Strategic Arms Limitation Talks

The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were two rounds of bilateral conferences and corresponding international treaties involving the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War superpowers dealt with arms control in two rounds of talks and agreements: SALT I and SALT II.

"SALT" redirects here. For other uses, see SALT (disambiguation).

Negotiations commenced in Helsinki, in November 1969.^[1] SALT I led to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and an interim agreement between the two countries.

Although SALT II resulted in an agreement in 1979 in Vienna, the US Senate chose not to ratify the treaty in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which took place later that year. The Supreme Soviet did not ratify it either. The agreement expired on December 31, 1985, and was not renewed, although both sides continued to respect it.

The talks led to the STARTs, or Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties, which consisted of START I, a 1991 completed agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union, and START II, a 1993 agreement between the United States and Russia which never entered into effect, both of which proposed limits on multiple-warhead capacities and other restrictions on each side's number of nuclear weapons. A successor to START I, New START, was proposed and was eventually ratified in February 2011.

Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty

Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty

Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty

START

New START

Threshold Test Ban Treaty

Ambrose, Matthew, The Control Agenda: A History of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2018).

The Control Agenda: A History of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks

Burr, William (ed.), The Secret History of The ABM Treaty, 1969-1972, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 60, The National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., 8 November 2001,

The Secret History of The ABM Treaty

Calvo-Goller Karin and Calvo Michel, The SALT AGREEMENTS: Content, Application, Verification, Brill, 1987, 428 p, at Google Books

[1]

Clearwater, John Murray, Johnson, McNamara, and the Birth of SALT and the ABM Treaty, 1963-1969 (Dissertation.Com, 1999) 978-1581120622

ISBN

Garthoff, Raymond L., "Negotiating SALT," Wilson Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 5, Autumn 1977, pp. 76–85, 40255284

JSTOR

Garthoff, Raymond L., Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1994), esp. pgs. 146-223

Haslam, Jonathan and Theresa Osborne, SALT I: The Limitations of Arms Negotiations. U.S.-Soviet Talks Leading to the Interim Agreement on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, 1969-1972, Pew Case Studies in International Affairs, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., 1987

Mahan, Erin R. and Edward C. Keefer (eds.), (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2010),

Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XXXII, SALT I, 1969–1972

Newhouse, John, Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973)

Payne, Samuel B. The Soviet Union and SALT (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1980)

Savel'yev, Alexander' G. and Nikolay N. Detinov, The Big Five: Arms Control Decision-Making in the Soviet Union (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995)

Smart, Ian. "The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks." The World Today, vol. 26, no. 7, 1970, pp. 296–305.

JSTOR 40394395

Smith, Gerard C., Doubletalk: The Story of SALT I by the Chief American Negotiator (New York: Doubleday, 1980)

Smith, Gerard C., Disarming Diplomat: The Memoirs of Ambassador Gerard C. Smith, Arms Control Negotiator (Toronto, Ontario: Madison Books, 1996)

Tal, David. " 'Absolutes' and 'Stages' in the Making and Application of Nixon’s SALT Policy." Diplomatic History 37.5 (2013): 1090-1116.

Tal, David, US Strategic Arms Policy in the Cold War: Negotiation and Confrontation over SALT, 1969-1979 (New York: Routledge, 2017).

[2]

Talbott, Strobe, Endgame: The Inside Story of Salt II (New York: Harpercollins, 1979)

online

Text of SALT I

Text of SALT II

Text of SALT II (cont.)

Text of the treaty from the U.S. Department of State

Archived 2007-03-13 at the Wayback Machine Text of SALT II 1979

NuclearFiles.org

Arms Control Today, June 2002.

"U.S.-Soviet/Russian Nuclear Arms Control"

from the Dean Peter Krogh Foreign Affairs Digital Archives