On January 15, 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev made a proposal that surprised the world: the Soviet leader called for the phased elimination of all nuclear weapons by 2000. It was the first time a leader of one of the two nuclear superpowers openly questioned a security model based on mutual destruction.
By the mid-1980s, the arms race between the USSR and the United States had reached a dangerous level. Moscow possessed about 40,000 nuclear warheads, while Washington had around 26,000. Against that backdrop, the Doomsday Clock stood at three minutes to midnight in 1984, and the crisis around the Able Archer exercises in November 1983, historians say, again brought the world close to nuclear war.
After Gorbachev came to power, the atmosphere began to shift. In November 1985, he and Ronald Reagan said in Geneva that nuclear war must never be unleashed and could have no winners. Even so, the Kremlin’s January program was unexpected because of how radical it was.
The plan envisioned three stages. In the first, during 1986–1990, the USSR and the US were to cut by half the weapons capable of reaching each other’s territory, while limiting the remaining delivery systems to 6,000 warheads per side. It also proposed ending nuclear tests, abandoning strike-capable space systems, and eliminating intermediate-range missiles in Europe.
Later stages were to bring in other nuclear powers, eliminate tactical nuclear weapons, and achieve the complete abolition of nuclear arsenals by the end of 1999, backed by legal and technical guarantees of irreversibility.
Washington reacted cautiously: some dismissed the initiative as propaganda, while others acknowledged that parts of it were constructive. Still, the proposal shaped the agenda of later talks. Although the Reykjavik summit in October 1986 produced no final deal, it was followed by the 1987 INF Treaty and START I in 1991. The world did not abolish nuclear weapons, but it did move toward major limits that grew out of that unrealized program.