The Nixon Administration And The "ABM Treaty" Negotiations

From November17,1969, the United States and the Soviet Union started negotiating the limitation of offensive and defensive strategic weapons, and the negotiation lasted for two years and six months. Finally, during the Moscow Summit in May1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon and Brezhnev, the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, signed the Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems, as well as the Interim Agreement on Certain Measures with Respect to the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms and the Supplementary Protocol. The Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems is a formal treaty, effectively preventing the arms race of anti-ballistic missiles between the United States and the Soviet Union. Therefore, many politicians and scholars called it the "cornerstone of strategic stability".On the structure of the article, I took time as the main line. In Chapter1, I introduced the historical background of negotiation of ABM Treaty, and analyzed the influence of ABM on arms race and strategic stability. In Chapter2, I narrated the differences and contest between the United States and the Soviet Union in the open and secret channels negotiations, and the complex decision-making process n the Nixon Administration; In Chapter3, I made some simple comments on ABM Treaty and the negotiation. In the horizontal direction, I checked the countries and events that were relative to the negotiation in the same period, and analyzed the interaction of the strategic arms limitation talks and the international situation in the view of international politics.Based on declassified U.S. documents, as well as the memoirs and writings of some participants, I took an objective analysis of the complex considerations and the different positions of the U.S. government, the military and Congress on the Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems and the strategic arms limitation talks. So my writing style is objective depiction, as to tell the truth of the history. Following the theory of dialectical materialism and historical materialism, based on detailed historical materials, I sorted through the negotiation process of Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in the microscopic view, and analyzed the context of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and its impact in the macroscopic view. In the writing of the thesis, I collected and analyzed historical materials, and compared them (for example, the contrast between the memoirs of negotiators from the United States and the Soviet Union).