Updating Reykjavík’s Lessons for Unlocking Progress, Recognising the Space-Nuclear Nexus

This opinion piece was written by Policy Fellows Dr Matthew Hartwell and Ching Wei Sooi.

The Reykjavík Summit is remembered both for the sweeping disarmament proposals that failed to produce an agreement and for the breakthroughs that it helped make possible. Forty years on, it offers lessons not only about diplomacy’s possibilities, but also about the obstacles that can stand in its way. With planned meetings between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping creating potential openings for dialogue and diplomacy, the summit’s lessons must be adapted to a strategic environment shaped by asymmetric threats, more nuclear rivals, and an increasingly intertwined space–nuclear nexus.

Cold War-era arms control rested on the premise that two states with broadly comparable arsenals could manage their rivalry through negotiated limits. Progress was often slow, and agreements mostly capped arms racing in specific areas rather than moving toward comprehensive disarmament. Reykjavík came close to breaking this pattern. Discussion went further than ever before, reaching possibilities neither side had expected in the run-up to the negotiations. The two leaders discussed halving strategic arsenals, removing intermediate-range missiles from Europe, and even eliminating ballistic missiles. The obstacle centred on Gorbachev’s demand that the Strategic Defense Initiative be confined to the laboratory. Reagan refused, asking during the second and final day of the talks if the General Secretary would really reject “a historic opportunity for agreement for the sake of one word in the text”.^[1]https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/3242110/Document-2-Transcript-of-Gorbachev-Reagan.pdf The dispute proved decisive, and the summit ended without a deal.

The verdicts of the negotiations diverged between the two leaders after the fact. Gorbachev insisted that Reykjavík was “not a failure” but a breakthrough that let both sides “look over the horizon”.^[2]https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1981-88v05/d309 Reagan recalled hopes for a nuclear-free world that “soared briefly” before collapsing into “one of the longest, most disappointing — and ultimately angriest — days of my presidency”.^[3]https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1981-88v05/d309 Many observers at the time sided with Reagan’s position. Nevertheless, few failed summits have aged as well. The talks led to progress on issues that had previously resisted resolution. Just over a year later, the two leaders signed the INF Treaty, and the groundwork laid at Reykjavik shaped the negotiations that produced START I in 1991.

Reykjavík left a further legacy: the failure to limit the SDI programme helped to formalise a material and intellectual basis that sustained American missile defence. While Reagan’s shield never materialised in full, American ambitions and rationale for such programmes have shifted over the decades. George H. W. Bush’s Global Protection Against Limited Strikes moved the focus toward limited attacks. The Clinton administration initially prioritised theatre missile defence, before tentatively endorsing a move toward deployment with the National Missile Defense Act of 1999. George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002 signalled a turning point, removing a major constraint on the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system. Trump’s Golden Dome represents a new attempt to realise the ambition of a more comprehensive national missile defense system. As set out in Trump’s executive order, the Golden Dome seeks to defend America against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.^[4]https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/the-iron-dome-for-america/

Golden Dome shows that the dream of a comprehensive shield outlived the Cold War. Like SDI, it is unlikely to achieve the president’s ambition, but its development is likely nevertheless to accelerate the expansion of strategic competition terrestrially and in space.^[5]https://jass.journal.fi/article/view/181644 As the saying goes, while history does not repeat, it rhymes. What lessons are there from Reykjavik for sparking renewed arms control and risk reduction today? While arms racing under the security dilemma was, of course, also present in Reykjavik and the broader Cold War, lessons from Reykjavik cannot be transported wholesale into our modern strategic environment without accounting for at least a few notable developments. 

Perhaps the most prominent change pertains to what SIPRI (The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) has referred to as the space-nuclear nexus: the “intersection of outer space, nuclear weapons, and related systems”.^[6]https://www.sipri.org/publications/2024/policy-reports/escalation-risks-space-nuclear-nexus Space has always been a militarised, strategic domain – the United States and Soviet Union quickly realised how satellite overflight could be used for the unilateral monitoring of strategic assets – and space assets have increasingly been integrated into nuclear deterrence architectures. But whereas the Cold War saw two dominant nuclear powers that were at relative (but not absolute) parity across the nuclear and space domains, the strategic environment today involves more nuclear-armed countries with greater – and shifting – disparities in nuclear and space capabilities between them. 

Russia is developing a whole range of novel nuclear delivery mechanisms, including a nuclear-armed underwater drone, and has been subject to a United States allegation that it seeks to develop a nuclear counterspace weapon. However, Russia’s position as a peer rival in space has decreased as of late, and today it is China that is rapidly catching up with the United States in space capabilities, including counterspace. Alongside China’s simultaneous expansion of its number of nuclear missile silos, these can be read as a sign of insecurity driven at least partly by American missile defence, as well as concerns that the space-based missile defence system developed as part of the Golden Dome could be repurposed as in-space weapons. The United States, in response to what it sees as a concerning threat environment, seeks to project confidence and assurance in the survivability of its nuclear deterrent and sustained ability to use space for conventional and strategic objectives. All three countries are prone to being overly generous in their assessment of adversarial capabilities, leading to worst-case assumptions of the risks posed to the survivability of their respective nuclear forces and the effectiveness of their nuclear deterrent.

Competing asymmetrical fears, proclaimed red lines, and concerns in the nuclear and space domains intermingle in the nexus between them. In their respective fora – such as nuclear risk reduction workshops or the UN working group on Preventing an Arms Race in Outer Space – concerns related to one domain often go unacknowledged and unaddressed, serving as an invisible backdrop which leads to inadequate proposals and stifled opportunities for constructive diplomacy and dialogue. This needs to be recognised to increase the odds that today’s strategic rivals will be able to maintain a somewhat stable relationship. For the expert community, proposed solutions must work across the nuclear and space silo to deal with the nexus as a whole. Formal arms control involving the counting of numbers of specific systems was fit for the Cold War, but asymmetrical capabilities and threat perceptions necessitate cross-cutting creative thinking. 

Reykjavík offers important lessons about the possibilities that can emerge during a window of opportunity with leaders willing to take political risks. Meetings planned between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping offer a chance, as at Reykjavík, for diplomacy to expand talks past their formal agenda. Ambitious proposals can move negotiations beyond their original limits, and engagement in one domain can produce positive spillover effects in other, often unexpected areas. The lessons remain relevant, even as the context has changed. Formal Cold War arms control, with complex, legally binding bilateral treaties, is unlikely to be revised in the near future. Withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002 removed a principal bilateral constraint. The legal debate over this area of strategic competition has, therefore, shifted to a looser set of principles and norms. In the face of this, BASIC’s Responsibilities Approach offers a method to navigate a path forward: focusing on reducing strategic distrust and risks through meaningful introspection and dialogues on shared intra- and inter-state responsibilities, across different domains and technologies. Grounded by principles such as collective problem-solving, neutrality, empathy, and co-creation, the approach seeks to ameliorate the condition of the security dilemma to create space for positive headway. The absence today of a comparable framework to Reykjavík and the Cold War does not preclude progress, but it demands new ways of approaching strategic competition, arms control, and risk reduction.

Image Credits: Wikideas1, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons