Negotiating Limits on
Strategic Nuclear Forces:
1954-1980
Over the course of three decades, while negotiators exchanged broad plans and minute details of various schemes to limit strategic forces, the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union grew dramatically. In the mid-1950s the United States had a nuclear arsenal of perhaps four dozen long-range bombers (although not yet with full intercontinental capabilities) and two to three thousand nuclear weapons, mostly bombs. The Soviet Union had tested a nuclear device in 1949, but the creation of usable and deliverable nuclear weapons still lagged about four years and several thousand bombs behind that of the United States. By 1980 the United States maintained a strategic weapons arsenal of over 8,500 nuclear weapons deployed on over 2,000 land- and sea-based intercontinental missiles and intercontinental bombers. The Soviet arsenal had about 6,300 nuclear weapons deployed on over 3,000 missiles and bombers. The total number of nuclear weapons possessed by each side was between 25,000 and 30,000, after counting the battlefield, short-range, and intermediate-range systems. 1
Nevertheless, by 1980 leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union also had signed two treaties designed to limit strategic forces--the 1972 treaty on anti-ballistic missiles and the 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty--although only the first was in force. The ABM Treaty placed fairly strict and specific limitations on deployments of ballistic missile defenses. Under the 1972 agreement, each party was limited to two ABM facilities, which were reduced to one each under a 1974 protocol. The treaty did not constrain development or deployment of offensive strategic weapons. These were limited under the 1972 Interim Agreement on offensive forces and subsequently by SALT II. But by effectively prohibiting both hard-point countrywide defense against ballistic missiles, the ABM Treaty removed an important propellant for offensive force expansion. 2
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