Word: grechko
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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During SALT I, Soviet negotiators not only acknowledged the verification problem but were the ones who actively resisted restrictions on research. When the Defense Minister at the time, Andrei Grechko, testified on behalf of Soviet ratification of the ABM treaty in 1972, he stressed, approvingly, that the pact "imposes no limitations on the performance of research and experimental work aimed at resolving the problem of defending the country against nuclear missile attack...
Fortunately, not many military men shared Grechko's mad, bellicose stance. In 1970 I talked with Nikolai Ogarkov, a well-educated, sophisticated and intelligent officer. Later named First Deputy Defense Minister and Chief of the General Staff, he has since been demoted. Ogarkov took a more realistic view of the prospect of war with China. He felt that the Soviet Union could not attack China with a nuclear barrage because it would inevitably mean world...
Kapitsa also said the Soviet leadership had come close to using nuclear arms on China. He had been at the Politburo discussion. He said that Marshal Andrei Grechko, the Defense Minister, actively advocated a plan "once and for all to get rid of the Chinese threat." Grechko, a dim-witted martinet replaced by Dimitri Ustinov in 1976, called for unrestricted use of the multimegaton bomb known in the West as the "blockbuster." The bomb would release enormous amounts of radioactive fallout, not only killing millions of Chinese but threatening Soviet citizens in the Far East and people in other countries...
...Grechko's opponents prevailed, happily, and no military option was exercised, nuclear or otherwise. But the long border with China remained a highly volatile area...
...Communist since joining the party in 1927, Ustinov gained power in the bureaucracy as he rose in the armaments industry. When Defense Minister Marshal Rodion Malinovsky died in 1967, there was widespread speculation that the post would pass to Ustinov. Instead, the Kremlin chose another military man, Marshal Andrei Grechko. Ustinov finally got the Defense portfolio in 1976. Along with it, he gained full membership in the Politburo and the title of marshal...