TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93AC0490> <title> US-Soviet Summits -- Chronology: 1943-1991 </title> <history> Compact ALMANAC--World Statistics </history> <article> <source>Time Almanac</source> <hdr> U.S.-Soviet Summits Chronology: 1943-1991 </hdr><body> [The following was prepared by W. Taylor Fain, III, of the Office of the Historian.] Every President since Franklin D. Roosevelt has conferred with the Soviet leadership, either the head of the Communist Party or head of the government. These meetings, 24 in all, went through several distinct phases. During World War II, Roosevelt and Truman met with Soviet and British leaders to decide on the conduct of military operations and to make arrangements for the peace. Three meetings during the Eisenhower Presidency were expanded to include France, and Eisenhower grappled unsuccessfully in the enlarged forum over the elusive German peace settlement and the growing problem of nuclear weapons. Kennedy and Johnson each met the Soviet leadership during the 1960s in informal circumstances over issues ranging from Europe to crises in the Middle and Far East. Five Nixon-Ford meetings with Chairman Brezhnev and a subsequent Carter-Brezhnev conference in the 1970s dealt primarily with arms control. The agenda of President Reagan's five meetings with General Secretary Gorbachev at Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington, Moscow, and New York included arms reductions, human rights, regional issues, and bilateral affairs. President Bush expanded the agenda to include transnational issues at Malta, Washington, Helsinki, Paris, and London. November 28-December 1, 1943: (Tehran: Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) Discussion centered on planning for the cross-channel invasion of enemy-occupied France. The three powers also agreed to try to get Turkey to join the war and to split Finland away from the Axis powers. Also discussed were political questions, including a future world organization, and postwar policy toward Germany. The leaders issued a special declaration recognizing Iran's contribution to the war effort. Decisions on some issues, such as future Polish boundaries, were postponed. This was the only summit held outside Europe, the Soviet Union, or the United States. February 4-11, 1945: (Yalta: Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) The three leaders issued an invitation to the United Nations to meet in the United States and discussed the future of Poland and Eastern Europe, the status of postwar Germany, and the conditions for Soviet entry into the Pacific war. In a Declaration on Liberated Europe, the Allies pledged to assist the liberated peoples to establish order and create representative governments through free elections. In a secret agreement, the Soviet Union promised to enter the Pacific war 2 to 3 months after Germany's surrender in return for certain Far Eastern concessions. Yalta remains the most controversial summit meeting because the Soviets later unilaterally subverted the concept of free elections to establish hegemony over Eastern Europe. July 17-August 2, 1945: (Potsdam: Truman, Churchill and Attlee, and Stalin) The conference dealt with the military details of the Soviet entry into the Pacific war and political questions, primarily the occupation of Germany and the question of German reparations. The three powers created a Council of Foreign Ministers to work on peace treaties with the European Axis powers and their Eastern European satellites, and reached an agreement on the resettlement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to Germany. In a declaration issued on July 26, the United States, Great Britain, and China demanded Japan's unconditional surrender. During the conference, Turman learned of the successful test of the atomic bomb and informed Stalin in general terms. July 18-23, 1955: (Geneva: Eisenhower, Eden, Faure, Bulganin and Khrushchev) At this first postwar conference, also the first to be called a "summit", Eisenhower advanced the "Open Skies" proposal calling for an exchange of military blueprints with the Soviet Union and aerial reconnaissance of each other's military installations. The participants also discussed disarmament, German reunification through free elections, European security, and the need for greater East-West contacts through travel and exchange of information. September 15, 26-27, 1959: (Washington-Camp David: Eisenhower and Khrushchev) Following brief meetings with Eisenhower upon his arrival in Washington on September 15, Khrushchev embarked on a 10-day trip to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, farm communities in Iowa, and Pittsburgh, arranged to acquaint him with the American way of life. Eisenhower and Khrushchev then engaged in substantive talks for 2 days at Camp David. They agreed to expand exchanges and to remove the Soviet deadline for a Berlin settlement, but no progress was made on disarmament and the reunification of Germany. They also agreed on a four-power summit in Paris the following year. Khrushchev also visited Eisenhower's farm at Gettysburg. Just before he left, Khrushchev addressed the American people on national television. This meeting constituted the first visit to the United States of a Soviet leader since establishment of U.S.-Soviet relations in 1933. May 16-17, 1960: (Paris: Eisenhower, Macmillan, De Gaulle, and Khrushchev) The four leaders planned to discuss Germany and Berlin, disarmament, nuclear testing, and the general state of East-West relations. On the second day of the conference, before any issues could be considered, Khrushchev demanded that Eisenhower apologize for the U-2 overflight of the Soviet Union on May 1. When Eisenhower refused, Khrushchev seized upon the issue to leave the conference. President de Gaulle's attempt to mediate failed. June 3-4, 1961: (Vienna: Kennedy and Khrushchev) The status of Berlin was the major subject of discussion, but the conflict in Laos and the question of disarmament were also on the agenda. Khrushchev's truculence on Berlin surprised and sobered Kennedy, but some progress was made when the two leaders agreed that further discussions on Laos should be continued at the Foreign Minister level. Kennedy replaced the highly- structured conference favored by Eisenhower with more informal and personalized meetings. June 23 and 25, 1967: (Glassboro: Johnson and Kosygin) The meeting at Glassboro, New Jersey, was arranged and agreed on after considerable haggling over a suitable location. It followed Kosygin's visit to the United Nations, where he came to support the Arab nations' proposals for ending the Middle East conflict that led to the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In addition to the Middle East, disarmament and the Vietnam war were also discussed. During the conference, the Soviet Union served as intermediary in conveying North Vietnamese willingness to negotiate in exchange for a halt to the U.S. bombing. The U.S. counterproposals via Moscow were never answered. May 22-30, 1972: (Moscow: Nixon and Brezhnev) This meeting had two principal and substantial accomplishments. First, it established a personal relationship between Nixon and Brezhnev, which facilitated the convening of subsequent meetings between the two leaders. Second, Nixon and Brezhnev signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) Interim Agreement, both of which had been in negotiation in Helsinki and Vienna for many months. Also concluded were agreements on public health, environmental cooperation, incidents at sea, exchanges in science, technology, education and culture, and a Declaration of Basic Principles of Mutual Relations. June 18-25, 1973: (Washington: Nixon and Brezhnev) Brezhnev's visit to the United States resulted in 47 hours of meetings with Nixon in Washington, Camp David, and San Clemente. The two leaders signed nine accords, which included an Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War and an Agreement on Basic Principles of Negotiations on the Further Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. Other agreements signed at the summit dealt with scientific cooperation, agriculture, trade, and other bilateral issues. The joint communique expressed "deep satisfaction" with the conclusion of the Paris Agreement on Vietnam which had been signed the preceding January. Nixon stated at Brezhnev's departure that the meeting "built on the strong foundation that we laid a year ago." June 28-July 3, 1974: (Moscow: Nixon and Brezhnev) Watergate and the President's imminent resignation overshadowed the meeting with the General Secretary and limited expectations on both sides. The two leaders discussed arms control and several international and bilateral issues in Moscow and at Brezhnev's villa in Oreanda on the Black Sea. They signed a protocol limiting each side to one ABM site apiece instead of the two allowed in the 1972 ABM Treaty, and a Threshold Test Ban Treaty, which limited the size of underground nuclear weapons tests. The Test Ban Treaty was never ratified by the United States, because of concerns about its verifiability. The governments signed several other instruments dealing with scientific cooperation, cultural exchanges, and other bilateral matters. Nixon and Brezhnev also agreed to explore the possibility of a 10-year time period for a SALT treaty, which opened the way for the Vladivostok accord a few months later. The communique reaffirmed an agreement to hold regular meetings. November 23-24, 1974: (Vladivostok: Ford Brezhnev) At the Vladivostok meeting, which followed visits by Ford to Japan and Korea, discussions focused on strategic arms limitations as well as on a number of bilateral and international issues, including the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and the Middle East. In the SALT II negotiations, Ford and Brezhnev reached agreement in principle on some of the basic elements that were subsequently incorporated in the 1979 treaty. They issued a joint statement on strategic offensive arms (the Vladivostok agreement) and a joint communique calling for continuing efforts at arms limitation and the development of economic cooperation. July 30 and August 2, 1975: (Helsinki: Ford and Brezhnev) During two sessions at Helsinki, immediately prior to and following the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Ford and Brezhnev attempted unsuccessfully to reach further agreement on strategic arms limitations. Differences between the two governments over cruise missiles and the Soviet Backfire bomber frustrated Ford's and Kissinger's desires to strengthen cooperation between the two superpowers and to conclude a SALT II agreement. Ford and Brezhnev held frank discussions on other issues, including the Arab-Israeli conflict and the relationship between Soviet emigration policy and most-favored-nation trading status. June 15-18, 1979: (Vienna: Carter and Brezhnev) The SALT II Treaty was signed at this summit in Vienna. Carter and Brezhnev also discussed other arms control questions including the continuation of the SALT process, and had wide- ranging exchanges on human rights and trade, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Africa, China, and other regional issues. The two leaders also issued a joint statement of principles and basic guidelines for subsequent negotiations on the limitation of strategic arms. The SALT II Treaty was never ratified. November 19-21, 1985: (Geneva: Reagan and Gorbachev) President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev discussed a four-part agenda: human rights, regional issues, bilateral matters, and arms control. The President pressed for improvement in Soviet human rights practices, removal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, and the resolution of regional conflicts in a number of countries including Cambodia, Angola, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua. In the arms control area, both leaders called for early progress on reductions in strategic, offensive nuclear forces. They also had frank exchanges on strategic defense issues. They agreed to study the establishment of Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers and to accelerate efforts to conclude an effective and verifiable treaty banning chemical weapons. They endorsed a policy of regular exchanges between senior U.S. and Soviet officials. The General Secretary accepted the President's invitation to visit the United States in 1986 and the President agreed to visit and U.S.S.R. the following year. At the end of the meeting, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the General Agreement on Contacts, Exchanges, and Cooperation in Scientific, Technical, Educational, Cultural, and Other Fields, and announced that the two countries would resume civil air service. October 10-12, 1986: (Reykjavik: Reagan and Gorbachev) President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev held a meeting in Reykjavik to discuss all four points of the U.S.-- Soviet agenda -- human rights, regional conflicts, bilateral cooperation, and arms control -- with particularly intense discussions on arms reductions. The two leaders agreed in principle to 50% reductions in strategic offensive arms to a level of 6,000 warheads on 1,600 delivery systems they also reached agreement on a counting rule for strategic bombers. In addition, they agreed to seek an initial INF [Intermediate- Range Nuclear Forces] agreement for a global ceiling of 100 warheads on longer-range INF missiles, with none in Europe, and constraints on shorter-range INF missiles. The President and Secretary Gorbachev agreed to expand mutually beneficial bilateral cooperation. However, on the final day of the meeting, Gorbachev insisted that further progress on INF and START be linked to new and unacceptable restrictions on the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative program. The President rejected such linkage, noting that the proposed Soviet restrictions on SDI were more stringent than those contained in the ABM Treaty and would cripple the SDI research program. December 7-10, 1987: (Washington: Reagan and Gorbachev) President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev met in Washington to continue discussions on the four-part U.S.-Soviet agenda: arms reductions, human rights, bilateral issues, and regional issues. They had full and frank discussions on human rights issues. The U.S. and Soviet leaders discussed increasing bilateral exchanges, cooperation on environmental matters, and trade expansion. They held wide-ranging talks on regional issues including Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq war, Central America, southern Africa, the Middle East, and Cambodia. The two leaders signed the "Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Elimination of Their Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles." They instructed their negotiators at the Geneva Nuclear and Space Talks to intensify efforts to complete a Treaty on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms to implement the principle of a 50% reduction in these arms, which was agreed to at the Reykjavik meeting. The leaders also instructed their negotiators to work out a new and separate treaty on defense and space issues that would commit the sides to observe the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, as signed in 1972, while conducting their research, development and testing as required, which are permitted by the ABM Treaty, and not to withdraw from the ABM Treaty for a specified period of time. Secretary Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze also signed agreements to increase air service between the United States and the Soviet Union and to extend the U.S.-Soviet world oceans agreement. General Secretary Gorbachev renewed his invitation for the President to visit the Soviet Union in the first half of 1988, and the President accepted. May 29-June 1, 1988: (Moscow: Reagan and Gorbachev) President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev met in Moscow to continue substantive discussions on the four-point U.S.-Soviet agenda: arms control, human rights and humanitarian affairs, settlement of regional conflicts, and bilateral relations. A wide-ranging discussion of regional questions included the Middle East, the Iran-Iraq war, southern Africa, the Horn of Africa, Central America, Cambodia, the Korean Peninsula, Afghanistan, and other issues. The two leaders exchanged and signed ratification documents on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which the Supreme Soviet and the U.S. Senate had approved on May 23 and 27 respectively. On Nuclear and Space Talks, understandings were reached in a number of areas, as a joint draft text of a treaty on reduction and limitation of strategic offensive arms was being elaborated in the Geneva negotiations. Exchanges on START resulted in the achievement of substantial additional common ground. The two leaders also discussed nuclear non-proliferation, the Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers established in Moscow and Washington, the status of ongoing negotiations toward a comprehensive, effectively verifiable, and truly global ban on chemical weapons, the status of conventional forces negotiations, and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Secretary Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze also signed or consummated through an exchange of diplomatic notes nine separate agreements, two of them related to arms control: the agreement on Advanced Notification of Strategic Ballistic Missile Launches and the Joint Verification Experiment agreement on nuclear testing. The seven other agreements covered a range of issues such as expansion of U.S.-Soviet cultural and educational exchanges, U.S.-Soviet cooperation on peaceful uses of atomic power and on space exploration, maritime search and rescue, fisheries, transportation technology, and radio navigation. December 7, 1988: (New York: Reagan and Gorbachev) President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev met on Governor's Island in New York Harbor, while the Soviet leader was visiting New York City to address the United Nations General Assembly. The meeting, which Vice President Bush also attended, was a private, non-negotiating session, followed by a luncheon. December 2-3, 1989: (Malta: Bush and Gorbachev) President Bush and General Secretary Gorbachev held a shipboard meeting in the harbor at Valletta, Malta, for an informal, personal discussion of major issues. The two leaders held a 5-hour session on December 2, including a one and one-half hour private meeting. A scheduled afternoon meeting and dinner was cancelled because of a major winter storm. They met again for 3 hours on the morning of December 3, and then held a joint news conference. During the meetings, the two leaders discussed the remarkable events leading to peaceful and democratic change in Eastern and Central Europe. President Bush noted his strong support for perestroika. Discussions also reviewed future steps in the U.S.- Soviet relationship, economic and commercial relations between the two nations, human rights, regional issues, particularly Central America, environmental concerns, and a range of arms control issues, including chemical weapons, conventional forces negotiations, strategic arms talks, the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, arms control verification, missile proliferation, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the situation in Lebanon. The two leaders agreed to hold a formal summit meeting in Washington in June 1990. May 30-June 3, 1990: (Washington: Bush and Gorbachev) Presidents Bush and Gorbachev met in Washington and at Camp David. During the first two days of meetings in Washington, the Presidents held wide-ranging discussions on political and economic matters including arms control, German unification, and U.S.-Soviet trade. On June 1, the leaders signed a key elements agreement for a strategic arms treaty, a chemical weapons reduction accord, and a trade agreement reducing barriers to U.S.-Soviet commerce. Several other bilateral accords increasing cultural and scientific exchanges as well as maritime and air links were concluded. A 5-year U.S.-Soviet grain deal was signed. While in Washington, President Gorbachev hosted events for prominent American figures in the political and business worlds and the arts. On June 2, Presidents Bush and Gorbachev spent the day in the more informal atmosphere of Camp David, where they discussed regional issues, including Afghanistan, Lithuania, and Central America. They also discussed U.S.-Soviet economic relations. The following day, President Gorbachev left Washington for Minneapolis, where he met with local business leaders, and San Francisco, where he met with former President Reagan, before returning to Moscow. September 9, 1990: (Helsinki: Bush and Gorbachev) Presidents Bush and Gorbachev met in Helsinki to discuss the crisis in the Persian Gulf caused by Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait. The summit, announced on September 1, was the product of a decision by the Presidents at Camp David in June to hold more informal and unstructured meetings as global developments warranted. The Presidents met for seven hours (three hours privately in the morning and four with an expanded group of advisers in the afternoon). They issued a joint statement expressing their solidarity in opposition to the Iraqi invasion and their intention to cooperate fully in ending the Gulf crisis. They also urged their negotiators to move forward more rapidly in finalizing both strategic and conventional arms control agreements and discussed the progress of Soviet economic reforms. November 19, 1990: (Paris: Bush and Gorbachev) Presidents Bush and Gorbachev met during the November 19 CSCE summit in Paris. They held a private discussion on the crisis in the Persian Gulf and Soviet support for a proposed UN resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq should it prove necessary. July 17, 1991: (London: Bush and Gorbachev) Presidents Bush and Gorbachev met privately over lunch on the final day of the economic summit of the Group of Seven industrialized nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States). They announced the completion of a START agreement and scheduled a summit in Moscow for July 30-31. They also discussed the economic situation in the Soviet Union. </body> </article> </text>