimina- tion of all U.S. and Soviet intermedi- ate- and short-range nuclear weapons delivery systems. Work on a strategic arms reduction treaty was well along when the Reagan administration ended, and Shultz left office. The treaty was concluded during the single term of George H.W. Bush. An interesting sidelight of the first President Bush’s attitude toward the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a statement he made in Ukraine, urging that country not to seek independence at all costs. He was concerned about centralized control of the Soviet stockpile of nuclear weapons. For this, his speech became known as “the Chicken Kiev speech.” In 1988 Reagan met with Gorbachev in Moscow. Walking with Gorbachev through Red Square, Reagan was asked by a reporter about the speech in which he had condemned the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire.” His reply: “You are talk- ing about another time, another era.” Gorbachev’s major and perhaps most lasting achievement was his freeing of the nations of Eastern Europe to join or not to join alliances. This is a provision of the Helsinki Final Act, which Leonid Brezhnev, one of his predecessors as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had signed. Soviet leaders prior to Gorbachev had