Word: gromykoisms
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Almost all U.S. foreign policy officials now agree that the Soviets have retaliated against Carter's China move by stalling SALT II. It had been expected that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko would agree on all but a few technical details of a new treaty at their meeting in late December. But they deadlocked when the Russians suddenly raised issues that had already been settled. By delaying SALT II, Moscow was able to postpone the Carter-Brezhnev summit, which had been tentatively planned for the middle of this month, just a couple of weeks...
...Although Gromyko carefully avoided making an issue of U.S.-Peking relations in his 18 hours of talks with Vance, the Kremlin is very sensitive to all dealings between its Communist rival and the U.S. After Carter stated on TV that he had received a message from Brezhnev indicating that improved U.S.-Peking ties would neither hurt SALT nor "endanger our good relationship with the Soviet Union," Moscow quickly pointed out that the note had also expressed reservations about the new American policy. According to Tass, Brezhnev had in fact warned that "the Soviet Union will most closely follow what...
...none of these matters were expected to cause serious trouble in the pre-Christmas talks. The mood around the conference table was cordial, even inviting some light bantering. Gromyko jokingly asked his counterpart: "Do you have your chief of staff with you?" The Russian was referring to Vance's wife Grace. The Secretary of State replied, smiling: "I have my chief of staff. She keeps me in line...
...Saturday morning the mood changed abruptly. Gromyko suddenly began disputing points that seemed minor and bringing up issues that Vance thought had been settled. Gromyko raised two key questions about the cruise missile, the highly accurate drone that the Pentagon is counting on to begin providing much of the nation's strategic strength in the 1980s. The Soviets insisted that cruise missiles outfitted with multiple warheads be formally banned until 1985, or for the duration of the SALT II treaty. Although this had come up in previous rounds of the arms talks, Vance thought that the matter had been...
...signed in 1977, and so the protocol would lapse in 1980, a deadline that would not raise too many objections at the Pentagon. The U.S. has offered a compromise, June 30, 1981, but the matter remains unresolved. Unable to settle these and a few other issues, Vance and Gromyko had no choice but to recess the talks...