The Summit Meeting between The U.S. and The Soviet Union

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“Gorbachev announced a unilateral Soviet moratorium on testing nuclear weapon and sought out a summit with Reagan. At their first meeting, in November 1985 in Geneva, the two leaders failed to come up with an arms control pact but agreed to further summits.” (Pg. 401)

 

Many worldwide conflicts, alliances and political aims were related to the Cold War since the end of the Second World War, and the U.S. and the Soviet Union were the center of the war and jostled each other over their behaviors. Sometimes, they invited other lands to hold a leading position of the war and threatened each other with a nuclear weapon. However, in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, the Cold War soddenly progressed toward a solution because Gorbachev shifted his attention to domestic problems such as deterioration in the standard of living in the Soviet and the nuclear plant disaster in Chernobyl, so the summit meeting between the U.S. and the Soviet was achieved.

The first Summit meeting started at November 1985, and it wasn’t successful, but they negotiated several times to eliminate nuclear arsenal and intermediate-range nuclear weapons. This reconciliation triggered settlements of other international problems. The Soviet Union retreated from Afghanistan in 1988, many East European countries changed into democracy and the Berlin wall was collapsed in 1989. The summit meeting is definitely a key to end the Cold War.