The great Soviet dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev met for the first time in January 1988. That was a little more than a year after Gorbachev had given Sakharov permission to return to Moscow from the closed city of Gorky, to which Sakharov had been exiled for seven years.
When Sakharov returned, US–Soviet nuclear arms control was at an impasse; Gorbachev was insisting that the US commit to keeping its ballistic missile defense (BMD) program within the constraints of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, and President Ronald Reagan was refusing to do so. Sakharov publicly argued that Reagan’s program, ridiculed as “Star Wars” by its US critics, would never produce militarily significant capabilities and that Gorbachev therefore should seize the opportunity for nuclear arms reductions. Two weeks later that view was endorsed by the Soviet leadership and opened the path to deep cuts in...
