Strategic Arms Limitation Talks

Series of US-Soviet discussions 1969–79 aimed at reducing the rate of nuclear-arms build-up (as opposed to disarmament, which would reduce the number of weapons, as discussed in Strategic Arms Reduction Talks [START]). The accords of the 1970s sought primarily to prevent the growth of nuclear arsenals.

The talks, delayed by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, began in 1969 between the US president Lyndon Johnson and the Soviet leader Nikita Brezhnev. Neither the SALT I accord (effective 1972–77) nor SALT II called for reductions in nuclear weaponry, merely a limit on the expansion of these forces. SALT II was mainly negotiated by US president Gerald Ford before 1976 and signed by Soviet leader Brezhnev and US president Jimmy Carter in Vienna, Austria, in 1979. It was never fully ratified because of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, although the terms of the accord were respected by both sides until US president Ronald Reagan exceeded its limitations during his second term 1985–89. SALT talks were superseded by START negotiations under Reagan, and the first significant reductions began under Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.