January 16, 2022
Arms Control Plus: What Reagan Got Right About Nuclear Deterrence
The nuclear challenges the United States faces today are every bit as daunting as they were in 1985, but there may indeed be lessons from Reagan’s Cold War experience that can adequately address them.
by Peter Huessy
From early 1985 through 1986, the Reagan administration was faced with several difficult strategic nuclear deterrence challenges. Arms control, particularly the call for reductions, was stalled; the Soviets had walked out of the arms negotiations in Geneva; and Congress had just overcome opposition to the administration’s nuclear modernization program, particularly with respect to the dual Peacekeeper and Small Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (SICBM) land-based missile systems.
Despite Ronald Reagan’s landslide re-election in 1984 and the subsequent agreement with Congress to proceed with the full strategic modernization program, including a considerable investment in strategic defense, a problem remained: how to get the Soviets to take seriously negotiations in Geneva over reductions. At the time, the default position had been simply maintaining the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) frameworks the United States inherited in 1981. Further complicating matters, the absence of serious arms talks led some in Congress to continually threaten to raise barriers to fully funding nuclear modernization and strategic defense.
On top of which, the 1972 SALT I agreement had expired and the 1979 SALT II deal was never ratified by the U.S. Senate. However, the Reagan administration, in 1981, had agreed on an interim basis to not deploy any strategic nuclear forces in excess of those deployed by the USSR, meaning that there was a general agreement to maintain the status quo regarding deployed strategic nuclear weapons within the SALT framework.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/arms-control-plus-what-reagan-got-right-about-nuclear-deterrence-199527
