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many warheads and missiles they had or confirm U.S. estimates. So the treaty was based upon our counting what could be verified—silos in the ground, detectable by surveillance satellite cameras. 8 As to things that could not be seen, like warheads inside a missile nose cone, the United States devised “counting rules”—based upon the observed size of nose cones—to apply limits. 9 SALT I limited
launchers
, not missiles or warheads, for precisely this reason. A complex technical and strategic calculus underlay judgments as to the balance between offensive and defensive systems. 10
    As to missile defense, SALT I limited each side to radar to protect one major city and one ICBM base, a compromise designed so that the Russians could keep their primitive systems protecting Moscow and one missile base. (The United States briefly deployed an ABM under treaty rules, but scrapped it later in the 1970s.) The treaty decreed that ABM radars could be deployed only on the periphery of the country. This was to prevent them from being used for the “battle management” of a national missile defense system—that is, for the countrywide detection and interception of incoming hostile objects (and damage assessment after a hit). In the 1980s the Soviets deployed a massive battle-management radar installation in central Russia, in violation of the treaty, but denied it until the Cold War ended. SALT I’s Standing Consultative Commission regulating treaty implementation was a two-party affair with no final outside arbiter (none existed). Thus the U.S. could not force the Soviets to comply.
    Disenchantment with SALT I did not stop the arms-control process—the new Carter administration unilaterally cancelled the strategic B-1 heavy bomber in 1977. 11 The next year, Carter did away with the proposed battlefield weapon known colloquially as the “neutron bomb.” Formally termed the “enhanced radiation, reduced blast” warhead, it combined intense neutron radiation with relatively limited explosive and heat energy. Covering a small area—typically, within a quarter-mile radius of the bomb’s low-altitude airburst detonation, half the physically destructive radius of the Hiroshima bomb—the highly lethal neutron radiation penetrated tanks and buildings, killing personnel inside (or outside) within hours. As any tank battle in Germany would have to take place close to heavily populated cities, German chancellor Helmut Schmidt had staked his prestige on the deployment of this weapon, and was enraged at Carter’s unilateral cancellation of it. 12
    The Carter administration signed the SALT II treaty in June 1979, essentially freezing new missile development at levels that left the Soviet heavy-missile arsenal intact. Its ratification—already an acrimonious subject in the Senate—became impossible when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve.
A Search for Common Interests: Late Cold War Arms Talks
    T HE ADVENT of the Reagan administration in 1981 bid fair to change the arms-control picture. Reagan had campaigned against the SALT II treaty as a symbol of the deteriorating military balance between the United States and the Soviet Union. Despite never ratifying the treaty, as president he informally adhered to its limits, for want of congressional support to build beyond them. In Paul Nitze’s view, by not seeking Senate ratification of SALT II Reagan allowed future arms talks to begin from scratch, rather than be treated as a continuation of SALT II and thus bound by SALT II’s foundation principles.
    While a Republican Senate from 1981 to 1986 gave President Reagan support for new weapon systems, a Democratic House of Representatives and the tug of arms-control politics severely limited his options. The House shrunk the domestically unpopular MX “Peacekeeper” program—200 missiles with 10 warheads each, shuttling on railroad tracks between 4,600 launching points in vast western rural tracts—down to 50 missiles in