Curated playlist
Soviet Union–United States diplomatic conferences
- Governors Island SummitThe Governors Island Summit met on the 7th of December, 1988, and it would not go the full distance. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were at its center. Something unfolding far from Governors Island would determine when it ended.…
- Washington Summit (1987)The Washington Summit of 1987 brought Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev together for three days in December at the White House. On the first morning, they sat across from each other in the Oval Office and talked about human rights,…
- Reykjavík SummitThe Reykjavík Summit, held on the 11th and the 12th of October 1986, came within a single word of ending the nuclear age. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev sat across from each other in Höfði House in Reykjavík, Iceland, and for two days…
- Tehran ConferenceThe Tehran Conference, codenamed Eureka, gathered Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill in the same room for the first time on the 28th of November 1943. They met at the Soviet embassy in Tehran, Iran, and remained…
- Strategic Arms Limitation TalksThe Strategic Arms Limitation Talks began in Helsinki in November 1969, at a moment when the United States already held 1,054 intercontinental ballistic missiles and 656 submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Two nuclear superpowers sat…
- Glassboro Summit ConferenceThe Glassboro Summit Conference began on the 23rd of June 1967 in a house almost nobody outside New Jersey had heard of. Hollybush was the home of the president of Glassboro State College. For three days, it served as the meeting place of…
- Malta SummitBrent Scowcroft and other members of the US administration were initially concerned that the proposed Malta Summit would be premature. They feared it would generate high expectations but result in little more than Soviet grandstanding.…
- Potsdam ConferenceThe Potsdam Conference opened on the 17th of July 1945, just sixteen days after the most destructive war in human history had ended in Europe. Three men gathered at Cecilienhof, a palace in Potsdam within the Soviet occupation zone near…
- Yalta ConferenceThe Yalta Conference opened on the 4th of February 1945, inside three palaces overlooking the Black Sea in Soviet Crimea. Outside, the war in Europe was not yet over, but it was close enough that three of the most powerful men alive had…
- Geneva Summit (1985)The Geneva Summit of 1985 brought Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev face to face for the first time on the 19th of November, 1985, in a lakeside villa called Fleur d'Eau in Versoix, Switzerland. No serious arms reduction treaty would…
- Moscow Summit (1988)The Moscow Summit brought Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev together in the Soviet capital from the 29th of May to the 2nd of June, 1988. It was their fourth face-to-face meeting, and the first to take place on Soviet soil. The two men…