The road to SALT-I

Abstract

By the late 1960s leaders in the Soviet Union and America had come to understand that enhancing either your defence against ICBMs or the ICBMs themselves led to a reduction in your security. Enhancing your offensive weapons motivated the other side to enhance theirs. And enhancing your defences motivated them to enhance their offensive weapons, thus worsening the problem. So, improving your defences decreased your security. That is the peculiar logic of détente. The stage was set for negotiations between the two superpowers to find a way out of this catch-22.