Word: optioning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Perle had just what Reagan was looking for: the "zero option." He proposed a straightforward, all-or-nothing package -- zero American missiles in exchange for zero SS-20s. That scheme could indeed be presented in a single sentence, which was at the heart of a speech the President delivered on Nov. 18, 1981: "The United States is prepared to cancel its deployment of Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles if the Soviets will dismantle their SS- 20, SS-4 and SS-5 missiles...
Since then much has changed. Brezhnev and two successors have gone to their graves by the Kremlin wall. All three angrily denounced the zero option as patently one-sided. So did many Western strategists. The U.S. was asking the Soviets to give up real weapons, already deployed at great expense, in return for the U.S.'s tearing up a piece of paper. Washington wags said it was like the Redskins trying to persuade the hated Dallas Cowboys to trade Tony Dorsett for a future draft pick. Administration officials privately conceded that the zero option was not intended to produce...
...missiles on schedule in late 1983, the Soviets walked out of the talks in Geneva and sulked in their tents for nearly 16 months. Haig had staged his own walkout from the Administration in 1982. As a quit-and-tell memoirist two years later, he bitterly denounced the zero option as a killer proposal, designed to be rejected. Now, as a Republican presidential candidate, he is criticizing the INF treaty as strategically unsound. All three Richards have also moved on. Allen has been succeeded by five National Security Advisers. Perle is presiding over seminars at the American Enterprise Institute...
...tangled, ironic and surprise-ridden history of those six years, there has been a curious constant: the zero option. The 27-word sentence that Reagan uttered in 1981 accurately presaged the treaty that Reagan and Gorbachev are scheduled to sign in Washington...
...watch while the Soviets responded in their suspicious, cumbersome manner. Until earlier this year, the American proposals were virtually all minor variations on the interim solution that would leave some missiles on both sides, although the U.S. continued to pay lip service to the "ultimate objective" of zero option...