Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Oleg Shevchenko
[REGNUM] Exactly 55 years ago, on November 17, 1969, negotiations between the USSR and the USA began in Helsinki to limit nuclear arsenals. Representatives of all the world's media that had any presence in the information resources market rushed to the capital of Finland. An event of incredible significance! The USSR and the USA decide to come to an agreement, Armageddon is postponed! For the average person, this event happened suddenly, but in the world of big politics and big military strategy, there is no place for the word "suddenly". And the main issues were not decided in front of cameras in Helsinki, but "behind the curtain".
More precisely, in a series of closed bilateral meetings between the veterans of the diplomacy of that time: US presidential aide Henry Kissinger and Soviet ambassador to the US Anatoly Dobrynin. And it all took its final form only in November 1974 in Vladivostok during a meeting between Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and US President Gerald Ford.
AGENT X REPORTS
It all began in the distant, victorious year for our country - May 18, 1945. From the USSR Embassy in Great Britain came a cipher using the most powerful encryption capabilities, it had the stamp "Super Lightning". That is, the information contained in it was not only extremely secret, but it was required to be reported to the leadership as soon as possible.
They were obtained by an agent with the code letter "X", whose identity is still one of the main secrets of our intelligence services. He reported that three days ago the Joint Planning Headquarters of the British War Cabinet began developing a scenario for war against the USSR - the Unthinkable plan.
The scenario – the authenticity of which the British government denied until 1998 – included plans for an offensive by 47 Anglo-American divisions in East Germany and Poland. The British also intended to use 12 undisbanded Wehrmacht divisions that the Allies were “keeping in reserve” in Schleswig-Holstein and southern Denmark.
Even then, the West's plans did not assume that the war would be "conventional" (without the use of weapons of mass destruction). Let us recall that the first atomic bomb was tested at the Alamogordo test site in New Mexico in July 1945, and a month later, the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became victims of the new weapon.
In 2014, London's The Daily Mail published FBI archive data, which showed that in 1947, Churchill convinced the Harry Truman administration of the need to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the USSR.
"DESIRABLE LOSSES OF RUSSIANS" - UP TO 100 MILLION PEOPLE
But the Americans themselves were developing various options for attacking the Soviet Union. Here are just a few of them.
In September 1945, American Major General Loris Norstad developed a map of targets for American nuclear bombing of the Soviet Union. The general planned to drop from 123 to 466 nuclear warheads on peaceful cities: Moscow, Baku, Novosibirsk, Gorky, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Kuibyshev, Kazan, Saratov, Molotov (Perm), Magnitogorsk.
On December 14, 1945, the Peancer plan was born. It designated 20 major cities and industrial centers of the USSR for atomic bombing, on which it was supposed to drop 196 atomic bombs. This plan was followed by a number of others with no less menacing names: "Hot Day", "Incinerating Heat", "Shake", etc.
In 1946, Dwight Eisenhower, then the US Army Chief of Staff, developed the Totality plan, which called for dropping 20-30 atomic bombs on two dozen Soviet cities.
On December 19, 1949, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff officially approved the basic plan for waging nuclear war, Dropshot.
According to this plan, it was necessary to drop 300 nuclear bombs on the USSR in such a way that 85 percent of the industrial potential of the Soviet Union would be destroyed in one blow. At the same time, the “desirable losses” of USSR citizens were estimated at 60-100 million people.
Against this warlike background, the Americans begin diplomatic pressure. In a very brazen manner, reveling in its own monopoly on nuclear weapons, Washington proposed the " Baruch Plan " - named after its developer, Roosevelt's advisor, financier Bernard Baruch.
According to the plan, actual control over the nuclear industry and nuclear arsenals that other countries might acquire would be transferred to the United States through the creation of a supposedly international special commission in which the West would occupy a dominant position.
PEACE PROPOSALS PLUS "KUZKINA MOTHER"
In response, on June 19, 1946, Moscow put forward a draft international convention on the complete and unconditional prohibition of the production and use of atomic weapons to the UN Atomic Commission.
The project was based on the recognition of the principle of equality and equal security for all signatory states. As expected, the Americans began to block Moscow's proposal and put pressure on various countries in every possible way to accept their plan. But the Soviet Union soon had a weighty argument.
In 1949, the USSR tests its first atomic bomb. It becomes obvious to Washington that nuclear blackmail can no longer be used: Moscow has something to respond to the plans of NATO generals.
And although the ratio of nuclear bombs was in favor of the Americans (1950 - 299 for the USA versus five for the USSR; 1955 - 2422 versus 200), no one in Washington wanted to have a nuclear explosion in New York or Los Angeles.
This was the moment when it would have been possible to come to peace talks. But the US relied on its scientific and technological advantage and began a new round of atomic blackmail. It was called "Bombing Breakaway".
The goal was to dominate the speed and scale of air delivery of bombs against the USSR and destroy its nuclear potential at their bases with a surprise preemptive strike. By 1960, over 18,000 nuclear warheads and over two thousand carrier aircraft had been accumulated. The USSR could counter them with only 1,600 atomic bombs.
Soviet successes in near-Earth space, from the launch of Sputnik to the flight of Yuri Gagarin, convinced the Americans that the military component of our missile program was up to par. As early as 1959, Pentagon chief Neil McElroy announced that the Soviets were capable of creating large forces of intercontinental ballistic missiles in a short time, while the United States was critically lagging behind in this regard.
With this statement, the United States launched a new round of nuclear confrontation in the sphere of missile technologies, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. After it, it became clear to many: the USSR would not give in to blackmail, and its scientific and technical base was not much inferior to the American one. The situation was becoming a stalemate.
This was stated in 1957 by then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in his book War or Peace?: “The ability of the United States to drop atomic bombs on Russia is largely neutralized by the ability of the latter to drop atomic bombs on the United States and Western Europe.”
Even the creation of a super-powerful thermonuclear bomb by the US in the mid-1950s did not improve their situation, because the USSR responded with a hydrogen bomb – a weapon of geostrategic scale. In those same years, the US Secretary of Aviation Thomas Finletter claimed: “ The security of our country is affected, which was not the case with the advent of the atomic bomb… In a short time, the Russians will have enough hydrogen bombs to be able to destroy the United States with a small part of them.”
THE MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM LOOKS LIKE WET CARDBOARD
The next stage of the US asymmetric response was to be missile charges with multiple warheads and the first Sentinel missile defense systems, which had been developed since the late 1960s. But at the same time, American military-technical analysts were sounding the alarm.
The presence of a heavy missile system with a nuclear charge in the USSR, the ever-increasing stock of our hydrogen bombs and the improvement in the quality of their delivery indicated that the American missile defense looked, as they say, like wet cardboard under a hail of boulders.
The American elite finally lost their nerve when it became known that the USSR had created its own missile defense systems - the A-35 and its successor, the A-135, which turned out to be much more effective than their American counterpart. The Soviet system was capable of intercepting most American missiles, and those that would miss would not be able to deliver a critical blow to the Soviet Union. A symmetrical blow from Soviet nuclear forces would wipe the United States off the face of the earth.
The nuclear arms race entered the parity phase, and Washington reasonably decided that it was time to reach an agreement.
"KISS" IN ACTION
On July 2, 1968, the Lyndon Johnson administration and the Soviet leadership led by Brezhnev indicated interest in nuclear arms control negotiations. In January 1969, when "Tricky Dick" Republican Richard Nixon replaced Democrat Johnson in Washington, Moscow formally agreed to begin negotiations.
The new White House team suddenly took a break – and fell silent. And then the Americans began to link the course of the nuclear weapons talks with… the situation in the Middle East and Vietnam. They say that Moscow should make concessions on these two issues.
A quiet dance of the two powers, resembling the soft steps of a cat, began. Allies were involved, spy networks were used, the press was monitored, and accidentally dropped phrases of diplomats were recorded - everything was subjected to careful filtering and analysis. Never in the history of the world had there been an analogy to an agreement on limiting nuclear weapons, this super-powerful trump card in a global war that never began.
It was necessary to build a structure of communication, formulas for concessions, a technique for probing the motives of opponents from scratch, without ready-made templates. The era of nuclear diplomacy was coming, for which no university in the world had prepared.
And as always, secret diplomacy started working before open diplomacy, and here the main role was played by another "sly one" - a diplomat with a serious intelligence background, Henry Kissinger. He had two nicknames - "Sly Fox" and "Kiss" - an abbreviation of his last name and at the same time "kiss" (Kiss). Apparently, thanks to his innate softness, charm and delicacy of communication, behind which hid a tough and skillful negotiator.
He was opposed by the recent Deputy Secretary General of the UN, and since 1962 the USSR Ambassador to the USA, who confirmed his highest qualifications during the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis – Anatoly Dobrynin.
On October 20, after a series of tense diplomatic clashes, the USSR forced the American government to announce its agreement to begin discussions on the issue of formal limitation of strategic arms (SALT).
The Soviet delegation was headed by Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Semenov, a diplomat with 30 years of experience, which included working at the embassy in Berlin just before the war, "resolving" the Berlin crisis of 1948-49, and participating in the formation of the GDR. The Western press respectfully called him "the gray cardinal." The Americans put forward a specialist in the field, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for "atomic" issues Gerard Smith, against our broad-based diplomat.
BREAKTHROUGH AND A NEW DEAD END
So the negotiations took place on two levels: confidentially in Washington “Kissinger-Dobrynin” and officially in Helsinki and Vienna “Smith-Semyonov”.
To call the negotiations difficult is to say nothing. Moscow had counted on talking only with Washington. But the American side published Nixon's message: the US will not decide anything without its allies, whose interests the US has pledged to protect. A sharp turn in the negotiations for which Moscow was not prepared.
Reminiscent of the behavior of Donald Trump's team during the negotiations on the START-3 nuclear agreement in 2020. Then, let us recall, Washington "dragged out" the negotiations, insisting that either China joins the Russian-American treaty (and China clearly did not intend to do this), or START-3 is not extended. As a result, the treaty was "buried".
Half a century earlier, Nixon and Kissinger had the common sense to reach an agreement with Moscow, although the background for the Helsinki meetings was demarches, provocative articles in the press, loud statements and a minimum of firm guarantees. By 1972, the negotiations began to steer towards the final stage. Its first stage was Nixon's visit to Brezhnev and the signing of two documents on May 26: the open-ended ABM Treaty and the five-year Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I).
But many important issues could not be settled. For example, the number of strategic bombers and missiles with multiple warheads (which replaced the old missiles and made it possible to increase the number of warheads without increasing the number of carriers themselves). And the five years of SALT-1 were supposed to pass quickly.
New consultations began, but the next round of negotiations again led the situation to a dead end. A decisive breakthrough was needed, which happened after Watergate and Nixon's resignation.
"Mr. Secretary General, I'm keeping my fingers crossed."
Half a century ago, in November 1974, the new President Gerald Ford met with Brezhnev in Vladivostok. The President and Secretary General agreed on a new treaty, SALT II. The USSR and the USA were obliged to limit the number of strategic nuclear weapons carriers to 2,400 units, and restrictions were imposed on the number of ground-based launchers and on the deployment of nuclear weapons in space.
According to Ford's memoirs, Brezhnev began to talk at length about the United States Congress, "which the Soviets saw as potentially detrimental to their ability to negotiate with American presidents. " Brezhnev asked Ford, "What Congress will you have to deal with in the next two years?" to which the president replied, "Mr. General Secretary... I can only say that I am keeping my fingers crossed."
Brezhnev signed SALT-2 in 1979, already with the next US President Jimmy Carter, but the conversation with Ford turned out to be prophetic: the Senate, citing the “Soviet invasion” of Afghanistan, flatly refused to ratify the treaty.
And the famous peacemaker Carter was playing a hidden game, which, incidentally, was also known in Moscow. Recently, in October 2024, the FSB declassified our intelligence data: in 1980, Carter signed secret presidential directive No. 59, which outlined a "new nuclear doctrine" that envisaged the possibility of the United States starting a full-scale nuclear war against the Soviet Union."
But both the “dove” Carter and the “hawk” Ronald Reagan who replaced him were pragmatists, and Washington, mindful of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, formally observed SALT II, which was never ratified.
SYSTEM COLLAPSE AND HYPERSONIC OVERTAKING
Washington did not enjoy the position of the sole wielder of the nuclear club for long - 75 years ago the USSR ended this monopoly, and 55 years ago it forced the US to comply with rather strict rules of the game for the first time. Since Russia was lucky enough not to lose the nuclear triad after the collapse of the USSR, America has been polite in the post-Soviet era. Examples of this are the treaties on strategic offensive weapons: START-1 (1991-2009), START-2 (1993-2002) and the START-3 agreement signed in 2010.
But already under George W. Bush, the United States began dismantling the system of checks and balances created in the last three decades of the 20th century. In 2002, the United States withdrew from the ABM Treaty, in 2019, under Trump, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) collapsed, and in 2023, already under Joe Biden, the New START Treaty was de jure terminated.
Today's Russia has eliminated all risks associated with the US attempt to feel safe in the face of a retaliatory nuclear strike. Russia's current nuclear triad, its missile defense systems, and hypersonic carriers have cooled many hot heads in Washington.
But in essence, we are once again in a situation of legal instability and turmoil of the mid-1960s. Only with the development of "hypersound" it is not we who are in a catch-up situation, but our opponents in the West. The spiral of nuclear diplomacy has completed its next turn and is heading into the future.
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