China is at the cusp of its “SALT moment” with the United States. Moscow and Washington were at a similar juncture in 1969, when the strategic arms limitation talks got underway. President Richard Nixon and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev decided to try to stabilize a competition in which both superpowers were poised to multiply their strategic offensive forces. The United States was on the verge of deploying national ballistic-missile defenses as well.
The odds of success were limited, since neither country had a history of substantive engagement on these issues or of coordinating government positions for complex negotiations of this kind. When the talks began, SALT critics accused U.S. diplomats of negotiating against the Pentagon and with the Kremlin, while military members of the Soviet delegation warned U.S. officials against revealing “secrets” to Russian diplomats. More
