Word: salt
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SALT II, the Kremlin accepted restraints on the number of ICBMs with multiple warheads, or MIRVS, and the number of warheads per type of ICBM. Those combined limits left the Soviets with an approximately 5-to-2 edge in land-based ballistic warheads. They also left them with enough of those warheads to raise the theoretical possibility of a crippling sneak attack against American ICBMs. Land-based missiles are the most menacing of all nuclear weapons because they are the most accurate and the most plausible instruments of a pre-emptive attack...
...principal accomplishment of SALT II was that it slowed that juggernaut down. At the same time, the treaty left the U.S. free to narrow the gap in land-based warheads. When the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave their endorsement to ratification of the SALT II treaty in 1979, they called it a "modest but useful step." Critics on both the left and the right were not willing to go even that far. They stressed what the treaty did not accomplish: it failed to stop, much less reverse, the arms race; it failed to close the "window of vulnerability" by eliminating...
...perhaps the greatest liability of SALT II was its sponsorship. The treaty was the fruit of three Administrations' labors. Much of its contents was the handiwork of Henry Kissinger and his colleagues. The remainder was mostly an improvement on that core. But the signature on the bottom of the last page, alongside Leonid Brezhnev's, was Jimmy Carter's. So technical an agreement
...dealing with such esoteric issues is especially prone to demagoguery. Insofar as SALT II was a symbol of Jimmy Carter's stewardship of American foreign and defense policy, it barely stood a chance. That was the linkage-the "fatal flaw"-that mortally wounded the treaty. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the coup...
...Carter had been reelected, he might have been able to use his second honeymoon with Congress to get SALT II ratified, but he would have been under powerful pressure to begin SALT Ill with a tough proposal that had strings attached to Soviet behavior and was accompanied by major defense programs...