From the launch of the Soviet Union’s January 15, 1986, proposal to abolish all nuclear weapons by the year 2000, both Reagan and Gorbachev pursued their shared dream of nuclear abolition. Reagan and Shultz were the only senior people in the U.S. administration who took Gorbachev’s initiative seriously; the Chiefs and the allies were against it.
After Reykjavik, the documents show that the American side actively suppressed Ronald Reagan’s nuclear abolition ideas, while the Soviet side worried that Reykjavik was “as high” as the US would ever go, when Gorbachev expected this to be the beginning of a whole new era of nuclear arms reductions. With hindsight, the tentative agreements–even breakthroughs–that the two leaders reached at Reykjavik on 50% cuts in strategic weapons, on intermediate range missiles, and on nuclear testing would create an “arms race in reverse” that would culminate the next year with the first-
Reagan believed that there could be no arms control without progress on human rights and in private meetings put pressure on the Soviets to make reforms. Gorbachev believed in opening his society and reforming the country. Human rights issues became a major subject in negotiations and at every summit and ministerial meeting. Soviet internal documents show that American quiet pressure was effective.
Washington, D.C., August 31, 2026 - The “fundamental reevaluation” that took place in the Kremlin under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev not only encompassed the political, ideological, and economic spheres but also included fundamental changes in military doctrine, according to declassified U.S.
Washington, D.C., November 14, 2025 - The State Department quietly deleted important archival records from an official history detailing how a 1983 NATO war game could have led to a catastrophic nuclear exchange, according to new reporting from the Washington Post. This is the first known instance in which the State Department has removed previously declassified and published documents from one of its Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volumes, according to the report.
Washington, D.C., October 15, 2025 - The 1968 crash of a nuclear-armed B-52 bomber near the U.S. Air Force Base in Thule, Greenland, that scattered radioactive plutonium across miles of icefields created an environmental catastrophe that demanded a quick response and a political crisis for the Danish government that exposed contradictions in its no-nuclear policy.
Washington, D.C., September 25, 2025 - Newly published documents and photographs concerning the radiation and blast effects of the August 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki provide graphic details on how U.S. and British officials first assessed the deadly impact of the atomic weapons. These and other records published today are among the data and evidence that helped undermine the public claim made at the time by Manhattan Project director Gen. Leslie Groves that radiation sickness was “a pleasant way to die.”
The first full U.S. report on the results of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, 80 years ago this week, made a “conservative estimate” that around 100,000 people had been killed, according to a newly published report from the U.S. Army Air Forces on Tinian Island, dated August 8, 1945.
Washington, D.C., July 16, 2025 - Early in the morning of 16 July 1945, 80 years ago, the U.S. Manhattan Project staged the first test of a nuclear weapon in the New Mexican desert. It was the first trial of a plutonium implosion weapon—the same weapon type that devastated Nagasaki a few weeks later. The explosion on the ground produced radioactive fallout contaminating over 1,100 square miles of the state, with some debris spreading as far north as Canada.
