Word: brezhnevs
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Stylish and outspoken, Raisa Gorbachev is the antithesis of earlier Soviet First Ladies. The public rarely saw the wives of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, but Mrs. Gorbachev turns up by her husband's side at official functions. In the U.S.S.R., such high visibility is considered unseemly. Her taste for designer clothes strikes many of her comrades as ostentatious. Soviet wags have dubbed her the "Czarina...
...that's what video-age diplomacy has become: summits between co-stars in the global village. This week Reagan and Gorbachev will share the screen for the third time, matching the pace set by Nixon and Brezhnev during the heyday of detente and working toward a Moscow meeting next year that would set a new world record for summitry. Who would have thought it of these two very, very different...
Early in his first term, Ronald Reagan was preparing to give one of the most important speeches of his presidency. He had inherited from Jimmy Carter a perplexing piece of unfinished business: what to do about a new class of missiles that Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union had arrayed against Western Europe. Each was mounted on a mobile launcher and armed with three highly accurate warheads that could be fired nearly 3,100 miles. In a minor coup, Western intelligence discovered that the Kremlin's strategic rocket forces secretly referred to this formidable weapon by the innocent-sounding name Pioneer...
Since then much has changed. Brezhnev and two successors have gone to their graves by the Kremlin wall. All three angrily denounced the zero option as patently one-sided. So did many Western strategists. The U.S. was asking the Soviets to give up real weapons, already deployed at great expense, in return for the U.S.'s tearing up a piece of paper. Washington wags said it was like the Redskins trying to persuade the hated Dallas Cowboys to trade Tony Dorsett for a future draft pick. Administration officials privately conceded that the zero option was not intended to produce...
...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 1977 Brezhnev gave a speech at a World War II commemorative celebration in Tula, a city south of Moscow. The Soviet leader laid down what became known in the West as the "Tula line." In that speech and subsequent elaborations, Brezhnev said nuclear superiority was "pointless," it was "dangerous madness" for anyone...