Word: inf
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...from public view on Aug. 18, essentially formalized earlier threats. The Soviets were breaking off, at least for a while, the tenuous two-year dialogue between the superpowers aimed at limiting the spread of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. The actual walkout from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) talks had occurred the previous day at a 25-minute meeting in Geneva between Chief Soviet Arms Negotiator Yuli Kvitsinsky and his U.S. counterpart, Paul Nitze. Kvitsinsky had put the mildest face possible on the decision, saying only that the Soviets were "discontinuing the present round of talks" and would...
...holocaust in ABC-TV's The Day After (see NATION).* For his part, President Reagan replied from his Santa Barbara ranch on Thanksgiving Day that "we can only be dismayed," adding that the Andropov declaration was "at sharp variance with the stated wish of the Soviet Union that an [INF] agreement be negotiated...
...were to propose equal reductions from 572 to zero on your side and 572 from our side, my government would accept it." The Soviets, he said, would also temporarily set aside a longstanding Geneva sticking point: Soviet insistence that independent British and French nuclear forces be counted in an INF agreement. Nitze said that he would pass on the idea, but, he warned, "I'm certain that the U.S. Government will not convert a Soviet proposal into a U.S. proposal...
Meanwhile, Soviet Delegate Pavlichenko was escalating the Soviet threat that deployment would trigger an INF walkout and military "countermeasures." He hinted darkly that there might be new Soviet weapons in "Cuba and other Central American countries," a phrase that at the time could only mean Nicaragua. "How would you Like to have missiles there?" he asked. Other members of the Soviet negotiating team were issuing more credible threats: an increase in the number of SS-20s, the deployment of new shorter-range missiles in Eastern Europe, bringing submarines equipped with cruise missiles and low-flying "depressed-trajectory" ballistic missiles near...
...after the INF talks opened in Geneva on Nov. 30, 1981, Perle testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He stressed that there was no middle ground between the zero option and full deployment of the 572 new American missiles called for in the December 1979 decision. He concluded his testimony with a quotation from the British statesman Samuel Hoare, reflecting ruefully on Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's "slide into surrender" to Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938. The comparison between Chamberlain in Munich and Nitze in Geneva was no less invidious for being implicit...