When Barack Obama arrives in Moscow on Monday for his first full-blown summit with Dmitry Medvedev, many will be tempted to cast their minds back to the grand old days of US-Soviet summitry.

In the two decades before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the leaders of the two countries got together for several set-piece occasions, signing agreements bound in heavy leather tomes that paved the way for reductions in their nations’ nuclear weapons. Taking a step back to those times, the two presidents will point the way to the first arms control agreement by Washington and Moscow in seven years.