"There’s a definite lack of leaders [today]," documentary producer Richard Symons commented to a Frontline Club audience on 8 October.  "Where are they?"

Symons had just screened the third film in his and Joanna Natasegara’s series The Price of Kings, which explores the weight of leadership.  Previous films have focused on Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres.

One true leader, the latest Price of Kings film suggests, has been Oscar Arias, two-time President of Costa Rica.

In 1987, he famously defied American and Soviet insistence – "an incredible amount of pressure," one aide put it – that Costa Rica pick a side in the Cold War proxy battles that were tearing Central America apart.

"I had to fight Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev," Arias reflects in the film.  "It was not gonna be easy, to say to Goliath, ‘well, here’s David, little David, but we’re gonna fight for our convictions, for our principles, for our ideals."

Peace was Arias’ ideal.  With no military behind him – Costa Rica’s disbanded in 1948 – he nonetheless broke from Washington and Moscow to bring ideologically-opposed Central American leaders to a negotiating table.

"Dial back to 1986," Symons said, "if you looked at those guys and what was going on in their countries, Arias must have been absolutely off his tits to think he could even get them on the phone!"

The Esquipulas Peace Agreement resulted, settling bloody conflicts that raged between Kremlin- and American-backed groups fighting for power over Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.  His efforts earned him the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize.

"In person, he’s an oddly persuasive man," Natasegara shared.  "He’s not necessarily hugely charismatic, and yet there’s something right about what he says, and you see how he could have convinced them."

In 2006, Arias risked his legacy by serving once more as Costa Rica’s President; the film shows how his dogged support for an unpopular mining project left his reputation among Costa Ricans in tatters. 

Today, he campaigns – so far unsucessfully – for an International Arms Treaty that would halt the flow of weapons from idustrialized nations to the third world.  

"Use the dividends of peace," Arias says simply, "[and] the world would be quite different, it seems to me."

After the screening, an audience member wondered why so many people in the film, even those very close to Arias, did not speak entirely positively about him.  Natasegara answered, 

"Ironically, I think apart from two people in the film […] everybody was very warm about him.  And I think that’s what’s nice […] that they feel so much trust in him that they can speak openly about his flaws […]  So if they speak badly towards him, it’s only because he allows this kind of openness."

The trailer for The Price of Kings:  Oscar Arias can be seen here.

Watch the event here. 

With detailed insider knowledge David E Hoffman told the story of how the president of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev and the US president Ronald Reagan prevented the escalation of the Cold War into a full-blown conflict.

As a reporter for the Washington Post Hoffman followed Reagan throughout his campaign and subsequent presidency but found him to be something of an enigma – “he was a terrific actor, he played roles”.

Neither Hoffman nor his fellow journalists knew what his private papers later revealed, that Reagan was in favour of disarmament.  Today support for nuclear deterrents is one of the foreign policy benchmarks for Republicans, said Hoffman, but Reagan held a different perspective, which became more apparent later in his presidency.

Gorbachev was a similarly unlikely candidate for change – as a Soviet Communist he rarely deviated from the party line. According to Hoffman, by the time Gorbachev was made General Secretary in 1985 he had already concluded that by reducing the vast sums spent on defence and the Cold War he could bridge the gap  between what Hoffman termed “the rotten lives” that most Russians led, and the country’s substantial resources.

The title of Hoffman‘s book The Dead Hand refers to a semi-automatic system developed by the Russians in the 1980s whereby three people who remained in the bunker were able to start the nuclear retaliation should everyone else be wiped out by a US attack.

The major problem, said Hoffman was that the Americans never knew about it – the Russians forgot that an effective deterrent needed to be common knowledge, said Hoffman.

It is not known how much Gorbachev knew about the development of biological weapons in the 1980s and he denied all knowledge when questioned by a concerned British prime minsister Margaret Thatcher and Reagan’s chief of staff James Baker.  Whether the real Gorbachev was a “participant or saviour?” remains unknown, said Hoffman.

But if a more hawkish character been leading the Soviet Union, things could have turned out very differently.

Instead of following through with the Generals’ plans, Gorbachev “put them in the bottom drawer” and ignored them, said Hoffman, who added that “without Gorbachev the Cold War would not have ended”.

As for Reagan, he “played an enormous role too” in ending the Cold War, but, concluded Hoffman “needed a partner” in order to do so.

David E. Hoffman, who worked for 27 years as a reporter and editor at The Washington Post, will be at the Frontline Club to discuss the relationship between US president Ronald Reagan and Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the dying days of the Cold War.

Author of The Dead Hand, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative history of this era, David E. Hoffman covered the White House during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and was Moscow bureau chief from 1995 to 2001.

From the discovery of a Soviet biological warfare machine to the refusal of Gorbachev in 1985 to compete in Reagan’s massive “Star Wars” weaponry programme, Hoffman tells the inside story of this fascinating era, including the little-known story of the Soviet semi-automatic retaliatory system known as the Dead Hand, a Doomsday Device that would leave the fate of Earth in the hands of three surviving duty officers buried deep underground in a concrete, globe-shaped bunker.

Hoffman will be in conversation with investigative journalist, university lecturer and author of Spyflights of the Cold War and co author of Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, Paul Lashmar.

Join us for what should be a fascinating evening looking back at the Reagan/Gorbachev era.