With the elevation of Mikhail Gorbachev as the new Soviet leader in March 1985, Reagan’s hopes for a nuclear peace rose. The 54-year-old Gorbachev was well educated and had traveled extensively in the West. He understood English, he wasn’t dying (like his elderly predecessors Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko), and he even appeared to have a sense of humor. His wife, Raisa, was often at his side, like an American first lady. In his initial months in power, Gorbachev announced a unilateral freeze on deploying intermediate-range missiles in Europe and began speaking in public about the need for perestroika, economic reform. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former President Richard Nixon, and others gave Reagan their opinion that Gorbachev represented no change at all. But British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher disagreed. “I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together,” she told the BBC after meeting him for the first time. Thatcher bolstered Reagan’s optimism about the Soviet leader when she visited him at Camp David and delivered a more detailed assessment, warning him, however, that “the more charming the adversary, the more dangerous.”

Gorbachev’s situation paralleled Reagan’s in several ways. He, too, wanted to serve as an agent of societal and political transformation, taking on the alcoholism rampant in Soviet society as well as its faltering economy. Like Reagan, he relied on his own experience more than on the bureaucratic apparatus beneath him. He shared Reagan’s aversion to the logic of mutually assured destruction. Around the same time that Reagan told Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko he wanted to eliminate nuclear weapons, Gorbachev said the same thing in a speech in London. And where Reagan had Secretary of State George Shultz to encourage his evolution, Gorbachev had Eduard Shevardnadze, whom he selected to replace Gromyko as foreign minister.

The chief obstacle to the relationship Reagan wanted with the new Soviet leader was Reagan’s cherished fantasy of a space-based missile-defense program, the Strategic Defense Initiative. In the run-up to their summit meeting in Geneva in November 1985, the first meeting of American and Soviet leaders in six years, Gorbachev sent Reagan a letter proposing a 50 percent cut in intercontinental ballistic missiles, contingent on a complete ban on space weapons. In negotiating sessions, Gorbachev went even further: If the United States gave up the militarization of space, he would be willing to reduce all nuclear forces to zero. Shultz now realized how frightened the Soviets were of SDI, which depended on technology they didn’t know how to develop and couldn’t afford, and he saw missile defense as a crucial bargaining chip to trade for Soviet concessions.

What Shultz did not yet realize was that Reagan would under no circumstances give up the space initiative. Although missile defense had yet to be successfully invented, Reagan viewed SDI as the key to realizing his dream of eliminating nuclear weapons. “We believe that it is important to explore the technical feasibility of defensive systems which might ultimately give all of us the means to protect our people more safely than do those we have at present, and to provide the means of moving to the total abolition of nuclear weapons, an objective on which we are agreed,” he wrote to Gorbachev on April 30, 1985. “I must ask you, how are we ever practically to achieve that noble aim if nations have no defense against the uncertainty that all nuclear weapons might not have been removed from world arsenals? Life provides no guarantee against some future madman getting his hands on nuclear weapons.”