It will be on the falklands crisis of 1982. Lets talk about Ronald Reagans foreign policy. We are a generation removed and historians are looking back to see what worked and what did not. Your book is based on one of the most high profile summits that took place. First of all, why was reykjavik the location for the summit . What was the goal . James Graham Wilson it would be a prelude at the end of 1986 for gorbachev coming to the United States. It was a, lets get together in a compromise country between the east and the west and have an informal conversation about how to move forward. This turned very quickly into a rather dramatic few days in which reagan and gorbachev spoke very seriously about getting rid of all nuclear weapons. And the stumbling block right at the end was gorbachev asking reagan to limit testing of sdi, something that was very dear to him. And some the people around him. So this encounter ended with scenes of reagan slumped over, very emotional, gorbachev looking very disappointed. But i think that ultimately as the two sides realized what had gone on they thought it should be regarded as a breakthrough in the history of arms control. And the end of the cold war. Your book begins by talking about reagans bid for the white house. He told an aide to get one of the reasons he wanted to run was to end the cold war but he did not have a plan. James Graham Wilson i think that reagan, who was a supreme optimist, saw the mission of his political career, which really skyrocketed in 1964, is finding some way out of the cold war. As i try to say in the book i do not think he had necessarily a clear idea of what to do. He had two great big aims, to get rid of communism and nuclear weapons. He had trouble reconciling them. I think that it was the arrival of gorbachev that was the key moment and also the role of George Schultz in trying to rationalize some of the contradictory impulses that reagan had. A fascinating story, 1979 president carters national and president Carters National Security Advisor getting a call from norad, thinking that there were soviet missiles. What happened . James Graham Wilson he received three phone calls. November 9, 1979. The first one was from military advisers saying they were several soviet icbms. Hundred he says to call back in a minute. The call came a minute later. And they say we are no longer tracking a couple of hundred, they are tracking a couple of thousand. His responses that at least i know what to do. He tells the same guy to call back in another minute. And the third phone call is to say that the whole thing had been a computer error. I opened the book with this to show that at that moment, exactly 10 years before the night vote the night that the wall came down in 1989 in , between these moments, something incredible happened very quickly that nobody expected. There is an opportunity to try to figure out the causes of the end of the cold war. One of the exciting things that the conference this week is that here in 2015 we have at least 20 papers that are on this period of the late carter and early reagan administrations. And the issues going on at the end of the cold war. Have you had a chance to talk to former president carter or Ronald Reagans aides . James Graham Wilson i have not met president carter. I have spoken to John Poindexter and others and i have had a lot of interaction with jack matlock who plays a very Important Role to 1986 asod of 1983 the top soviet advisor on the National Security conference. It is one of the fun parts about my job, working for the state Department Although the book is my own scholarship and not necessarily official policy of the state department or the u. S. Government. One of the wonderful things is getting to encounter these people who are now retired and often have a lot of stories to say that they were not necessarily captured in the official record at the time. Can they be a lot more open . James Graham Wilson yes. Let me ask you about one of the iconic moments. He travels to west berlin and says mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. But get beyond that important speech and have significant it was to the 10 year period you you just talk about in terms of his approach to the cold war and the fall of the soviet union. James Graham Wilson at the end of the day, there was no operational policy that flowed from it in the reagan administration. That is to say they did not follow up my coming up with a policy for how to bring down the wall. The basic tenor in reagans conversation towards the end of his administration was that maybe this was something that could happen in several decades. To give another example about the berlin wall, he said to me that Henry Kissinger said to him in november of 1988 that what would have been on his watch was the very gradual start of a very gradual diminishing of soviet control. The wall might come down within the next two decades. It happens within a year and not because reagan said to tear down the wall. When it came down that night it was not because gorbachev gave a specific order. I do think it is an important moment but i think that even more important in terms of reagans rhetoric in 1989 and the end of the cold war is what he said when he went to moscow in the summer of 1988 when asked if the soviet union was still the evil empire. He said he was talking about a different time, another era. I think that that really neutralized the perception of threat in the soviet union when it came to americans and it allowed events to proceed very quickly. When the wall fell in 1989, john sununu, the former white house chief of staff in a new book says that president bush did not want to rub it into the face of mikhail gorbachev. He wanted to have a lowkey approach. Looking back was that the right , response . James Graham Wilson absolutely. One thing that was not clear at the time about president bush and i have learned to appreciate is that in his role as Vice President of the two terms, he was in charge of something called basically Crisis Management group and he was often presented with scenarios of things that might go bad, bad scenarios, could be in the future. A lot of times one of the fears among u. S. Planners was what would happen if there were a kind of quick collapse of soviet power. What would happen . How would they respond . And the expectation always was, before gorbachev, that there would be a very harsh reaction from the kremlin. You look at bush on the night of november 9, 1989, you see somebody who was very, very cautious about saying anything. Even with his body language, that might be interpreted in the images and broadcast to the soviet union as hostile. I did it was very unfair the way i think it was very unfair the way he was portrayed on the floor of the house the next day, criticizing the president for not taking a victory lap. I agree with the defense team at the time. Lets talk about two other seeds to the fall of the berlin wall. The elevation of a polish pope , Pope John Paul ii, and the Solidarity Movement in poland. How significant were those developments . James Graham Wilson both were instrumentally important figures in the end of the cold war. The famous line from stalin the , pope, how many divisions does he have . When Pope John Paul ii goes to poland at the end of the 70s and it is a sensational moment, i think viewed by a billion people in the world. He played a big role in keeping solidarity alive, in keeping support. There is an incredible moment in 1989. When he debates one of the members of the government. It shows what a charismatic figure he is. And i think that history will regard him as a giant of the 20th century. Poland is, you know, is very important, confusing, but relevant story in the early 80s. One of the scholars that is here, nick schaefer, has written a great book about u. S. Policies towards poland from the late 70s to the early 90s. Many of the things that we hear about going on in the ukraine are very much like the political arguments and tensions between the United States and western europe once you have the series of strikes in poland and the possibility that the soviets might go in as they had done in hungary and czechoslovakia. And there have been a number of papers at the conference that look at this issue in a way that will be helpful. In this book you describe the scene with gorbachev and reagan. What about the personal interaction between these two men . What was it like . How did it evolve during the eight years of the reagan presidency . James Graham Wilson it certainly evolved, i would say. The First Encounter, was, perhaps, i do not think it was as warm as it then became. There was a moment when gorbachev made a joke about reagan having been in a bunch of b movies. Reagan took great umbrage and tried to say i was in some good ones, too. There is this moment when they First Encounter each other and you see gorbachev getting out of the car, all bundled up, and reagan, without the jacket, bounding down the stairs. The very First Encounter, which you can watch on tv, gorbachev said, i hope you do not catch cold. Reagan had outrun his interpreter so he had no idea what he was hearing. He just stood there and smiled. That is a microcosm for the initial encounters. Over time, reagan really saw somebody that he had not expected. He believed that gorbachev is somebody that believes in god, has a wonderful family and an educated wife, not at all what reagan expected from the leader of the communist world. And he began to put back together with his confidence in the Strategic Defense Initiative or star wars. And by the second or third encounters started to conceive of a grand vision where the United States would build sdi, it would share it with the soviet union, and that would be a sort of insurance policy towards having a blockbuster deal that would in the longterm eliminate nuclear weapons. But then the two sides would keep the Defense System in case somebody like qaddafi were to get their hands on the bomb. With the death of a series of soviet leaders until gorbachev took over, didnt Margaret Thatcher famously say we can do business with this guy as opposed to brezhnev . James Graham Wilson she hosts gorbachev and is tremendously impressed by him. She says he is a man that we can do business with and tells reagan as much. Another point to the story is that another thing that was not so well known at the time is that reagan was always reaching out to soviet leaders from the first few months in office. He wrote handwritten letters to brezhnev, saying we need to find a way out of the cold war. He always had this impulse to reach out to a soviet leader but obviously gorbachev was the one. What was the cold war all about . James Graham Wilson the cold war was about three things, i think. The division of germany, and europe more broadly. Nuclear weapons. And a real, unsettled ideological culture at the end of world war ii over what was the fair, the most fair way of organizing society. And i think that in all three of those questions, they were settled to some extent in the period from 1979 to 1991. They did not go away but at least there was an answer to how we stop the arms race. We know that communism does not work but that does not mean the free market is the answer to everything. We see very quickly from 1989 to 1990 the people of germany and europe as the historian to the state department i understand that you cannot give your opinion but i wonder if you can apply what you learned with how we deal with russia generally today. Are there lessons that can apply going ahead . James Graham Wilson i think that one of the lessons is that as we go forward, just to keep in mind that this history, this period at the end of the cold war is much fresher in the minds of people in russia and eastern europe. That, to them, this is something that could have happened last week. It is very much on their minds. For people who are my age, they were kids when the soviet union was a superpower. And they hear a lot of these things from their parents and they look at a world in which the country does not have the same status. That really has nothing to do with what our proper policies should be in terms of russia more broadly but i do think if we go into a president ial cycle, and people are reading about the topic, it is something to keep in mind, the very recent history in this part of the world. Why is this an area of study for you . James Graham Wilson i got very interested as everyone my age is the formative events in our lives were the attacks of september 11. I was in vassar college. I was sitting in the library. In the months after that and as we went to iraq in 2003, i became interested in several levels in trying to get at what were these situations that led to this conflict. Why did i get to grow up, be a teenager, and not have to worry about getting under the desk for Nuclear Drills . I never had to deal with it and my parents did. I think i was very lucky to go through a period of the late 90s were the sense of threat was for at least a brief period not there. In your book you talked about gorbachevs adaptability and reagans engagement and the end of the cold war. This is an often asked question. Did the men make the moment or did the moment make the individuals . James Graham Wilson these two individuals, and i talk a lot about secretary of state George Schultz, there were clearly structural changes, the recovery of the russian economy, the collapse in the price of oil which had a devastating effect on the soviet economy, the technological revolution, these things were more important. Even more important or decisions made by individuals in power, the two most important of which were reagan and gorbachev. At the end of the day, the individuals made the moment. How did Mikael Gorbachev become adaptable and how did Ronald Reagan engage . James Graham Wilson gorbachev, because of his time in the 1970s traveling to western europe and elsewhere, he saw that the promises that he was told and he believed in communism to the very end that other societies were enjoying a higher standard of living. He was embarrassed by a lot of the stagnation, antisemitism on the part of leaders in the kremlin and he was ready to try new things. His slogan, a european home, glasnost, to him these were ideas to pursue. He was a bit like Franklin Roosevelt who wanted to try anything he could to save capitalism. That was gorbachevs mentality towards communism. He tried to adapt his ideology to fit changes. And reagans engagement from the start he was trying to engage soviet leaders. It was i think a function of his incredible optimism that he really believed he could sit down and talk to anyone and persuade them in the end. And he retained that confidence through the end of his presidency. As one of the historians in the state department, is it a fun job . James Graham Wilson it is the best job that there is and it is a lot of fun. I learn something new every hour of every day. What is the next project . James Graham Wilson we have the first Foreign Relations volume on the soviet union which should come up this year which is 19811983. I think there will be a lot of interest in it. At the very moment i am trying to finish up the publication file, it is a fascinating story. James Graham Wilson thank you , for being with us. Tour, cspan cities working with our cable affiliates in visiting cities across the country. This week and are joined by turkey mitigation to learn more about the history and literary life of Grand Junction, colorado. The mining of a certain mineral had a longterm importance in this part of colorado. All over the Colorado Plateau outside of Grand Junction, were stranded by morrison rock. We find dinosaur bones and a lot of fossils. That has really intrigued scientist for long time. The other thing we time find is a mineral, rock called carnage like. It contains three different elements. Radium, which is redirected in use by terry kerry to help m arie currie. We also find vandium. Ii, it was ofar extreme value. Uranium. Also contains its one of best sources for atomic power and atomic weapons. Colorado commerce been weighing congressman wayne inall he made sure that we got our fair share. How did he do that . Career,g in his state and then going on to his federal career, he climbed of the latter of seniority and was able to exercise more power than you might normally have. Certainly in the United States congress where he was able to make sure colorado and western colorado would be treated fairly in any divisions of water. His first major success was the passage of the Colorado River storage process project in 1956. See all of our programs from Grand Junction tonight on cspan2 book tv. Of exercises at the Naval College contribute it to success during world war ii. He is an author for the Naval Colleges proceedings magazine. This is a version of his imposing ogres and the pacific in august of 1945. The institute for the study of strategy and politics hosted this hourlong event. Norman friedman, as im sure you all know, is an extremely prolific naval author. He has done untold damage to my bank account. Today, he is going to talk about the process of wargaming between the two wars and how that prepared us for the pacific war