Introduction

President Carter signed a second SALT agreement with the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in Vienna, in June 1979. President Lyndon Johnson was about to begin negotiations with the Soviet Union over the limitation of strategic arms. The invasion postponed the planned negotiations, but this time, Richard Nixon, managed to bring them to a successful end: he and Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT I agreement in May 1972, in Moscow. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. This book tells the story of the negotiations that led to the conclusion of these agreements, and, in the case of SALT II, the process that led to its failure. Nixon, Kissinger and their contemporaries and successors knew much less than they pretended to know, but nonetheless they based decisions and actions on those thin layers of knowledge, which sometimes did not exist at all.