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American officials were apprehensive that Gorbachev had raised "the level of expectations for the summit" by dangling hints of a sharp reduction in nuclear weapons only if the U.S. would stop development of its Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), commonly known as Star Wars. White House Spokesman Larry Speakes tried to downplay any idea of substantive arms-control bargaining at the summit. Said Speakes: "The important thing is to get to this meeting, to have the two men look each other over, size each other up, lay out their views on these various topics and then be able...
...conceded "will continue" because there would be no way to verify a halt, and the building of "models or mock-ups or test samples," which could be stopped by a verifiable agreement. Byrd found this a welcome contrast to the previous "stonewalling" of Soviet negotiators, who had insisted that SDI research of any kind must cease as the prelude to an arms-control deal. It could point toward the kind of trade suggested by such American conservatives as former President Richard Nixon and Columnist William Safire: limitations on the deployment and, perhaps, testing of defensive systems, though not on research...
Logical or not, a bargain along these lines would be exceedingly difficult to negotiate. The line between research and testing is by no means clear. The U.S. regards all 15 tests of SDI weaponry it has scheduled for the next few years as a kind of research program, to see if any of the technologies involved look feasible, rather than as developmental testing of deployable weapons. Even so, William Hyland, editor of Foreign Affairs, voiced the hope that Gorbachev's hint about accepting some research was a "beginning" and an "invitation to negotiation." Hyland's advice: when arms-control talks...
From the same point of view we approach what is called the SDI research program. First of all, we do not consider it to be a research program. In our view, it is the first stage of the project to develop a new ABM system prohibited under the treaty of 1972. Just think of the scale of it alone--$70 billion to be earmarked for the next few years. That is an incredible amount for pure research, as emphasized even by U.S. scientists as well. The point is that in today's prices those appropriations are more than four times...
That is why the entire SDI program and its so-called research component are a new and even more dangerous round of the arms race. It is necessary to prevent an arms race in space. We are confident that such an agreement is possible and verifiable. (I have to point out that we trust the Americans no more than they trust us, and that is why we are interested in reliable verification of any agreement as much as they...