by Emma Sandifer
In 1986, with the Cold War winding down and the Soviet Union on its last legs, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev met in a tiny house on the coast of Reykjavik, Iceland, to decide whether there would be peace or war in the world.
The new movie, The Brink of War, starring Jeff Daniels, Jared Harris and J.K. Simmons (with a historically accurate cameo by former White House photographer Pete Souza), depicts this meeting with the A-list actors sitting in the same house and in the same chairs, with the same art on the walls, reciting excerpts from the actual transcribed conversations, and yet the story could not be more relevant to the world of today, 40 years in the future.
[T]he progress made in Reykjavik eventually led to the ratification of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between the United States and U.S.S.R. in 1988.
The Reykjavik Summit, believed to be the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union, was initially deemed a failure by disarmament advocates with ambitious arms control negotiations falling apart at the last minute. What was left on the table: the elimination of all nuclear weapons. While falling short of this ideal albeit lofty goal, the progress made in Reykjavik eventually led to the ratification of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between the United States and U.S.S.R. in 1988, a pivotal arms control treaty banning all ground-launched intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles. So, a concrete success nevertheless.
At a pre-release screening of the movie, writer and director Michael Russell Gunn and producer Tyler Zacharia shared with viewers that their main takeaway from the film was the power of talking and, most importantly, listening to people we disagree with. And while this is certainly true, this movie offers many more lessons for the world we live in today. Here are just a few:
“Trust, but Verify”
Both in the movie and in real life, President Reagan employed an old Russian proverb, “Dovorey, no provorey (trust, but verify),” to define engagement between the United States and the Soviet Union during his time in office. At the signing of the INF treaty, President Reagan included this phrase in his official remarks to which Secretary Gorbachev responded humorously, “You repeat that at every meeting.”
This term came to characterize the arms control negotiations of the 1980s and continued to do so until recent years. It refers to the verification procedures that form part of successful arms control agreements and enable all parties to a nuclear risk reduction treaty to monitor the compliance of the other parties. We see this in a host of monitoring and verification technologies — machines that can detect explosive nuclear testing around the world or track treaty limited materials — and in the work of institutions like the International Atomic Energy Agency, which maintains active monitoring in countries around the world to guard against nuclear proliferation and ensure peaceful nuclear energy practices. Until recently, in the spirit of “trust, but verify” and under obligation to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which expired in February, the United States and Russia would exchange vital data on their nuclear arsenals twice a year. Such was the understanding of the importance of verification to nuclear risk reduction. Beginning in 2023, Russia unfortunately refused to provide the required information as a way of highlighting increasing nuclear risk in light of its aggression against Ukraine.
In the past decade, we have seen the breakdown of the international agreements that protected the world from nuclear risk: the expiration of New START in 2026, the end of the INF treaty due to Russian cheating, and the unravelling of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (also known as Iran nuclear deal) following the U.S. withdrawal in 2018. At this moment, there is diminished trust and, more consequentially, a diminished if not destroyed ability to verify.
This blind path leads us to an increased risk of nuclear proliferation, especially from those that have ample nuclear weapons already. Monitoring and verification regimes are essential to ensuring that leaders of nuclear-armed states can make responsible decisions when it comes to their own nuclear weapons and responding to those of adversaries. Given today’s tense geopolitical atmosphere, perhaps “trust, but verify” is too ambitious a goal. Maybe “verify to trust” might be the better pathway forward. Regardless of how we get there, we have to find a way back to where we were.
Reagan’s SDI and Trump’s Golden Dome
The most obvious parallel between the discussions in Reykjavik and those of today is the concern surrounding a proposed American missile defense system. While Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed “Star Wars” is not an apples-to-apples comparison with President Donald Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” missile defense program, there are important similarities when it comes to strategic negotiations — mostly, that defensive systems cannot take the place of negotiations and can potentially complicate them.
[D]espite its characterization as a “defensive technology,” in the perspective of an adversary, this seems to be an act of aggression, possibly preempting a U.S. attack by rending the adversary’s nuclear arsenal ineffective.
In the movie, Jared Harris (playing Gorbachev) protests the SDI, arguing that despite its characterization as a “defensive technology,” in the perspective of an adversary, this seems to be an act of aggression, possibly preempting a U.S. attack by rending the adversary’s nuclear arsenal ineffective. It effectively dismantles the concept of mutually assured destruction.
Contemporary adversaries of the United States feel similarly. At the 2026 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference, PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs Department of Arms Control Director-General Sun Xiaobo shared that the U.S. Golden Dome program (combined with modernization efforts) would “…increase the risk of unnecessary nuclear confrontation and conflict, gravely undermine global and regional strategic stability, and greatly worsen the international environment for nuclear disarmament.”
While neither the Soviet Union of 1986 nor People’s Republic of China of 2026 are innocent in the realm of worsening the international environment for nuclear disarmament or increasing the risk of unnecessary nuclear confrontation, programs like SDI and Golden Dome make a bad situation worse.
The Importance of Dialogue — Even If It Is Hard.
One of the things that The Brink of War does expertly is show that even “failed” dialogue is valuable.
Following the Reykjavik Summit, The New York Times reported that although the Secretary General “called the failure ‘sad and disappointing,’ Mr. Gorbachev added that ‘it was not an unproductive meeting’… He described the talks as ‘a step in a difficult dialogue.'” We can’t forget that what came after this was the world’s first arms reduction treaty.
In what seems like a fairytale today, in 1986, both the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to come to the table, bringing both qualified experts and hopes to overcome their differences and make concessions in pursuit of a shared vision: a world in which their citizens could live free from the threat of nuclear weapons looming overhead.
Today, as all nuclear arms control treaties have gone away, and diplomats struggle to find solid ground in negotiations with Iran, this lesson from Reykjavik is all too pertinent. Arms control, and diplomacy more broadly, is rarely linear and never susceptible to quick fixes. It takes grit and endurance to find a durable and long-lasting solution to these incredibly complex and sensitive issues. Just because we hit rough terrain does not mean that all hope is lost, instead it might be the first step toward making the world a little bit safer.
Just because we hit rough terrain does not mean that all hope is lost, instead it might be the first step toward making the world a little bit safer.
When you see The Brink of War, remember that just because the issues of 1986 have not yet been solved, that does not mean they are unsolvable.
What it does mean is that we need to get back to work. The world needs to find a way back to verification and trust, we need to commit our national resources to programs that actually make us safer, and we need to return to the negotiating table again and again in good faith until we can find a way to make everyone safer.
