Today, slower of step but hardly of wit, Mikhail S. Gorbachev and George P. Shultz are allied in that same common cause, and watched as their two countries' new presidents joined this month in the unprecedented step of declaring their governments partners in pursuing the goal of abolishing nuclear weapons.
"Persevere," is former Soviet President Gorbachev's advice to the two younger men.
Make sure your "home constituencies" are behind you, counsels ex-U.S. Secretary of State Shultz.
The two 20th-century statesmen looked back on the famous "failure" of the 1986 Reykjavik summit and ahead to this new disarmament effort in interviews with The Associated Press during a two-day conference on "Overcoming Nuclear Dangers" last week in Rome.
In that October 23 years ago, Gorbachev, President Ronald Reagan and their lieutenants, Shultz among them, met in the Icelandic capital to negotiate reductions in their nuclear missile forces.
When Gorbachev surprised the Americans by proposing Moscow and Washington eliminate all nuclear weaponry, Shultz barely hesitated. "Let's do it," the transcript shows him responding.
Both presidents had touched on the idea in recent speeches, but few outside the inner Kremlin circle expected it to land on the bargaining table. Reagan was enthusiastic, Gorbachev optimistic. But it wasn't meant to be. This earthly aspiration
- of a world without a nuclear nightmare - foundered on the shoals of outer space.
Reagan was unyielding on his other dream, of a space-based defense system that would shield America from any rogue state's missile attack. The Russians, meanwhile, were unswayed from their conviction that such a scheme was meant to give their old Cold War foes a permanent military advantage.
"We came very close. We were ready to sign an agreement in principle," Gorbachev told the AP, sitting beneath the lofty, lush murals of Raphael's 16th-century Villa Madama, site of the Italian government's conference dinner Thursday.
But "we regarded this" - Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative
- "as an attempt to weaponize outer space. We saw that that was a real danger."
The Russians demanded the SDI be limited to laboratory research. Reagan refused.
"In the end it got entangled," recalled Shultz, meeting with a reporter in the marble-clad grand halls of Italy's Mussolini-era Foreign Ministry. "If anything was to happen, everything had to happen." The summit ended in seeming discord.
A generation later, however, both men look back and see more success than failure. The ambition and spirit of Reykjavik contributed, they believe, to the 1991 U.S.-Soviet START agreement, the first reducing the superpowers' ranks of atomic-tipped missiles, and to the concurrent end of the Cold War.
"Certainly our efforts were not in vain," said Gorbachev, who went on to win the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize. "A very large proportion of nuclear weapons have already been destroyed."
For his part, Shultz, at 88 still natty in a rich, gray-striped suit and commanding in his precise, lawyerly tone, carries around a chart to show people how the number of weapons declined post-Reykjavik. The old, missile-heavy doctrine of "mutual assured destruction" was "not a very healthy way to achieve peace," he said.
