Word: brezhnevs
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...since the shelving of the SALT II treaty in 1980 and the failure to resume talks since then?have moved, with mutual belligerence, toward a direct confrontation that could trigger a nuclear war. Those worries were, in a sense, symbolized by a rhetorical exchange between Ronald Reagan and Leonid Brezhnev last week that probably did more to augment superpower tensions than to ease them. Speaking to the 17th Congress of Soviet Trade Unions, the medal-bedecked Soviet leader announced that Moscow was immediately suspending its deployment of new SS-20 nuclear missiles west of the Urals and targeted at Western...
Washington swiftly rejected Brezhnev's proposals. "A freeze simply isn't good enough because it doesn't go far enough," said President Reagan in a speech to the Oklahoma state legislature. Instead, Reagan reminded Brezhnev of his "zero option" proposal made last November, in which the U.S. would forgo placing its new Pershing II and cruise missiles on European soil if Moscow would scrap its arsenal of SS-20 missiles...
Concerned that Moscow might nonetheless score a propaganda coup with its proposals, the White House released a detailed analysis intended to show that the Brezhnev plan would only harden an already overwhelming Soviet edge in nuclear weaponry in Europe. The Soviet Union, for example, now has 300 SS-20 missiles in place and capable of being targeted on Western Europe?up from 100 in 1979?while NATO currently has no land-based missiles that can hit the Soviet Union. "What [Brezhnev] is talking about," charged White House Counsellor Edwin Meese, "is a situation where, two-thirds of the way through...
There was something else to Brezhnev's proposal: a vague but ominous warning to the U.S. that seemed to harken back to the days of an earlier showdown between the countries, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. If the NATO allies did indeed station the new missiles on European soil next year, said the Soviet leader, "there would arise a real additional threat to our country and its allies." Warned Brezhnev: "This would compel us to take retaliatory steps that would put the other side, including the United States itself, its own territory, in an analogous position. This should...
...occupation could spread; Iran, where the U.S.S.R. might be tempted to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of Khomeini's rule; the Arabian Peninsula, where the U.S. Rapid Deployment Force and Soviet airborne units could fight over the oilfields; the Caribbean Basin, where even last week Washington believed Brezhnev was hinting at the possibility of another Cuban missile crisis...