Word: brezhnevs
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...through one long emergency session of the 15-man Politburo after another, Leonid Brezhnev may well have felt a twinge of envy at Richard Nixon's evident power to make quick foreign policy decisions on his own. Despite his pre-eminence as Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party, Brezhnev is a member of a collective leadership whose decisions are reached only by consensus. Last week those deliberations were especially arduous, as Russia's ruling council coped with its most complex challenge in a decade: how to respond to the U.S.'s mining of North Vietnamese harbors...
Peacetime Policy. For Brezhnev and the other Russian leaders, the latest Viet Nam crisis could hardly have come at a more crucial moment. Under his guidance, the Soviet Union has begun the broadest peacetime policy of accommodation and conciliation with Western Europe and the U.S. since the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917. Brezhnev's own prestige, and perhaps his position as party leader, is linked to the success of that policy. Within the next few days, two important diplomatic developments are scheduled to take place. One is the visit of Nixon to Moscow; the other, or so the Kremlin...
Washington was deeply disappointed. Said a State Department spokesman: "We are exceptionally frustrated." There was a feeling that Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev had misled Kissinger by exaggerating Hanoi's willingness to negotiate. "It was deception," snapped a senior U.S. official. Brezhnev's motive may have been to embarrass the U.S. before Nixon's visit to Moscow by making it look as though the new Communist offensive had pressured Nixon into suing for peace. Washington, on the other hand, had thought that the North's military gains had given Hanoi a new incentive to bargain...
...White House last week announced a "major advance" in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, which have been going on since 1969. The advance-a compromise worked out in a secret exchange of letters between President Nixon and Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev-represents an important milestone in U.S.-Soviet relations and reflects a long-term change in Washington's policy. Where once the U.S. sought to maintain overall nuclear superiority, Washington has now settled for what Nixon has called "sufficiency" -that is, enough arms to deter any Russian attack by promising a devastating retaliatory strike...
...compromise virtually ensures that Nixon and Brezhnev will be able to have a historic signing ceremony if and when the President visits Moscow later this month. They will probably have two documents to sign. One is a full-fledged treaty, already agreed upon, limiting the number of defensive ABMS, or anti-ballistic missiles, that each side may install. The second, barring any last-minute snag, will be an executive agreement setting informal ceilings on offensive strategic missiles until the SALT negotiators can come up with a formal pact. The major points of the two documents...