Word: nuclearization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...about ten years ago, when Ronald Reagan was a radio commentator and Gorbachev was Communist Party boss for the Stavropol region. That was when the strategic rocket forces started deploying the SS-20s. But that same year, Soviet civilian leaders began to have doubts about whether more and more nuclear weapons like the SS-20 necessarily meant more security and power for the U.S.S.R. The Kremlin initiated a gradual shift in emphasis away from nuclear weaponry to conventional weaponry as instruments of Soviet influence and intimidation, particularly in Europe. In January 1977 Brezhnev gave a speech at a World...
Ogarkov, however, was no dove. The money saved by relying less on nuclear missiles he wanted to spend on advanced conventional weapons. He did not want those rubles diverted to the beleaguered Soviet consumer economy. He was finally demoted in September 1984. But the new chief of the general staff, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, was also a proponent of the idea that enough is enough in nuclear weaponry...
There was, in the Tula line, both good news and bad news for the West. A recognition of the need for nuclear sufficiency rather than superiority was welcome, especially if it meant that the Soviet Union might be coaxed into retiring some of its most threatening weapons. The bad news was that Moscow still seemed bent on increasing its influence in Europe -- and on using its huge conventional military strength...
...partial denuclearization of Soviet military strategy required the much more thorough denuclearization of the American military presence in Europe. Moscow might be more willing to bargain away some of its own missiles, but it was more determined than ever not to sanction the stationing of new, land-based American nuclear weapons near the Soviet border...
Kvitsinsky's American counterpart was Paul Nitze, 80, a grand old man of American nuclear strategy. In 1982 they engaged in an extraordinary, one-on- one mini-negotiation -- the so-called walk in the woods -- that resulted in a tentative deal that would have sacrificed the Pershing II but allowed the U.S. a stripped-down deployment of cruise missiles to counter a residual force of SS-20s. Cruise missiles fly subsonically at low altitudes and are vulnerable to enemy air defenses. The Pershing II ballistic missiles arc to the edge of space and can strike targets inside western Russia...