The story of cultural contact between Dixon, Illinois, the boyhood home of President Ronald Reagan and Dickson (or Dikson), Siberia, the northernmost town in the world, a place where polar bears are a traffic hazard, and a restricted area of the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

This human story of the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a new world of friendship and peace is told in alternating segments by Boris Ivanov and Bill Shaw, two newspapermen viewing the unfolding drama from opposite sides of the collapsing Iron Curtain.