David Tal - US Strategic Arms Policy in the Cold War: Negotiation and Confrontation Over Salt, 1969-1979

First published 2017
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2017 David Tal

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ISBN: 978-1-138-63264-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-20810-7 (ebk)

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The work on this project has been conducted for several years. During those years I have enjoyed the help and support of various institutions and individuals, to whom I would like to express my thanks. A large part of this project had been carried out during my tenure as a professor at the University of Calgary in Calgary, Canada. The University provided me with an excellent environment for research, both spiritually and materially, and Im deeply grateful to the University authorities, and especially to the staff and my colleagues in the department of history, where I was a member of the faculty for four years (20092013). Im grateful to the Center for Military and Strategic Studies (CMSS) at the University of Calgary and its then director, Dr. David Bercuson, for the financial support for the research. In 2013 I moved to the UK, to the University of Sussex, where I finished writing this book. The University of Sussex was also a great place to research and write and, once again, Im grateful to the university and my colleagues for providing me with such a great working environment.

As is the nature of a work such as this, I spent a lot of time in archives and presidential libraries. I would like to thank the staff of the American national archives, and the presidential libraries of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. In all these places I got a lot of help from librarians and staff who did their utmost helping me to get the material I needed for my work. Especially, I would like to thank Ms. Melissa Lew Heddon, archivist at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, for her great help in finding documents and sources which I missed. Im also especially grateful to Ms. Brittany Parris from the Carter Presidential Library, for her great help in filling in what I missed.

The journey ended somewhat abruptly. President Carter signed a second SALT agreement with the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in Vienna, in June 1979. Following that, he negotiated with Congress the ratification of the agreement. The negotiations were not easy, but it looked as if he was making progress. And then, on the night of December 2425, 1979, the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. Without declaring it at that very moment, it was obvious that the ratification of SALT II would be postponed. As it turned out, it was postponed to oblivion. With that came to an end a journey that had started nearly a decade earlier. The beginning of SALT was also tainted by a Soviet invasion this time, the summer 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. President Lyndon Johnson was about to begin negotiations with the Soviet Union over the limitation of strategic arms. The invasion postponed the planned negotiations, but this time, Johnsons successor, Richard Nixon, continued, or had started the negotiations, and managed to bring them to a successful end: he and Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT I agreement in May 1972, in Moscow. This book tells the story of the negotiations that led to the conclusion of these agreements, and, in the case of SALT II, the process that led to its failure. The need for such a book is the result of the current state of literature that deals with the negotiations on the limitation of strategic arms, which were known as SALT. The literature on this subject is divided into three kinds: first, studies on SALT that were not based on documents. These have been written by academics, journalists and individuals involved in the negotiations, but they did not use archival documents as the basis for their study. In most cases, they also discussed only part of the whole process. Among those we can find John Newhouse, who was a member of SALT I team, who wrote on SALT I; Strobe Talbot wrote on SALT II; and, best known, Raymond Garthoff, who was a member of the SALT I delegation, wrote a major book on dtente, where he dealt extensively with SALT I and II. However, Garthoff, like Newhouse and Talbot, did not use primary sources. That was even truer during the 1970s, when both superpowers further increased the size of their nuclear arsenal. The numbers and the strategic calculations were meaningless. Did it really matter whether each side would have 1,000 nuclear-head ballistic missiles or only 900? Would that make any difference? Furthermore, as is shown throughout the book, the figures and kind of weapons negotiated were not suggested on the basis of well-calculated strategic considerations. The negotiations were based mainly on existing and planned stocks. No strategic or security-based arguments served the negotiators when they discussed certain figures or type of weapons.