Word: inf
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When Soviet and American negotiators meet in Geneva on May 17 to resume talks on intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) the most formidable obstacle to a Soviet-American agreement will be the issue of whether to count British and French INF weapons as part of NATO's intermediate-range nuclear forces. But this issue is really not a dispute over Soviet INF policy toward Britain and France. The dispute is over Soviet INF policy toward the Federal Republic of Germany...
...parallel negotiations on INF, Carter or anyone else would have faced an even greater problem. (The talks, then under the label of Long-Range Theater Nuclear Forces, began in October 1980, just before the U.S. presidential election.) The U.S. took the firm view that the only weapons in Western Europe eligible for limitation were American ones, not those of Great Britain and France, and there was considerable doubt that the American ones in question would ever make it from test ranges in the U.S. to deployment sites in Europe. In accordance with its so-called two-track decision...
...ensuing two years have seen some course correction toward the center. By the end of 1981, political pressures from across the Atlantic nudged a reluctant Administration to come forward with a proposal for INF, and by the spring of 1982 similar pressures, the freeze and antinuclear movements in particular, induced Reagan to offer...
...compensate for the Soviet monopoly in one category of weaponry: numerous, highly accurate, land-based missiles that can reach targets throughout Europe in a matter of minutes. Therefore none of the existing Western weapons should be given equal treatment with Soviet SS-20s on the agenda of the INF negotiations. The British and French forces in particular should be left aside entirely. Mostly submarine-based, less accurate and less destructive, they have as their prime purpose to defend Britain and France alone, not the Western alliance as a whole. The U.S. cannot bargain with the independent deterrents of its sovereign...
...paragon of this camp is Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense for international security policy. He has had more impact on the substance of U.S. policy in INF and START than any other official in the U.S. Government, an achievement that is all the more remarkable since he holds a third-echelon job. Part of his success is that he is as personally charming, intellectually brilliant, bureaucratically masterful and politically well connected as he is ideologically unyielding. He was for years Senator Henry Jackson's top assistant and the leading congressional staffer in the campaign against SALT. He maintains...