The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

Six months before the resolution of the NATO crisis, President Carter and Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty—SALT II, as it was known—the culmination of seven years of negotiations, through the previous two presidents, and the most ambitious nuclear arms control treaty to date. Yet to obtain the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s endorsement, which was necessary to win the Senate’s ratification, Carter had to fund what would be the biggest, most destabilizing missile in the U.S. arsenal. This political tradeoff—an arms buildup in exchange for an arms treaty—had become standard practice by this time, a built-in feature of the arms control process that the Chiefs had honed to an art. It began under Nixon. At the same time that he and Kissinger were unfurling nuclear threats, they were also crafting a diplomacy of “détente,” a complex of forums and agreements to reduce tensions and build trust with the Kremlin—and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks formed the centerpiece of this effort.