Word: kosygin
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...moral" obligation to erect antimissile defenses? Or would such systems stimulate a new and dangerous arms race, in which one side's defenses would provoke the other side to proliferate offenses? In 1967 the U.S. argued that offense was "good" and defense was "bad." McNamara explained to a skeptical Kosygin that if both sides restricted their defenses, they could afford to limit their offenses; while each would need enough weapons to retaliate against an attack, neither would feel it needed a surplus to overwhelm enemy defenses. Thus the arms race could be regulated and mutual deterrence assured...
...logic of the American position eventually prevailed. The Glassboro meeting led to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). At a summit in Moscow in 1972, Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev signed a pair of agreements embodying McNamara's recommendation to Kosygin at Glassboro: a treaty restricting antiballistic-missile defenses and an interim accord on offenses. The ABM treaty is still in force; the offensive agreement was replaced in 1979 by SALT II, which was never ratified and which expired last year but still serves as a check on the arsenals of the two sides while they try to negotiate...
...defense. In March 1983 Reagan proclaimed his dream of a comprehensive, impregnable, space-based shield that would render offensive nuclear forces "impotent and obsolete." He has argued that deterrence based on the threat of retaliation is immoral and a "defense that really defends" is benevolent, an eerie echo of Kosygin's rebuttal to McNamara at Glassboro. Proponents of the Strategic Defense Initiative charge that the Soviet offensive buildup proves that the U.S.S.R. never really accepted the logic of McNamara's argument and has violated the spirit (as well as the letter) of the SALT agreements...
...June 1967 the Soviet Premier, Aleksei Kosygin, came to New York City to visit the United Nations. After some difficulty, it was arranged for the Premier and President Johnson to meet on June 23 at Glassboro, NJ.--Glassboro is halfway between New York and Washington--to discuss the question of ABM deployment. At lunch in New Jersey on that June day, the President, the Premier and a group of their associates were sitting around a small oval table. It was clear the President was becoming frustrated by Kosygin's failure to see the U.S. point of view on ABM defenses...
...Kosygin was furious. The blood rushed to his face, he pounded on the table, and he said, "Defense is moral; offense is immoral!" That was essentially the end of the discussion. The Soviet Union was by no means ready at that time to discuss an agreement banning defensive systems...