ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on American policy-making. It examines the Nuclear and Space Arms Talks (NST) in Geneva, which began in March 1985 and led to the December 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the July 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I). The chapter then argues that the successful negotiation of these treaties vindicated George Shultz's approach to Cold War diplomacy during his years as secretary of state from 1982–1989. Employing fresh archival evidence, it offers several potential reassessments of the role of nuclear weapons during the final decade of the Cold War and connects them to Shultz's overall strategy of delinkage. The overriding objective of delinkage was to insulate negotiations from external shocks. Successor regimes will likely rely on a combination of delinkage, which Shultz propounded, and committed diplomacy along the lines of United States (US) and Soviet negotiators in Geneva between 1985 and 1991.
