Word: warhead
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Most destructive of all, Moscow continued its relentless piling up of arms. In 1977 the Kremlin started emplacing mobile, accurate, triple-warhead SS-20 nuclear missiles in the Far East and in the western U.S.S.R.; those in Europe vastly increased the destructive power aimed at U.S. NATO allies. The SS-20s were supposedly intended to counter the threat posed to Moscow by British and French nuclear weapons, but by the end of 1978 they already exceeded the British and French forces in the number of warheads...
Translated from arms-control jargon, Kvitsinsky was saying that if the U.S. would offer to give up the entire NATO deployment of 572 single-warhead cruise and Pershing missiles, the Soviets would agree to reduce by 572 the number of warheads on its missiles in Europe. Kvitsinsky sweetened the offer by explaining that he and his military advisers had calculated that this would leave the Soviet Union with only 120 triple-warhead SS-20s, fewer than in Andropov's latest offer. The bottom line, of course, was that the U.S. would still be left with no missiles...
Moscow's position was both bogus and brazen. It was the Soviet Union that had upset the balance in the first place by deploying the mobile, triple-warhead SS-20 ballistic missile. The West Europeans urged Washington to redress the imbalance by getting the Soviets to cut back on their SS-20s while NATO evened the scales with some new weapons on its side. Nor did the Soviets quit while they were ahead. Despite declaration of a moratorium on SS-20s, they pushed ahead to complete new missile sites that had previously been under construction...
Underlying Soviet arithmetic and diplomacy was an attempt to undermine the very basis of the Atlantic Alliance by breaking an important bond between the U.S. and Western Europe. By opposing the addition of even one new intermediate-range warhead in NATO countries, the Soviets hoped to deny the U.S. the right and the ability to treat the defense of Western Europe as an extension of American self-defense...
Burt developed a plan that would permit 300 warheads on each side: 100 triple-warhead Soviet SS-20s throughout the U.S.S.R. against a mixed force for NATO of 300 Pershing Us and cruise missiles. But National Security Adviser Clark favored "hanging tough on zero," and Weinberger said, "We don't want it to look as though we're letting the West German left push us around...