214 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
In the afternoon, Gorbachëv asked Reagan whether he accepted
the proposal to reduce strategic nuclear missiles by fifty per cent.
Reagan said he did, before making the proviso that any agreement
should leave the two sides with equal military capacity – a simple
halving would allow the USSR to keep far more warheads than
America. He stood by his own call for the complete eradication of
intermediate-range missiles in Europe and Asia.^30 Gorbachëv enquired
whether Reagan would consider restricting his ‘zero option’ to Euro-
pean territories if the Soviet side could find a way of alleviating
worries about the USSR’s Asia-based rocketry. He also appealed to
Reagan to appreciate his flexibility in offering to concede the labora-
tory testing of the Strategic Defense Initiative.^31 While recognizing
America’s superiority in financial resources, he predicted that the
Soviet scientists would invent ways of counteracting the American
programme. He refused to take Reagan seriously in his promise to
share the products of the research. If the Americans prohibited the
export of dairy-industry technology to Moscow, why should Soviet
leaders believe that things would be different with anti-missile equip-
ment? He contended that the President anyway failed to comprehend
what his entire project for strategic defence truly involved. The same
old topic continued to divide them.^32
Shultz looked on the bright side. That evening, as his limousine
carried him back to the Holt Hotel, he exclaimed to his aide Hill:
‘Charlie, it was a sensational day! So much on the table!’^33 The arms
reduction working group headed by Nitze and Akhromeev tried to
narrow the divisions before the next day of talks. The discussion in the
Höfdi House continued into the small hours. The two delegations
occupied the first floor, above the rooms where the meetings between
Reagan and Gorbachëv took place. At the top of the stairs, the Amer-
icans had rooms on the left and the Soviets on the right.^34 (The
Icelanders had a good political sense of humour.) The American dele-
gation’s discussion ‘bubble’ was an impressive piece of kit but other
features of their equipment were less so. Richard Perle had to impro-
vise a desk by getting a door unscrewed and laid across a bathtub. He
and his colleagues did not want to plug their electrical typewriters into
the mains for fear that the KGB might somehow detect what they were
typing. It was intense work. The Americans had only one professional
secretary with them in the Höfdi House; they also quickly ran out of
carbon paper and had to borrow some from the Soviet delegation.