INF Treaty: Eliminating an Entire Class of Nuclear Weapons
The United States and the Soviet Union agreed in December 1987 to destroy an entire class of nuclear weapons. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty eliminated all ground-launched missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometres, which meant 2,692 missiles destroyed — about twice as many Soviet as American — along with their launchers and support equipment. It was the first agreement to reduce arsenals rather than cap their growth. The crisis it resolved was of both sides' making. The Soviet SS-20, deployed from 1976, was mobile, accurate and carried three warheads, and it threatened western Europe without touching the United States; NATO's answer in 1979 was a dual-track decision to negotiate and, failing that, to deploy Pershing IIs and cruise missiles, which arrived in 1983 and produced the largest peace demonstrations in European history. The Soviets walked out of the talks and came back. Gorbachev's arrival in 1985 changed the terms, and the zero option — remove all of them — had originally been an American proposal made in 1981 partly because Moscow was expected to refuse it. The verification provisions were the most intrusive ever accepted: on-site inspection at production and elimination facilities, and a permanent monitoring presence outside a Soviet factory at Votkinsk for thirteen years. Reagan quoted a Russian proverb about trusting and verifying so often that Gorbachev complained. The United States withdrew in 2019, citing Russian violations, and the treaty lapsed. The treaty also mattered because of what it demonstrated rather than what it removed. Two governments that had spent forty years unable to verify anything accepted inspectors inside each other's factories, and the arms control agreements of the following four years were built on that precedent. Europe now has no equivalent instrument.
- Year: 1987 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
