Word: salt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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GRAHAM K. ALLISON JR. '62, dean of the Kennedy School, had good reason to be angry last Monday night. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown's soporific advertisement for SALT II--beamed live and in color to the largest crowd in the K-School Forum's history--had suddenly gone haywire. An elaborate farce had turned into melodrama. While 20 of their comrades picketed outside, two protesters from the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) had managed to smuggle themselves into the building, and one began screaming at Brown ten minutes into his speech. All those plans, all those arrangement... screwed...
...island in 1978.* Nor is the brigade plausibly a strike force for an assault on Guatemala or Key West. Nor did it arrive recently enough to be a deliberate, mischievous test of Jimmy Carter's will. Nor does it have anything to do with the issues in SALT...
Henry Kissinger and some Senators have urged linking ratification of the treaty with a significant boost in the U.S. military budget to offset increased Soviet arms spending of the past five years. That is a creditable argument, since SALT must enhance U.S. defenses as well as help control arms. But there are no grounds for linking SALT to the Soviet brigade in Cuba. The Soviets say the unit has been there for 17 years, and U.S. intelligence sources concede it has been there for at least ten, so the brigade is not even symbolically part of the global Soviet buildup...
...decades. There is legitimate, longstanding concern over the island's use as a training ground for Soviet-Cuban adventures in the Third World, including the Caribbean. But Castro's reprehensible conduct as a global mischief-maker bedeviled American foreign policy long before the ratification of SALT II or the re-election of Frank Church was an issue. Cuba's predatory military probably will continue to be a problem for a long time to come - until the U.S. recovers some measure of leverage on Cuba, possibly by restoring trade and diplomatic relations and thereby beginning the difficult process...
...brigade, then Americans will have to live with the uncomfortable knowledge that in the overblown Cuban crisis of September 1979, Soviet flexibility rescued the U.S. Government from its own clumsiness. If Vance fails, there is a good chance that a sensible debate on the merits of the SALT treaty, will be impossible. The treaty might well have to be shelved until the silly season of the 1980 elections is over...