Word: sovietizers
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...excerpt that follows, McNamara describes an eerily similar debate over offensive and defensive systems that took place 19 years ago but was very much on the minds of American and Soviet officials as they prepared for the weekend meeting in Reykjav?...
...1960s we had irrefutable evidence that the Soviets were deploying an antiballistic-missile system around Moscow--a system to defend their capital against our long-range missiles. We made the reasonable--but perhaps incorrect--assumption that they would deploy the system across the entire Soviet Union. Why would anyone put a system around one city and nowhere else? Were a nationwide Soviet ABM system to be put in place, it would require that we make major changes in our force levels...
...Congress believed that the proper response to a full-fledged Soviet antiballistic-missile network was for the U.S. to deploy its own countrywide ABM system. The Army had been working on such systems since the late 1950s, first the Nike-Zeus and later the Nike-X. In 1966, therefore, the Congress authorized and appropriated $167.9 million for production of a Nike system (when fully deployed, the weapons would probably have cost a total of $30 billion). President Johnson and I believed the system would provide little if any protection either to our population or our weapons. We refused to spend...
...that point I said to the President, "The Chiefs' recommendation is wrong; it's absolutely wrong. The proper response to a Soviet ABM system is not the deployment of an admittedly 'leaky' U.S. defense. The proper response is action that will ensure that we maintain our deterrent capability in the face of the Soviet defense. What the Chiefs are recommending has nothing to do with maintaining that deterrent. If our deterrent force--our offensive missiles and bombers--was of the proper size before the Soviets deployed their defenses, it must now be expanded to ensure that the same number...
...June 1967 the Soviet Premier, Aleksei Kosygin, came to New York City to visit the United Nations. After some difficulty, it was arranged for the Premier and President Johnson to meet on June 23 at Glassboro, NJ.--Glassboro is halfway between New York and Washington--to discuss the question of ABM deployment. At lunch in New Jersey on that June day, the President, the Premier and a group of their associates were sitting around a small oval table. It was clear the President was becoming frustrated by Kosygin's failure to see the U.S. point of view on ABM defenses...