Word: 20s
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...prove that the new President could simultaneously stand up to the Soviets in the military competition and sit down with them at the bargaining table. Haig pushed for a negotiating position similar to that favored by the Carter Administration -- fewer Tomahawks and Pershing IIs in exchange for fewer SS-20s...
Perle had just what Reagan was looking for: the "zero option." He proposed a straightforward, all-or-nothing package -- zero American missiles in exchange for zero SS-20s. That scheme could indeed be presented in a single sentence, which was at the heart of a speech the President delivered on Nov. 18, 1981: "The United States is prepared to cancel its deployment of Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles if the Soviets will dismantle their SS- 20, SS-4 and SS-5 missiles...
...game being played to a draw this week began about ten years ago, when Ronald Reagan was a radio commentator and Gorbachev was Communist Party boss for the Stavropol region. That was when the strategic rocket forces started deploying the SS-20s. But that same year, Soviet civilian leaders began to have doubts about whether more and more nuclear weapons like the SS-20 necessarily meant more security and power for the U.S.S.R. The Kremlin initiated a gradual shift in emphasis away from nuclear weaponry to conventional weaponry as instruments of Soviet influence and intimidation, particularly in Europe. In January...
...they engaged in an extraordinary, one-on- one mini-negotiation -- the so-called walk in the woods -- that resulted in a tentative deal that would have sacrificed the Pershing II but allowed the U.S. a stripped-down deployment of cruise missiles to counter a residual force of SS-20s. Cruise missiles fly subsonically at low altitudes and are vulnerable to enemy air defenses. The Pershing II ballistic missiles arc to the edge of space and can strike targets inside western Russia in a matter of minutes. The deal was repudiated by both men's home offices. It was shot down...
...first hint that the game might be changing came in 1985, when the Soviets tipped their hand on two critical points. One was the status of SS-20s in Soviet Asia. The U.S. had been insisting that the zero option must be "global in scope": it must eliminate SS-20s in Asia too, since they are mobile weapons that in a crisis could be moved to threaten Europe. In May 1985, Gorbachev publicly suggested that his government would be willing to freeze its SS-20 forces east of the Ural Mountains. Shortly afterward the Soviet delegation in Geneva tabled...