Word: lande
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...other side, the Soviets brought up an old complaint about America's ICBMs. Under SALT II, each side will be allowed a maximum of 820 land-based, MiRVed rockets, and the two countries must agree in advance which are to be counted as MIRVs. From time to time the Soviets have hinted darkly that they were having difficulty distinguishing the 450 U.S. single-warhead Minuteman IIs from the 550 MiRVed Minuteman IIIs. For months they were silent on the issue, but they recently brought it up again, probably for bargaining leverage on other issues. What especially irritated...
Threats to Soviet security have been, and still remain, much greater than those to U.S. security. The U.S. faces a non-defensible nuclear threat from the Soviets, yet no direct conventional threat by land, sea, or air; we face the Canadians to the north, the Mexicans to the south, and Cuba and the Bahamas to the east. In comparison, the Soviet Union similarly faces a non-defensible nuclear threat from the U.S. as well as from France, Britain, and China. The perceived non-nuclear threats are also considerable: the Germans in the west, having marched through Soviet territory twice...
SALT fails to limit the qualitative nuclear arms race. It allows both the Soviets and Americans to continue to modernize and replace their current weapons with more powerful ones. Therefore SALT partially funnels strategic competition from quantitative to qualitative grounds. SALT will allow both sides to deploy on new land-based system such as the MX ICBM in the U.S.; it will also allow those systems to be mobile, although the U.S. wrote in the 1972 SALT I agreements that mobile systems would violate the spirit of the negotiations...
...allowing improving accuracies and yields in ICBMs, SALT does not solve the long-term problem of vulnerability of land-based systems. This is a goal for SALT III. It also will not limit military spending and may very well increase it. The U.S., in not atypical fashion of "negotiating through strength," is deploying the new Trident submarine; the projected ten Tridents will cost the taxpayer about $20 billion. Additional systems, under consideration as "bargaining chips" to obtain Senate ratification of SALT, are the MX ICBM at $30-50 billion, and several thousand air-launched cruise missiles at $30 billion...
...against the U.S.S.R. but against the lesser military powers in the poorer half of the world, like Vietnam," and in "the vast excess in the quantity of nuclear weapons" that the U.S. now has and continues to build. They recommend that we do without our nuclear bombers and land-based missiles; the nuclear submarine force, the most invulnerable to Soviet attack, could also be substantially reduced...