Word: talbotts
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...this point Talbott's reader might expect a reasonable discussion of the problems and frictions both sides experienced through the long and frustrating INF talks in Geneva. Instead, we are subjected to pages and pages of criticism directed solely at Washington's approach to the talks. Intra-Administration rivalry, attempts to solidify the support of the Europeans, the "public relations" push for domestic support of our position--Talbott describes it all in excruciating and damning (at least in his eyes) detail. His acknowledgement, that the Soviets never accepted the West's intention to deploy at least some missiles to counter...
...Talbott does not seem to listen to his own very convincing dismissal of the Soviets' principal argument, which contended that British and French nuclear weapons already constituted an allied deterrent. The small arsenals these NATO partners maintain do not threaten the Soviet Union, and in fact the French forces are not even integrated into the NATO force structure; Talbott knows this, but he does not extend the same type of withering criticism to the Soviet rationale as he does to the American...
...called "walk in the woods" initiative undertaken by chief negotiator Paul Nitze, ends with a fizzle. This informal proposal, worked out exclusively between Nitze and his opposite number Yuli Kvitsinsk, would have "traded" deployment of the Pershing lls for a significant reduction of the SS-20s. Talbott describes with withering sarcasm the process by which the Administration repudiated Nitze's action, seeming to put the onus for stalemate on Washington. But he ends his chapter lamely with this...
...MUCH FOR American perfidy in INF. Talbott completely his book with an even harsher slashing of the U.S. approach to strategic arms reduction...
...only does Talbott allow no doubt about his more negative feeling concerning START, but he also negates much of his harange against U.S. conduct at the INF talks with his very first sentence in Part Two "White INF was largely an inherited dilemma for the Reagan Administration, its conduct of START--the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks--was beset by problems much more of its own making...