START, officially the STrategic Arms Reduction Treaty was a nuclear weapons limitation treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. The treaty was initially proposed by United States PresidentRonald Reagan. It was retroactively named START I when the second START treaty, START II began to be discussed and later went into effect.
It was signed on July 31, 1991, five months before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The treaty placed limits on the number of various types of vehicles and warheads that could be deployed by either side. It remains in effect, as a treaty between the US and Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine have since totally disarmed.
In May 1982 U.S. President Ronald Reagan, an opponent of SALT II, advanced his own proposal for a strategicarmsreductiontreaty, calling for deep cuts in land-based missiles (in which the USSR was perceived to hold an advantage).
Negotiations continued after George Bush was elected U.S. president in 1988, and in July 1991 he and Gorbachev signed the START I Treaty, by which it was agreed to reduce the number of nuclear warheads by about 25 percent.
The START II Treaty, which called for the elimination of almost three-quarters of the nuclear warheads and all the multiple-warhead land-based missiles held by the U.S. and the former Soviet republics, was signed by Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin in January 1993.
SALT II was a second round of the StrategicArms Limitation Talks from 1972-1979 between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which sought to curtail the manufacture of strategicnuclear weapons.
An agreement to limit strategic launchers was reached in Vienna on June 18, 1979, and was signed by Leonid Brezhnev and President Jimmy Carter.
Additional arms were of decreasing usefulness given that each side could quite assuredly cripple the economy, infrastructure, populace (etc.) of the other side even if only a small fraction of the weapons launched managed to strike their intended targets.
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