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On Aug. 1, 2025, the Office of the Historian published National Security Policy, 1985–1988 Part 1, which focused on President Ronald Reagan’s pursuit of the Strategic Defense Initiative and Strategic Modernization Program.

What can we learn from this newly released volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States series? The biggest takeaway is that questions about war and peace in the nuclear age remain so important. Many of the people debating nuclear policy today were born after Reagan was president. Others who grew up when he was president may not have an accurate sense of what he wanted to achieve. Moreover, the challenges facing policymakers today about strategic stability echo similar conversations from the past. Especially in the context of President Donald Trump’s commitment to build a “Golden Dome” and modernize U.S. strategic forces, grappling with the history of the Reagan era can help policymakers produce outcomes that keep America safe. As Mark Twain is rumored to have said: “History does not repeat, but it does rhyme.”

The Foreign Relations of the United States series presents the official documentary historical record of key foreign policy decisions and important diplomatic activity of the U.S. government. I started compiling this latest volume as a historian in the Department of State’s Office of the Historian almost exactly 14 years ago. One evening in 2015 — on my way home from the office having spent the day working on it — I accosted former National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane in the produce section of the Foggy Bottom Whole Foods. And I peppered him with questions about fixed land-based intercontinental missiles with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles: “Could they ever be stabilizing?” I asked. “Perhaps not,” he responded — yet I would need to take this up with the U.S. Air Force.

The Foreign Relations of the United States Series and You

It is not my job to tell the U.S. Air Force (or Space Force) what to do. Nor is it my job to tell you what you should learn. According to 22 U.S. Code § 4351, the purpose of the Foreign Relations of the United States series is to provide “a thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record of major United States foreign policy decisions and significant United States diplomatic activity.” If my colleagues and I are doing our jobs, then we are empowering you to come up with your own explanation of how the Reagan administration pursued the Strategic Defense Initiative and modernization of strategic forces to advance overall U.S. objectives in the second half of the 1980s. Keep in mind that this is the 12th Reagan volume to be released out of 52 total volumes so there are a lot more on the way.

Three terrific books can help to provide insight into the geopolitical and historical context swirling around the Reagan White House. Will Inboden’s The Peacemaker Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink and Max Boot’s Reagan: His Life and Legend offer competing interpretations about Reagan. The former focuses nearly entirely on his eight years as president, while the latter is a full-scale biography. In his masterful Gorbachev: His Life and Times, William Taubman downplays the role of the U.S. military buildup in shaping Gorbachev’s actions. I recommend each of these books.

The Foreign Relations of the United States series can help you develop your own argument about Ronald Reagan, nuclear weapons, and the last few years of the Cold War. Try employing a combination of keyword and chronological searches that cut across volumes. For instance, here are all the released documents from one month before the start of the Reykjavik Summit of Oct. 11–12, 1986 — where Reagan and Gorbachev came close to a blockbuster nuclear agreement — to one month after it ended. You can also use the ChatGPT 5 model as a virtual research assistant to serve up these primary documents alongside news reports from this period. How do the declassified White House records compare with what the White House press corps was reporting? This is just one of a multitude of entry points to start your research.

Depending on how deep you want to dive, you can also go to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Evaluate and interrogate primary U.S. documents and compare them to the Soviet documents that Tom Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya include in The Last Superpower Summits: Reagan, Gorbachev and Bush. Conversations that Ended the Cold War. Consider as well Susan Colbourn’s Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO and Sergey Radchenko’s To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power. To what extent were Reagan’s ideas about nuclear weapons as important as alliance dynamics or the long arc of Soviet leaders’ ambitions throughout the Cold War? My point here is that you can use the Foreign Relations of the United States series to engage in a serious debate with leading scholars on more equal footing.

My Own Take on National Security Policy, 1985–1988 Part 1

National Security Policy, 1985–1988 Part 1 confirms Ronald Reagan’s deep loathing of nuclear weapons and his commitment to abolishing them. He expressed this publicly, for instance, in his address to the Japanese Diet on Nov. 3, 1983, when he stated: “I know I speak for people everywhere when I say our dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth.” When I first read Paul Lettow’s 2006 Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, I was skeptical. Yet the more I have dug into the records over the past 20 years, the more I am convinced. President Reagan’s “goal is the total elimination of nuclear weapons,” according to declassified minutes of a National Security Planning Group meeting on Dec. 17, 1984.

Still, turning Reagan’s vision into reality required a clear plan of action. And as I contend elsewhere, around the time of that meeting — shortly after the president’s reelection in November 1984 — Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State Paul Nitze put forward a “strategic concept” to move in three phases from strategic offenses to strategic defenses. Nitze was dubious about the Strategic Defense Initiative and (at least by the mid-1980s) the prospect of nuclear abolition. Yet, he was proud of his own role in crafting the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; he wanted to sustain it and wanted to achieve a durable strategic offensive arms reduction agreement.

Ultimately, both Reagan’s ambition and Nitze’s bureaucratic savvy — on top of Gorbachev’s aspirations to reduce or even eliminate nuclear weapons — proved to be essential toward negotiating the December 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and that same month a basic formula for what became the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. That is my interpretation of how we got from December 1984 to December 1987.

What’s New in National Security Policy, 1985–1988 Part 1

This volume reveals how the Department of Defense and intelligence community reacted to Reagan’s proposals in the aftermath of the October 1986 Reykjavik Summit. On Nov. 3, the president signed National Security Decision Directive 250, “Post-Reykjavik Follow-Up,” in which he directed the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Central Intelligence Agency to consider the opportunities and costs associated with eliminating all fast-flying intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles — within a decade.

National Security Decision Directive 250 was previously declassified in part — the Foreign Relations of the United States version is released in full. Newly declassified and available as well are documents showing how the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Central Intelligence Agency carried out President Reagan’s tasking — they were skeptical. In their quarterly meeting with President Reagan on Dec. 19, 1986, Chairman William Crowe and the rest of the Joint Chiefs of Staff took turns accentuating the negatives.

Chief of Naval Operations Carlisle Trost “noted that much of the Soviet [nuclear attack submarine] force is devoted to protecting bastions for SSBNs [Ship, Submersible, Ballistic, Nuclear]. Thus, a zero ballistic missile regime would free-up Soviet [nuclear attack submarines] for other missions.” Army Chief of Staff John A. Wickham “noted that the current modernization program for ground forces is only about 30 percent complete and that, to be completed with the ten-year transition period, it would have to be accelerated at an estimated cost of $180 billion.” Commandant of the Marine Corps Paul X. Kelley “noted that up to now, extended deterrence of the ‘nuclear umbrella’ has ‘really depended on ballistic missiles.’ Any premature shift away from ballistic missiles would stress both conventional capabilities and regional balances.” And Gen. Kelley “was not sure we could really implement the necessary force improvements outlined by the other Chiefs.”

Considering this pushback, Reagan insisted he was serious. “[A]t the end of Reykjavik we were talking ballistics, and they [the Soviets] brought up the idea of all nuclear weapons,” the president observed. This was consistent with his long-held aspirations; he also wanted to call the Soviets’ bluff. According to the notes of this meeting, Reagan said: “We needed to go through with this so that the Soviets can see we are serious” and that “[t]hey have a choice — join us in arms reduction or lose an arms race.” At that point in the meeting, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger proclaimed consensus on what to seek within 5 years: a 50 percent reduction. When it came to the period after that, he noted “that while we have the resources to move towards conventional emphasis, we don’t have the will (i.e., ‘We don’t have the votes’).” Democrats had flipped the Senate a few weeks earlier and were set to control all the key committees come January 1987 and complicate Weinberger’s life. He observed: “[So] while the Soviets don’t have the overall resources, they can make up for this through their determination to make further sacrifices.”

On Jan. 15, 1987, Acting Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates sent his agency’s response to National Security Decision Directive 250 to Reagan’s newly appointed National Security Advisor Frank Carlucci: “The paper covers a lot of important issues,” Gates wrote. “I want to emphasize that, although I think it is highly unlikely that the Soviets would go along with a move to eliminate ballistic missiles while retaining bombers and cruise missiles, they, in fact, would be in a much better position to take advantage of such a new regime than most people realize.” In other words, Gorbachev could well be laying a trap.

What follows in the Central Intelligence Agency paper are an overview and 109 paragraphs on topics that remain relevant in 2025. “A zero-zero ballistic missile agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union would be cause for concern in Beijing — despite its longstanding call for the abolition of nuclear weapons,” according to the overview. China would come under great pressure to accede to such a treaty. “At the same time,” the paper went on to say, “compliance with an agreement [. . .] would nullify China’s deterrent, which relies exclusively on ballistic missiles that can threaten the Soviet Union.”

According to paragraph 82, NATO allies — especially nuclear-armed Britain and France — “will continue to oppose the elimination of U.S. and Soviet ballistic missiles on the grounds that it will undermine the concept of nuclear deterrence and weaken the perceived U.S. commitment to Western Europe’s defense.” Paragraph 107 — “Nth Countries” — concluded that it was unlikely that states such as Libya, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea would restrain their nuclear ambitions. To conclude this exhaustive depiction, the Central Intelligence Agency included a chart of what Soviet forces could look like in December 1996 and how menacing that could still be.

When it comes to National Security Decision Directive 250, Gates’ memo was not quite the end of the road. But you get a sense of the reluctance of the Central Intelligence Agency on top of that of the Joint Chiefs. On April 7, 1987, National Security Advisor Frank Carlucci submitted to Reagan a final report on the military aspects of a world with zero ballistic missiles: “[The Joint Chiefs] conclude that a transition to a zero ballistic missile world by 1996 is possible either with no increase in risk or with no increase in cost, but not both. They provide two plans, one maintaining risk constant, and one involving no increase in cost.” Carlucci spared the president the 100 pages of the Joint Chiefs’ report. He recommended to Reagan that “[p]ending some Soviet movement in that direction, we take no further action on analyzing the Reykjavik formula for a transition to a world without offensive ballistic missiles.”

Of course, none of this took place in a political vacuum. Details about the Iran-Contra affair emerged in November 1986 and hobbled the Reagan administration for months. Congressional hearings began on May 5, 1987 and lasted until Aug. 6, 1987, after which Reagan publicly apologized. These were the lowest months of Reagan’s presidency. Did Iran-Contra impede Reagan’s ability to counter Central Intelligence Agency and Joint Chiefs of Staff skepticism about National Security Decision Directive 250? That I do not know; it is something to ponder.

Reagan rebounded, signing the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in December 1987, and he fought hard to conclude the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty before the end of his presidency. “[T]he bottom line is you’ve got to go for the gold,” as he put it to his national security team on Feb. 9, 1988.

Behind the Curtain

In sum, I learned from National Security Policy, 1985–1988 Part 1 that, after the Reykjavik Summit, Reagan instructed his national security team to embark on an exercise that reconsidered a fundamental tenet of U.S. grand strategy from the late 1950s forward — that ocean spanning ballistic missiles would underwrite the protection of the American homeland — and his national security team, which was in flux because of Iran-Contra (as well as the incapacitation of Director of Central Intelligence William Casey), took this charge seriously and concluded that to do so would be too expensive. Especially in the context of the Gramm–Rudman–Hollings Balanced Budget Act, which Reagan signed into law in December 1985 and which pegged future spending to deficit projections, the cost of achieving zero ballistic missiles was insurmountable.

In the totality of these and other sources, it is possible that National Security Policy, 1985–1988 Part 1 tells you nothing more than what you already knew or could figure out elsewhere. At the very least, it is a convenience. All Foreign Relations of the United States volumes are free and accessible to anyone, anywhere — and in three E-Reader formats. Read them on the beach and come up with your own interpretation of history. Figuring that out is the hardest-yet-most-enjoyable part.

James Graham Wilson works on Soviet and National Security Policy volumes for the Foreign Relations of the United States series in the Office of the Historian at the Department of State. He is the author of America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024) and The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagement, and the End of the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government or the U.S. Department of State.

Image: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons