ABSTRACT
At the start of the talks, the Soviets put forward a plan for a phased reduction followed by a region-wide division of the entire area of reductions from the Atlantic to the Urals. The revolutionary transformations removed the underlying premise of the talks on conventional armed forces in Europe. The agreed-upon mandate for the talks called for considering the conventional armed forces of the participants, including conventional armaments and equipment, located in the territories of the participants in Europe, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural mountains. The refusal of Western representatives at the initial stages to agree to include personnel in the talks was based on the considerable difficulty of counting personnel for verification purposes. There were fewer disagreements about the reduction of combat helicopters than about the reduction of combat aircraft. From the very start of the talks there were fundamental disagreements about reducing tanks.
