Word: troop
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...Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction negotiations were formally convened in October of 1973. East and West had very different reasons a decade ago for desiring a cut in troops and equipment stationed in central Europe, the aims of the talks. For the U.S., this period was an obviously trying time for those who believed in strong foreign deployment of American troops. The burden of some 200,000 U.S. soldiers in Europe, high relative costs and inflation, a simple desire to "bring our boys back home," and especially the conflict in Vietnam had already prompted Congressional debate on unilateral withdrawal...
...Even the initial estimates of force to be negotiated were in dispute. The West estimated Warsaw Pact and Russian combined troop strength at approximately 925,000. NATO's at 777,000. However, Russia claimed rough parity at the lower level. Ten years later, the two sides have come no closer to aggreement on the data, that presumably would be a prerequisite for any final treaty...
...East refuses to agree to verification measures the West sees as essential to any treaty. In 1979 the West dropped some of its troop demands in return for verification requests--on-site inspections, exchange of information, establishment of exit-entry points with observers, and so forth. After initially rejecting these demands categorically, the East appears to have yielded somewhat, to the point where the United states sees some hope in the area...
Indeed, if the West can persuade the Soviets that troop reduction is in their interest, then all European security questions would become simpler. Gains for the West are obvious: reduced cost for equal security, greater assurance against attack, and a simple slacking of military tension during peacetime. And for the East the gains from an MBFR agreement would be tangible as well: a reduction in cost and tension and a lessening of the American presence in Europe, something that Russia has wanted for a long time...
...well educated, sensitive to a fault, politically liberal, and affluent enough to feel pleasurable guilt in their possessions. They tend, in short, to resemble the stereotypical reader of The New Yorker, which is where the luckiest of these fictional people are chosen to appear. The rejected ones must troop off to the quarterlies and go through their paces (at greatly reduced rates) for smaller audiences composed of people with whom they can feel equally at home. These days a good many characters in short stories are also quarterly readers...