re: #130 avanti

Reagan’s trust-but-verify was a novel way to deal with the problem of verification of destroyed weapons between large nuclear powers where a small shift or number of weapons involved could provide one nation with the ability to carry out a devastating first strike and eliminate the possibility for reprisal.

Once numbers of weapons go below a certain point, there is an instability in outcomes; you can’t necessarily predict what would happen if let’s say Russia decides to attack out of the blue, because with so few US weapons remaining, the Russians could wipe out US weapons in the silo and not worry about a reprisal strike. It means that as countries approach zero weapons, they become even more susceptible to rogue regimes that have nothing to lose and everything to gain from a first-strike capacity.

Reagan’s missile reductions - which were actually the SALT treaties, not START, reduced US missile numbers and allowed the US to phase out older missiles while retaining the MX missiles. The US phased out fewer weapons than the Russians, but proportionally more weapons overall because of the size of the stockpiles involved.