Word: troop
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...this took place against the background of the battle over Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield's proposal to cut U.S. troops in Europe by one-halt. It was an ill-advised and ill-timed proposal, but some Nixon critics feel that the President greatly overreacted. As part of the counterattack on Mansfield, the Administration sought to link the arms limitation issue with the troop reduction issue. During the talks, the Russians have insisted that American nuclear weapons in Europe-aboard Sixth Fleet carriers in the Mediterranean, for example-must be included in any arms-limitation agreement...
...will jockeying for political and military advantage. But the two superpowers will carry on laborious negotiations: the Berlin meetings, the SALT talks and the anticipated discussions of mutual force reductions in Europe are examples. This delicate diplomatic work is not helped by Senate efforts to mandate U.S. troop reductions in Europe-or by a hard-nosed presidential response that finds "unacceptable" even a congressional request that negotiations be speeded...
...Administration also got an unexpected assist from, of all people, Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, who gave a speech at Tiflis, in Stalin's Georgia homeland, recommending that the Soviets and the NATO powers start talking about mutual troop reductions in central Europe. Brezhnev challenged the U.S. to get serious about the subject. He asked rhetorically: "Don't these curious people resemble a person who tries to judge the flavor of a wine without imbibing...
...beginning of a conventional war for nearly a month, while waiting for reinforcements to mobilize. "But should that force be cut in half," he says, "we would lose that option, and it would be retreat, surrender or nukes." His assessment is presumably based on the near parity in peacetime troop strength-approximately 1,105,000 NATO to 1,270,000 Warsaw Pact-of the opposing European alliances. Should the U.S. withdraw 150,000 men, the Pentagon claims, this balance would be tilted...
...real difficulty, according to Rogers, is the long-run diplomatic consequence of Mansfield's proposal. Any unilateral and massive troop withdrawal, he contends, would lead the Soviets to believe that "we're leaving the world," and create among Western Europeans a tremendous crisis of confidence in the U.S. It would, Rogers says, be a "major disaster for this country to let down NATO, which is as essential to our defense as to Western Europe's." He claims that the one thing forcing the Soviets to settle...