Reykjavik Legacy
In October 1986, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met at Höfði House in Reykjavík, Iceland, for a summit that came remarkably close to achieving something that had seemed impossible: the abolition of nuclear weapons.
Their agreement ultimately didn’t happen. Reykjavik Legacy is Tonic Theater Company’s multidisciplinary exploration of that extraordinary moment, and its continuing consequences for the world today.
At the heart of the project is Richard Rhodes’ Reykjavik, a two-character drama that brings the historic encounter between Reagan and Gorbachev to life. Tonic is building a larger public conversation around the play through live performance, podcasting, filmed storytelling, and conversations with diplomats, scientists, historians, and nuclear security experts.
The Reykjavik Legacy podcast begins each episode with a dramatic excerpt from Reykjavik, placing listeners inside the room with the two leaders. The performance then opens into a conversation with experts examining the issues Reagan and Gorbachev confronted, and asking how those decisions continue to shape nuclear security, international relations, and the risks facing the world today.
The project also explores what happens when governments stop communicating, when trust breaks down, and when nuclear weapons become instruments of political coercion rather than weapons of last resort.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author Richard Rhodes, whose scholarship has shaped our understanding of the nuclear age, serves as a technical advisor to the project. His work on the evolution of nuclear deterrence, including his concept of “malignant deterrence,” the deliberate use of nuclear threats to prevent interference in conventional conflicts, provides an important contemporary lens through which to examine the legacy of Reykjavík.
Reykjavik Legacy is ultimately about more than one summit or one missed opportunity. It is about the continuing human challenge of preventing catastrophe through communication, imagination, diplomacy, and the willingness to see a problem from more than one perspective, an idea that Richard Rhodes traces back to Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity.
Through theater and the humanities, Tonic brings history out of the archive and into the room, inviting audiences not simply to learn what happened, but to experience it, question it, and consider what it means for the choices we face today.
Reykjavik Legacy is history performed, history reconsidered, and history still in the making.
International Tour
From Washington to Reykjavík—and beyond
In October 1986, Reykjavík became the unlikely setting for one of the most consequential meetings of the nuclear age. Forty years later, Reykjavik Legacy returns to the places and institutions connected to that history.
Tonic Theater Company is developing an international presentation of Richard Rhodes’ Reykjavik for the 40th anniversary of the summit, beginning in Reykjavik, and continuing to Vienna and Washington, D.C., with additional European destinations under development.
The tour is designed not simply as a theatrical production, but as a catalyst for international conversation.
At each destination, the performance serves as the starting point for conversations among artists, diplomats, scientists, historians, students, journalists, and members of the public. The central question is the same one that confronted Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986:
Can adversaries find enough common ground to reduce the danger of nuclear war?
Washington, D.C.
Reykjavik Legacy originates in Washington, D.C., bringing together theater, diplomacy, journalism, science, and public policy. Washington provides the opportunity to examine the decisions surrounding Reykjavík within the institutions and political environment that shaped them. As currently planned, Reykjavik will open in Iceland around the 40th anniversary of the meeting. After stops in Europe, the play will come home for a run in D.C.
Reykjavík
Reykjavík is the project’s essential destination. At Höfði House, Reagan and Gorbachev came closer than the world had ever expected to an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons. Although the agreement ultimately failed, the summit changed the trajectory of the Cold War and demonstrated what direct engagement between adversaries could accomplish.
Returning Reykjavik to Iceland allows the work to connect to the historical event in the place where it happened, and to ask what its unfinished promise means forty years later.
Vienna
Vienna offers a different but complementary perspective. As a major center of international diplomacy and nuclear-security institutions, it provides a natural setting for examining the systems of communication, verification, security, and cooperation that are essential to managing nuclear risk.
The international tour extends Tonic’s central premise: Theater can open historical conversations and create a space in which people with very different perspectives can encounter the same questions together.
The goal is not to recreate 1986 nostalgia. It is to use Reykjavík as a lens through which audiences can consider the nuclear dangers of the present—and the possibilities for diplomacy that remain.
The Reykjavik Legacy Podcast
History enters the room
The Reykjavik Legacy podcast brings the drama of the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev summit into conversation with the nuclear-security challenges of the present.
Rather than statistics, policy papers, or political commentary, each episode begins with a scene from Richard Rhodes’ Reykjavik, where Reagan and Gorbachev wrestle with the weight of extraordinary decisions. The dramatic encounter puts listeners in the room before moving into a conversation with historians, diplomats, scientists, journalists, and nuclear-security specialists who provide context and discuss the meeting and the legacy of the Cold War.
The format is deliberately different from a conventional policy podcast.
The result is a form of public engagement that makes an abstract problem tangible.
From Reykjavík to the present
The series explores the historical questions surrounding the summit and its consequences today: nuclear deterrence, proliferation, international cooperation, the breakdown of diplomatic communication, and the growing use of nuclear threats in conventional conflicts.
Richard Rhodes has described this emerging phenomenon as “malignant deterrence”, the deliberate threat of nuclear escalation to prevent interference in the pursuit of conventional war.
That concept provides an important contemporary lens for the project. But the podcast is ultimately concerned with a larger question:
What can we learn from this moment when diplomacy didn’t succeed?
Tonic already has a foundation for this approach. Its earlier Reykjavík work brought artists together with policymakers, scientists, and diplomats connected to the history of nuclear weapons, creating a proof of concept for this combination of dramatic storytelling and expert conversation.
The podcast continues the model and expands the conversation to new voices and questions.
Why theater?
Nuclear security is often discussed in language that is necessarily technical and abstract. Theater offers another way in.
A scene allows audiences to experience uncertainty, disagreement, ambition, fear, and trust before they are asked to analyze what happened.
That is the distinctive proposition of Reykjavik Legacy: make the abstract visceral, then give audiences the knowledge to understand what they have experienced.
Film
The legacy of Reykjavík is still unfolding
The film component of Reykjavik Legacy expands the story beyond the 1986 summit to explore what its unfinished promise means in the contemporary nuclear age.
The project combines the historical encounter between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev with a contemporary fictional narrative centered on the people responsible for protecting the world from nuclear dangers.
At its center is a fundamental contradiction: nuclear security depends upon international cooperation at precisely the moment when governments may be least willing to communicate or trust one another.
The contemporary story follows nuclear-security specialists confronting a fictionalized threat involving nuclear material. Their challenge is not simply technical. They must persuade institutions and policymakers to act while international political relationships are deteriorating around them.
The story connects the extraordinary moment at Reykjavík with the practical realities of nuclear security today.
Two timelines. One unfinished question.
The historical narrative brings audiences back to Höfði House in 1986, where Reagan and Gorbachev confronted the possibility of eliminating nuclear weapons.
The contemporary narrative asks what happens when that possibility has receded, and when the nuclear threat is once again being used as an instrument of geopolitical pressure.
The two stories illuminate one another.
The film’s contemporary storyline is being developed with the benefit of expertise from people working in nuclear security, including Richard Rhodes, whose historical work provides essential context for understanding the nuclear age. Rhodes has agreed to serve as a technical advisor to the project.
From history to human stakes
The film is not intended to turn nuclear security into an abstract policy thriller. Its purpose is to make the stakes personal.
The people confronting a nuclear security crisis operate in a world of incomplete information, competing political interests, institutional friction, and enormous consequences for failure.
That makes the story a natural extension of Tonic’s theatrical approach: use compelling human stories to bring audiences into subjects that usually remain confined to experts.