Word: zeros
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nitze, who had become special adviser to Shultz and Reagan on arms control, had never liked the zero option, but he now did his best to sell it to U.S. allies in Europe. During one of his frequent missions, European leaders told Nitze that they had invested considerable political capital in accepting the American missiles. They had withstood domestic opposition by arguing that the missiles were necessary to assure "coupling" between America's nuclear forces and its defense of NATO. It would be awkward to justify the removal of all the U.S. missiles, even as part of a deal that...
...aide to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put it, "We would have preferred to leave a token deployment of American missiles in Europe. Nitze's own walk-in-the-woods scheme would have been a far better outcome than the zero option from a strategic point of view. If, however, the U.S. allowed itself to be snookered by the Soviets into the damn-fool zero option, then we told Nitze in no uncertain terms that we wanted it to be a version of the zero option that extracted the maximum price from the Kremlin...
...Reagan Administration was reluctant to back away from the zero option, partly because it had been Reagan's proposal to begin with. Glitman instead proposed a modification of the interim solution: an immediate reduction of INF missiles on both sides combined with a schedule for achieving the "global" elimination of INF missiles by the end of 1989. Obukhov replied dryly: "We'll study this more carefully, but on initial consideration, it looks like the zero option...
...Reagan Administration, to the relief of some of its own members as well as numerous Europeans, saw an opportunity to retreat from the controversial zero option and to reinstate the interim solution, with token missile deployments in Europe. U.S. negotiators tabled a response that seemed quite close to the Soviet proposal: each superpower could keep 100 INF warheads in Europe, but with some Pershing IIs permitted...
...official on the powerful Central Committee Secretariat, Georgi Kornienko, said in Moscow, "We feel it is important to make progress somewhere, and INF appears to be the only area of opportunity." All indications were that the deal the Soviets had in mind was the interim agreement, not the zero option...