Now a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Ambassador Simons spent most of his U.S. Foreign Service career (1963-1998) working in East-West relations. In October 1986 he was part of the U.S. team at the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting in Reykjavik: he was in fact the U.S. notetaker on the Sunday afternoon when that meeting broke up. Many now see that afternoon’s exchange on getting rid of nuclear weapons as validating today’s elimination movement. Simons’ memory of being there gives him a somewhat different take, and he talked about it, and what came before and after Reykjavik, in his session.
Thomas W. Simons is Visiting Scholar at Harvard University at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Currently he is a Ukraine in European Dialogue Visiting Fellow at IWM.
Comments by Holly Case (Associate Professor of History, Brown University; IWM Visiting Fellow)
