Word: inf
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...treaty that Reagan and Gorbachev are to sign this week cannot exist in a vacuum for very long. While the U.S. has succeeded in separating INF from the bigger issues of START and SDI, the success could prove temporary and illusory. What the experts, Soviet and American alike, call "conceptual" linkage remains a fact of life. Unless the SS-25 and other ICBMs are dealt with in a strategic agreement sometime soon, they will eventually nullify the good news being celebrated this week in Washington and around the world...
Left to its own instincts and devices, the Reagan Administration might have abandoned both tracks of the 1979 decision. Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, the Administration's most forceful and persistent skeptic about traditional arms control, would have preferred to let the intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) negotiations languish -- the same treatment that was already in store for that other unwelcome legacy with the better-known acronym SALT (for Strategic Arms Limitation Talks). Perle doubted that the negotiating track would lead anywhere and that the West Europeans would have the gumption to follow through on deployment...
...America's European allies were aghast that the new Administration might renege on the 1979 commitment. They had a friend in court in Alexander Haig, the hard-charging Secretary of State who had been NATO commander in the Ford and Carter Administrations. He made INF a test case to prove that the new President could simultaneously stand up to the Soviets in the military competition and sit down with them at the bargaining table. Haig pushed for a negotiating position similar to that favored by the Carter Administration -- fewer Tomahawks and Pershing IIs in exchange for fewer...
...tents for nearly 16 months. Haig had staged his own walkout from the Administration in 1982. As a quit-and-tell memoirist two years later, he bitterly denounced the zero option as a killer proposal, designed to be rejected. Now, as a Republican presidential candidate, he is criticizing the INF treaty as strategically unsound. All three Richards have also moved on. Allen has been succeeded by five National Security Advisers. Perle is presiding over seminars at the American Enterprise Institute and working on a novel about bureaucratic infighting over national-security policy. Burt, who will probably resemble a less than...
...Reagan Administration could not resist the temptation to occasionally gloat over Moscow's apparent capitulation in the face of American steadfastness. Perle has been beaming with the pride of paternity and enjoying the last laugh. The Administration has convinced itself, and now wants to convince everyone else, that the INF treaty is not just an unprecedented accomplishment by the superpowers acting in concert -- the elimination of an entire class of modern weaponry -- but an unprecedented triumph of American persistence over Soviet intransigence. As Kenneth Adelman, the Perle ally who is outgoing director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency...