Gorbachev wrote a message to the United States in Pravda and Izvestia, proposing a program to gradually reduce nuclear weapons with the goal of complete elimination within 15 years. This same goal had been declared by US President Ronald Reagan a few years earlier, before Gorbachev came to power. Gorbachev’s move served to discredit what Yeltsin called “the old mafia of the party apparatus,” and was enthusiastically welcomed by Reagan.
