Word: bans
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...theory, a ban on underground nuclear tests would slow the arms race by making each side less confident that it could rely on new weaponry. It would at least be an important symbolic step. In mid-December, 46 U.S. Senators, including twelve Republicans, wrote Reagan urging him to resume test-ban talks to "demonstrate to the world that both you and Mr. Gorbachev are willing to take concrete steps to further reduce superpower tension." After years of tortuous arms-control negotiations, a test ban has the popular appeal of a quick and easy fix, harking back to the enduring...
...President Reagan is not eager to agree to a total test ban, even if verification procedures could be worked out. And any deal would surely meet fierce opposition from the Pentagon. The military, with support from the major weapons-research laboratories, wants to continue experimenting with its modernized nuclear arsenal, particularly technology that might be used to implement the President's Strategic Defense Initiative. Last Saturday at an under ground site in Pahute Mesa, Nev., northwest of Las Vegas, the U.S. exploded a device (code-named Goldstone) designed to channel the energy of a nuclear blast into a concentrated, powerful...
...real significance of the verification issue goes far beyond nuclear testing. Actually, on-site inspection is not essential to a test ban, since seismic devices placed outside the Soviet Union can detect most underground nuclear explosions. The Soviets have even shown a willingness in the past to allow seismic sensors on their soil with direct satellite links to the U.S. Inspections of missile installations are a different matter, however, and have become a major sticking point of arms-control negotiations...
...civilian sectors of the economy. Karpov laid down a proposal in Geneva last fall under which the Soviet Union would give up half of its land-based warheads if the U.S. canceled SDI. There have been some high-level hints that the Soviet definition of cancellation would be a ban on testing and deployment but not on the research phase of the program...
...which the U.S. would relinquish its arsenal. "We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead," declared former Wall Street Financier Bernard Baruch in presenting the plan to the fledgling United Nations. Moscow's Ambassador, a youthful Andrei Gromyko, put forth a Soviet counterproposal: a ban on the construction of atomic weapons and the destruction of the U.S. arsenal, with no provisions for inspection or enforcement. The cold war was just getting under way, and no compromise was reached. Three years later the Soviets successfully tested a bomb of their...