Word: gorbachev
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...Gorbachev are not signing the START treaty just for old times' sake. As long as there is even the slimmest danger that these two nations could fire their weapons at each other, it behooves their governments to keep fine-tuning the balance of terror to make it a bit more balanced and thus a bit less terrifying...
Those weapons, to be sure, are irrelevant to Gorbachev's current preoccupations and divert resources from perestroika. In fact, rather than fretting about a bolt-from-the-blue Soviet attack on the U.S., experts at the CIA and Pentagon have lately been worrying about the much more plausible danger that Soviet tactical nukes, as well as chemical and biological weapons, might end up in the hands of secessionist rebels in the U.S.S.R. or shady merchants in the international arms bazaar. Still, American defense planners cannot entirely rule out the possibility that the Strategic Rocket Forces might pose a threat...
...Bush and Gorbachev were never so concerned with the technical details or even the military bottom line as with a more immediate and important political purpose: both want this treaty to be seen as the result of equitable trade- offs, and thus proof that the U.S.S.R., for all its troubles, is contributing to the cause of world peace in a way that preserves its dignity and bolsters its security...
There is a degree of benign deception here. On almost every major question in START, the U.S. demanded, and got, its own way. The treaty is an improvement on the earlier SALT accords largely because Gorbachev was willing to give up the idea that the U.S.S.R. must keep a substantial numerical advantage in ICBM warheads to compensate for American superiority in other categories. In the START treaty Gorbachev is tacitly accepting a position of overall inferiority, at least in the near term, since he is giving up right away much of the U.S.S.R.'s principal strength, which is in land...
Even while authorizing his negotiators to squeeze everything they could get out of the Soviet military, Bush has gone to some lengths to convey the appearance that two great nations still adhere to the concept, long so sacred to the Soviets, of parity or equality. Gorbachev desperately needs to keep up the illusion of give-and-take at a time when the Soviet Union is doing almost all of the giving and its traditional rival is doing most of the taking...