Word: inf
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...move that blindsided the White House, Gorbachev declared that the pending agreement on intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) was not, by itself, enough reason to justify a Washington summit. Unless the U.S. was willing to talk about ways to limit Reagan's cherished Strategic Defense Initiative program, he would prefer to pass up Thanksgiving at the ranch. Barely a year after he had done much the same in Reykjavik, Gorbachev pulled off a bait-and-switch scheme at Reagan's expense, luring him into high- level, high-visibility diplomacy only to shock and infuriate the Administration at the last minute...
...Soviets have made a habit of linking and unlinking progress on arms control to demands for restricting SDI. After relinking the issues in Reykjavik and thereby dooming that meeting to failure, Gorbachev just as suddenly announced last February that he was willing to sign an INF accord independent of any progress on SDI. The Administration was euphoric and tumbled through a set of negotiations that expanded the original INF proposal to include a virtual ban on all medium- and short-range missiles worldwide. But during the summer Soviet officials dropped hints, some of them in interviews with TIME, that...
...remained high on the Kremlin agenda when Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze arrived in Washington last month to work on the details of the INF pact. He brought with him a proposal refining Soviet demands that research and development of Star Wars weapons be restricted. Under the new Soviet plan, defensive technology in five categories -- kinetic kill vehicles, particle and laser beams, electromagnetic weapons, and space-based mirrors -- could be tested anywhere, including in space, as long as they were less powerful than certain agreed-upon levels, or "capacity thresholds." The testing of more powerful systems would be confined to laboratories...
...blanketed Moscow's four airports; Shultz, Carlucci and their 110-member traveling party were forced to make the 700-mile journey from Helsinki to the Soviet capital on an overnight train. When they arrived, they knew that even without the unexpected hitch on Star Wars, sticky details on the INF pact still had to be resolved...
While Shultz and Shevardnadze conferred on a range of topics from human rights to tensions in the Persian Gulf, Soviet and American arms-control specialists huddled over disputed phrases within bracketed passages of the 100-page draft INF treaty. Even though West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had pretty much removed a major obstacle by agreeing to destroy his country's arsenal of 72 aging Pershing IA missiles, the Soviets wanted the German weapons system and its U.S.-controlled warheads mentioned in what the Americans considered to be a bilateral accord. Both sides indicated that a compromise was reached. Other points...