The National Archives has regular releases of newly declassified documents. Some are fairly arcane, many quite revealing. The latest release details notes and information regarding the attempt by Soviet Leader Gorbachev in 1986 to get an agreement to abolish nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, there was a fly in the ointment and his name is "the gipper":

The documents show that U.S. analysis of Gorbachev's goals for the summit completely missed [my emphasis] the Soviet leader's emphasis on "liquidation" of nuclear weapons, a dream Gorbachev shared with Reagan and which the two leaders turned to repeatedly during the intense discussions at Reykjavik in October 1986. But the epitaph for the summit came from Soviet aide Gyorgy Arbatov, who at one point during staff discussions told U.S. official Paul Nitze that the U.S. proposals (continued testing of missile defenses in the Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI while proceeding over 10 years to eliminate all ballistic missiles, leading to the ultimate abolition of all offensive nuclear weapons) would require "an exceptional level of trust" and therefore "we cannot accept your position."

This is a tragedy of epic proportions.

The tone of the description of the release attempts to be charitable to Reagan, but clearly the U.S. side was the problem. Later, Gorbachev was even willing to accept the U.S. conditions:

Politburo notes from October 30, two weeks after the summit, show that Gorbachev by then had largely accepted Reagan's formulation for further SDI research, but by that point it was too late for a deal. The Iran-Contra scandal was about to break, causing Reagan's approval ratings to plummet and removing key Reagan aides like National Security Adviser John Poindexter, whose replacement was not interested in the ambitious nuclear abolition dreams the two leaders shared at Reykjavik.

The United States Republican leaders, statesman-like as always.

Of course, who knows if the genie could ever really be put back into the bottle. But this was an opportunity for the two key nuclear powers to try. And what stopped it? The chronically paranoid and nutty Republicans insistence of continuing research into SDI, which by-the-way, continues unsuccessfully to this day twenty years later. Put another way, the biggest sticking point to a comprehensive ban of nuclear weapons on the planet was an insistence by Reagan to continue a pie-in-the-sky science fiction program to protect against soon to be non-existent nuclear weapons, and then a stupid scandal hatched by the ancestors of the current Republican hackery.

I was raised to believe that America is not an aggressive country. America is a country that only fights when it has to and typically goes out of it's way to avoid violent conflict. In short, we are the good guys. Clearly that's a quite naive notion only for school children and this revelation is merely a continuing refutation of that myth. On the contrary, America is apparently a most aggressive and violent society and an obstacle to attempts to have world peace.

Gorbachev's brief opportunity in time to attempt to make the world safe may be, someday, seen in hindsight as a pivotal moment in human history where the limitations of a popularly elected Hollywood actor to the position of leader of the free world caused human near extinction, if not extinction. If it was not so tragic it might be funny.

In the end, I hope that my conclusion ends up being hyperbole. But the way things are going, I doubt it.