In August 1972, the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved the agreements. SALT-I, as it was called, served as the basis for all subsequent arms restrictions talks. Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union to restrict the production of strategic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The first agreements, known as SALT I and SALT II, were signed by the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1972 and 1979, respectively, and aimed to curb the arms race in strategic ballistic missiles (long-range or intercontinental) armed with nuclear weapons. First proposed by US President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967, the two superpowers agreed in the summer of 1968 on strategic arms control talks, and comprehensive negotiations began in November 1969. Among the resulting set of agreements (SALT I), the most important were the Treaty on Ballistic Missile Defence Systems (ABM) and the Interim Agreement and Protocol on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Weapons. Both were developed by Pres.
Richard M. Nixon for the United States and Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, for the USSR signed on 26 May 1972 at a summit in Moscow. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were two series of bilateral conferences and corresponding international treaties involving the United States and the Soviet Union, the superpowers of the Cold War, on the issue of arms control. The two rounds of talks and agreements were SALT I and SALT II. Negotiations on the status of salt II began in November 1972. A major breakthrough took place at the Vladivostok meeting in November 1974 between President Ford and General Secretary Brezhnev. At this meeting, the parties agreed on a basic framework for the SALT II agreement. The SALT II Agreement was signed in Vienna on 18 June 1979 by President Carter and Secretary General Brezhnev.
President Carter sent it to the Senate on June 22 for deliberation and approval of ratification. However, on January 3, 1980, President Carter asked the Senate Majority Leader to defer the Senate`s consideration of the treaty in light of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In May 1982, President Reagan declared that he would do nothing to undermine the SALT accords as long as the Soviet Union showed the same restraint. The Soviet Union again agreed to abide by the unratified treaty. In 1984 and 1985, President Reagan declared that the Soviet Union had violated his political commitment to the SALT II Treaty. On May 26, 1986, President Reagan stated that ” the United States must base its decisions on its strategic force structure on the nature and extent of the threat posed by Soviet strategic forces, not on the standards contained in the SALT structure. On May 27, President Reagan announced that the United States would no longer adhere to the treaty boundaries. The president said that the USSR was not fulfilling its political commitment to comply with the provisions of the treaty and was not showing its willingness to conclude new arms reduction agreements. He went on to say that the United States would base its decisions on its strategic force structure on the nature and extent of the threat posed by Soviet strategic forces, rather than on the standards contained in the SALT structure. He explained that the US would not use more SNDVs or strategic ballistic missile warheads than the USSR to protect strategic deterrence. Although the agreements resulting from the SALT negotiations were imperfect, they were a modest first step towards fulfilling the obligations of the United States and Russia under article VI of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to take effective measures to end the arms race and nuclear disarmament.
The SALT and ABM agreements also set a standard for future bilateral negotiations on nuclear arms control treaties, which would lead to more ambitious verifiable restrictions and reductions in both sides` excessive nuclear stockpiles. The United States repeated its January 1984 accusation that the USSR had violated certain provisions of the Treaty. In June, President Reagan reaffirmed that it was in the interest of the United States to maintain a temporary framework of mutual restraint with the USSR, stating that the United States would continue to refrain from undermining existing strategic weapons agreements as long as the USSR showed similar restraint and actively pursued arms reduction agreements within the framework of the Geneva Nuclear and Space Talks (NST). The USSR also reiterated its accusations of January 1984 concerning the violation of certain provisions of the Treaty by the United States. Even after the Vladivostok Agreements, the two nations could not resolve the other two outstanding issues of SALT I: the number of strategic bombers and the total number of warheads in each nation`s arsenal. The first was complicated by the Soviet bomber, which American negotiators thought could reach the United States, but which the Soviets did not want to include in the SALT negotiations. Meanwhile, the Soviets tried unsuccessfully to limit the U.S. deployment of airborne cruise missiles (ALCM). The verification also divided the two countries, but they eventually agreed on the use of national technical means (NTM), including the collection of electronic signals known as telemetry and the use of photographic reconnaissance satellites. On 17 June 1979, Carter and Brezhnev sign the SALT II Treaty in Vienna. SALT II limited the total number of nuclear forces of the two countries to 2,250 launchers and imposed various other restrictions on deployed strategic nuclear forces, including MIRVs.
The most important element of the summit concerned the SALT agreements. Discussions on SALT have been going on for about two and a half years, but with little progress. However, during the meeting between Nixon and Brezhnev in May 1972, a monumental breakthrough was made. The SALT agreements signed on 27 May addressed two important issues. First, they limited to two the number of anti-ballistic missile (ABM) sites that each country could have. (ABMs were missiles designed to destroy incoming missiles.) Secondly, the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-fired ballistic missiles has been frozen at the existing level. However, the agreements did not cover several re-entry missiles that could be targeted independently (single missiles with multiple nuclear warheads) or the development of new weapons. Nevertheless, most Americans and Soviets celebrated the SALT accords as huge achievements. SALT II authorized Parties to use their national technical means of evidence (NTMs) to ensure compliance with the Treaty and requested them not to interfere with the NCD of the other Party and not to apply intentional obfuscation measures that could impede the verification of the NTM (Article XV).
The treaty provided for the case-by-case communication of ICBM launches, with the exception of single ICBM launches from ICBM test areas or operational areas that should not extend beyond the territory of a Party (Article XVI). An important breakthrough for this agreement took place at the Vladivostok Summit in November 1974, when President Gerald Ford and Secretary General Leonid Brezhnev reached agreement on the basic framework of the SALT II Agreement. It has been indicated that the elements of this agreement will be in force until 1985. A clause in the treaty required both countries to limit the number of sites protected by an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system to one at a time. The idea of this system was that it would prevent competition in the deployment of ABM between the United States and the Soviet Union. .