Politics of Strategic Arms Negotiations

Report Outline
Impediments to Salt II Agrement
Efforts to Limit Nuclear Weapons
Outlook for Conclusion of Salt Ii
Special Focus

Impediments to Salt II Agrement

Recent Soviet Rebuff; New Talks in Geneva

The United States and the Soviet Union return this month to the negotiating table for further talks on limiting strategic weapons. Both superpowers are mindful that their relations have cooled since President Carter came to office talking about human rights abroad, and especially since the Kremlin rebuffed his recent proposals for a new treaty to limit strategic arms. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, who will meet in Geneva with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko, May 18–21, said in Washington before his departure for Europe: “We have put no new proposals on the table, nor have they. We are merely reviewing the existing proposals.” While declining to predict the outcome of the new round of negotiations, Vance held out hope that “any time the parties sit down and start talking to each other, there is always a possibility that something constructive will come out of it.”

The two sides have until Oct. 3 to reach an agreement for a new strategic arms limitation pact, called SALT II. On that date, SALT I, the five-year accord limiting the deployment of all offensive nuclear weapons, expires. That agreement froze U.S. and Soviet land-based missiles and nuclear submarines at existing levels. Without a new agreement, it is feared that there will be a substantial strategic weapons buildup by both the United States and the Soviet Union.

Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev rejected the two SALT proposals that Vance took to Moscow in late March. In the weeks that followed Russian leaders and publications denounced the proposals as a repudiation of the understanding that Brezhnev had reached with President Ford when they met in Vladivostok in November 1974—the so-called Vladivostok guidelines for a SALT II treaty. Gromyko charged on March 31 that the United States was trying to win “unilateral advantages” at the expense of the Soviet Union.