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chapter four Nuclear Arms Reductions in the Final Cold War Decade The Reagan Years The controversy over the terms of the SALT II Treaty spilled inevitably into the 1980 presidential election and, of course, the positions and policies of the Reagan administration to follow. On the campaign trail, Reagan claimed that the Soviet Union was aggressive and unrelenting and a serious security threat to the United States due to its own prior mistakes. In office, Reagan did not let up. He staffed his administration with key personnel who were deeply suspicious of Soviet intentions and overtly hostile to prior U.S. arms control concessions, which had allegedly placed the United States at a severe disadvantage. Unsurprisingly, then, the early 1980s were a nadir for U.S.-Soviet relations and for arms control. In Reagan’s first term, the administration pushed the Soviet Union strongly— and unsuccessfully—to accept a dramatic restructuring of its forces. It maintained that the United States had to hang tough in negotiations and to improve its military strength if it was to secure a better treaty. Administration officials insisted that their predecessors had been too anxious to get a deal: treaties were virtual ends in themselves—written around what the Soviets would accept, not U.S. interests (Talbott 1985: 8). They argued that the United States would have been better off walking away from the negotiating table than accepting the deeply flawed agreements that resulted. They insisted, for that matter, that the United States would have benefited from holding the Soviets to their commitments and standing up to willful and systematic Soviet violations. In their view, no violation could be dismissed: small violations could add up to big Soviet advantages and impugned the general Soviet commitment to arms control and international legal obligations. Thus, administration officials seriously questioned whether U.S. security interests were best served by working outside the framework of formal arms control treaties or by interpreting treaties to permit the deployment of new U.S. weapon systems. Indeed, the Reagan administration announced for- Nuclear Arms Reductions in the Final Cold War Decade 133 mally that it would not seek ratification of the SALT II Treaty and put forth an interpretation of the ABM Treaty that permitted the United States to pursue defensive technological options, short of deployment. The Reagan administration was willing, however, to accept the constraints of “unpalatable” treaties—the very limits that administration officials had claimed were precisely the problem for having locked the United States into an inferior position. The administration maintained that it “would not undercut existing agreements” (a thinly veiled reference to the SALT II Treaty) as long as the Soviets did the same and that the United States had no immediate plans (or need) to withdraw from the ABM Treaty (Sartori 1985/86: 149). The administration deferred implicitly to the SALT II Treaty, even when exceeding its ceilings. In May 1986, the Reagan administration announced that the United States would scale its strategic forces to address the Soviet strategic threat rather than stay within SALT-imposed limits (given the deficient Soviet commitment to SALT and arms control) and, by the end of the year, broke through the SALT limits by deploying an additional heavy bomber that was equipped with cruise missiles. Yet the administration continued to stay generally within the SALT II ceilings and announced that it had no plans to increase U.S. force levels appreciably except to match Soviet quantitative improvements (U.S. Senate 1988a: 1:45). The fact is that the Reagan administration was sufficiently committed to arms control with the Soviet Union to win significant concessions from it. With the Soviet Union under the new leadership of President Mikhael Gorbachev, the Reagan administration is credited with helping forge a revolutionary treaty: the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty banned an entire class of nuclear weapons and established rules for intrusive onsite inspections that would become staples of future agreements. By that year, in fact, the United States and the Soviet Union had agreed to the basic outlines of a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) that drew heavily on INF principles. The Changing Strategic Nuclear Threat In the 1970s, the arms control debate centered on the anticipated size and capabilities of the Soviet nuclear force and specifically on the “window of vulnerability ” that would supposedly open in the 1980s, with the full deployment of Soviet MIRVed missiles (the fearsome SS-18s and SS-19s). The hundreds of SS-18 missiles in the Soviet...

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