The symbolic presence of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) has been and continues to be the pivot point in all summitry rhetoric between the American President and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. To examine some of the rhetorical choices made by Gorbachev to dramatize his vision of why Ronald Reagan refuses to negotiate on the issue of SDI, Kenneth Burke's "Dramatistic Pentad" is applied. One aspect of Mikhail Gorbachev's rhetorical world is revealed through three October 1986 speeches he presented in Moscow after his meeting with Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik, Iceland. Gorbachev's manipulation of the pentadic terms suggests a starkly different motive behind SDI from that presented by Ronald Reagan: it will allow nuclear superiority by the United States over the Soviet Union rather than peaceful co-existence. Pentadic elements are ordered so that identification with the drama's premises result in any call for peace automatically also becoming a demand for cessation of any SDI research or planning. However, since the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty is "strategically safe" and would enhance Gorbachev's ethos, and mostly, because the benefits and deficits as well as strengths and weaknesses of the SDI may well remain rhetorical, Gorbachev may not always link Soviet negotiations to demands for an abandonment of SDI, despite the rhetorical vision he invites his audience to share. (Eighty-one notes are included.) (MS)