Central to Soviet foreign policy was detente
with the US, which in the 1970s and 1980s could
by itself enhance overall security and reduce the
military budget. The exorbitant expense of devel-
oping modern weapons and of attempting to frus-
trate the US Strategic Defence Initiative, or ‘Star
Wars’, became a Soviet nightmare. The much
greater industrial and technological capacity of
the US and the West meant that it was essential
to the Soviet Union to set limits on the develop-
ment and deployment of nuclear weapons. In a
non-nuclear war, moreover, the outcome would
be determined by the sophistication of conven-
tional weapons. American cruise missiles without
nuclear warheads could still cause havoc, destroy-
ing command centres; superior aircraft and anti-
radar devices could penetrate Soviet airspace. So
military budgets had simultaneously to carry the
burden of conventional-weapons development.
But to have provided all the armaments that the
military were clamouring for would have crippled
any attempt to improve living standards for the
ordinary Soviet citizen, when it was in any case
becoming increasingly difficult in the second half
of the 1970s to raise national production. Worst
of all, the failure to give the Soviet people some
sense of material progress would undermine
morale, arouse nationalist rivalries between the
constituent republics and so threaten the stability
of the whole Soviet system.
Brezhnev and his successors responded to this
dire predicament by launching peace offensives.
Brezhnev and Andropov repeatedly declared that
the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers were more
than sufficient to serve deterrent purposes and that
no nuclear war was ‘winnable’. As Andropov put it,
‘One has to be blind to the realities of our time not
to see that, wherever and however a nuclear whirl-
wind arises, it will inevitably go out of control and
cause a worldwide catastrophe.’ The Soviet Union
and the US, however suspicious they might be of
each other, also shared common interests. One
of the most important was to prevent the spread of
nuclear weapons. Accordingly they concluded on 1
July 1968 a treaty on the non-proliferation of
nuclear weapons, which bound them to refrain
from assisting non-nuclear nations to obtain or
make nuclear weapons. Although the treaty has
been signed by more than a hundred countries,
nuclear-weapon capability continues to spread; the
supposed safeguard of inspection by the Inter-
national Atomic Energy Agency is proving ineffec-
tive in such countries as Israel and Iraq.
During the 1970s there was a rational dialogue
between the Soviet Union and the US about how
a nuclear war between them, which would destroy
both countries, could best be guaranteed never to
take place. The answer they found seems perverse.
They concluded that it could best be prevented by
ensuring that both countries would indeed perish.
This could be effected by a treaty severely limiting
the defences that could be set up to destroy incom-
ing nuclear missiles. The Treaty on the Limitation
of Anti-ballistic Missile Systems, known as the
ABM Treaty, was signed on 26 May 1972 during
a visit to Moscow by President Nixon. On the
same day an Interim Agreement on Limitation of
Strategic Offensive Arms, known as SALT I, was
also concluded. The US already had more than
enough nuclear missiles to destroy the Soviet
Union.
MAD, mutual assured destruction, was the
name given to this doctrine that was designed to
ensure peace. Then the impetus for further disar-
mament came to a halt. SALT II, negotiated by
President Carter and Brezhnev, and apparently
sealed when the Russian leader kissed the US
president on the cheek in Vienna on 18 June 1979,
was refused ratification by the US Senate. It had
sought to reduce the nuclear weaponry on each
side, but it was a dead letter after the Soviet inva-
sion of Afghanistan in December 1979; there now
appeared to be no prospect for negotiation
towards SALT III to reduce offensive weapons on
both sides. But during the Brezhnev period mean-
ingful Soviet–US negotiations had begun to find a
way out of the blind alley of piling on more and
more weapons of mass destruction. After an inter-
val of nearly a decade, Gorbachev and Reagan
in the second half of the 1980s resumed this
sequence of mutual accommodation in the inter-
ests of the Soviet Union and the US, and indeed of
the whole world.
The seventeen Brezhnev years, together with a
brief postscript, marked the final phase of author-
itarian, monolithic communist rule, a military
1
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