At 1:20 p.m. on October 13, 1986, the day after he left Iceland, Ronald Reagan called Margaret Thatcher to tell her what he had offered Mikhail Gorbachev. The only other American listed on the call was the notetaker, Peter R. Sommer. His summary has Reagan describing a ten-year plan in which the first five years would bring “a fifty percent reduction in every kind of nuclear weapon, not just ballistic missiles,” and the second five would eliminate “the other fifty percent.”
A week later the official record of the same call said something else. In the version filed in the National Security Council’s permanent system files, the other fifty percent had become “the other fifty percent of ballistic missiles.”
Both versions sit in the Reagan Library, and the National Security Archive republished them on Saturday in a set marking the summit’s 40th anniversary this weekend. We read the two typed summaries page by page against each other, along with the routing slip that traveled with the official one. The rewrite comes down to four phrases on a single page, and the routing slip says who made it.
Four phrases on page two
Most people who remember Reykjavik remember it as the summit that collapsed over the Strategic Defense Initiative, with two grim-faced leaders leaving Hofdi House on October 12. The more startling part, that Reagan and Gorbachev talked seriously about getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether, is usually told as a brief moment of vision that faded on its own. The paper trail shows Reagan’s own staff working to narrow it within days, starting with the record of his first call to an ally.
Pages one, three and four of the two summaries are word-for-word the same. Every change is on page two, in the paragraphs where Reagan describes the deal:
| Passage | Sommer’s draft | Official version |
|---|---|---|
| The agreement | “to abolish all nuclear missiles over a ten-year period” | “to abolish all ballistic missiles over a ten-year period” |
| Second five years | “we would have eliminated the other fifty percent” | “we would have eliminated the other fifty percent of ballistic missiles” |
| The trade | “this agreement on eliminating nuclear missiles” | “this agreement on eliminating missiles” |
| What SDI restraint bought | “the total elimination of all nuclear devices” | “the total elimination of all ballistic missiles” |
One sentence survived intact in both versions: the first five years would cut “every kind of nuclear weapon, not just ballistic missiles.” Left standing next to the new ending, it makes the official paragraph contradict itself. Half of every kind of nuclear weapon goes in five years, and then only the remaining ballistic missiles.
The editors also left Thatcher’s side of the call alone. In the official version she still warns that “the elimination of all nuclear weapons would strike at the heart of our deterrence strategy,” still says that giving up nuclear weapons “is the sort of thing that Neil Kinnock advocates” and would be “tantamount to surrender.” In the record as filed, the prime minister is pushing back hard against a proposal the president no longer makes.
Al Keel’s “edits”
The official version comes with its paperwork. On October 14, Sommer sent the summary to national security adviser John Poindexter, recommending it go into the NSC’s permanent files after his review. The approve line is checked, with “as modified” written beneath it.
The NSC routing slip shows the package going to NSC staffer Alton Keel just before Poindexter. Keel’s handwritten note at the bottom, addressed to Poindexter by his initials, reads “JMP – plse read & note my ‘edits’.” Another hand added “Memcon redone 10/20.” Neither man appears on the participant list, which names only the president, Sommer and Thatcher. The Archive’s editors, Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, conclude that the official version reflects significant editing by Keel with Poindexter’s approval.
The slip doesn’t record Keel’s reasons, and nothing in the file shows Reagan seeing either version. What the documents do show is that the record of what the president said was rewritten by two officials who weren’t on the line.
London heard the first version
Thatcher’s private secretary, Charles Powell, wrote up the same call that evening in a Secret letter to the Foreign Office. His account matches Sommer’s draft, not the official U.S. version. Powell records Reagan describing “a radical proposal” under which the United States would not deploy a strategic defense for ten years “in return for an undertaking to eliminate all US and Soviet nuclear weapons over that same period.” Thatcher, he wrote, said the president’s proposal “for the elimination of all nuclear weapons within ten years caused her considerable concern.”
Powell’s record never mentions ballistic missiles. When the Margaret Thatcher Foundation later published it, it noted that the British and American accounts cannot be reconciled on what Reagan proposed, according to the Archive’s notes on the document.
Poindexter’s memo three days later
The editing of the call record fits a strategy Poindexter set out for Reagan in writing on October 16. The memo, marked TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE and titled “Why We Can’t Commit to Eliminating All Nuclear Weapons Within 10 Years,” opens by urging the president to “step back from any discussion of eliminating all nuclear weapons in 10 years” and to focus on the written proposals he had handed Gorbachev, which covered “all offensive ballistic missiles.” Poindexter also recommended that Reagan “make no further public comment endorsing the idea” as something he had discussed and agreed with Gorbachev. If asked, the president should describe abolition as a long-term goal requiring the correction of conventional force imbalances first.
The memo also explains where the ballistic-missile idea came from. It was originally Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s proposal, made while Reagan’s earlier letter to Gorbachev was being drafted, and Poindexter presents it as the position the allies had already been consulted on.
By December the word inside the NSC for the abolition talk was “flap.” Writing to Soviet specialist Jack Matlock on December 2, Robert Linhard, the NSC’s senior arms control staffer, objected to Matlock’s draft plan for eliminating nuclear weapons. He said it would be “very damaging at this time, especially since we have just put the flap over ‘zero nuclear weapons’ in the context of Reykjavik behind us.” The idea, Linhard added, was “not in synch with the Reagan-Thatcher priorities.” Poindexter was already gone by then. He resigned over Iran-Contra on the day Matlock forwarded his plan, the Archive notes.
How Moscow read the retreat
The Soviet records in the same set show Gorbachev noticing the shift almost immediately. At an October 22 Politburo session, in the Archive’s translation, he accused the American side of distorting the facts and said that “Reagan cannot keep a rein over his crowd.” By mid-November, in notes kept by his aide Anatoly Chernyaev, he was worried that the Americans would not go beyond Reykjavik.
None of these pages are new. The Reagan Library declassified both summaries of the call in 2010, after withholding the official one on national security grounds in 2005, and declassified the Poindexter memo in part in 2005. What the Archive’s package adds is the order of events. The first record of what Reagan told an ally was narrowed within a week, before the official line on Reykjavik had been settled anywhere else. Anyone can still compare the draft and the official version, because the library kept both.
Primary source: Summary of Telephone Conversation [Draft], Reagan–Thatcher, October 13, 1986 (PDF) and the official version with Sommer’s cover memo and the NSC routing slip (PDF). Full context: National Security Archive, “The Reykjavik Aftermath,” part of Briefing Book No. 933, “The Reykjavik Summit 40 Years Later.”
Sources
- Summary of Telephone Conversation [Draft], President’s Telephone Conversation with Prime Minister Thatcher, Peter R. Sommer, notetaker, October 13, 1986, Confidential. Reagan Library, Alton Keel Files. Used for: the call time, participants and the draft wording.
- Summary of Telephone Conversation [Official Version], October 13, 1986, with Reagan Library withdrawal sheet, NSC routing slip and Sommer memorandum to Poindexter of October 14, 1986. Reagan Library, Executive Secretariat NSC System File. Used for: the official wording, Thatcher’s lines, Keel’s note, “as modified,” and the 2005 withholding and 2010 release.
- No. 10 record of conversation, Charles Powell to Colin Budd, October 13, 1986, Secret. Margaret Thatcher Foundation. Used for: the British account of the call.
- Memorandum for the President from John M. Poindexter, “Why We Can’t Commit to Eliminating All Nuclear Weapons Within 10 Years,” October 16, 1986, Top Secret/Sensitive. Reagan Library, Alton Keel Files. Used for: “step back,” “no further public comment,” the Weinberger origin, and the 2005 partial declassification.
- Memorandum for Jack Matlock from Bob Linhard, “Your Paper, dated 25 November,” December 2, 1986, Secret/Sensitive. Reagan Library, Jack Matlock Files. Used for: the “flap” and “not in synch” passages.
- National Security Archive, “The Reykjavik Aftermath,” ed. Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton (Oct. 10, 2026). Used for: the editors’ reading of the Keel and Poindexter edits, the Thatcher Foundation note, Poindexter’s resignation date, and the translated Politburo and Chernyaev records of October 22 and November 17, 1986.
- National Security Archive, Briefing Book No. 933, “The Reykjavik Summit 40 Years Later” (Oct. 10, 2026). Used for: the anniversary package.