Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) By aLex Cruz

Important people involved: Richard Nixon and his administration, Lenoid Brezhnev and his administration
Date of event: November 1969 to May 1972

SALT happened in the 1970's, what is that? SALT stands for Strategic Arms Limitation Talks/Treaties. It is a series of talks and treaties between the US and the USSR. The first one began in November of 1969 and the last one happened in may of 1972. The goal of these talks and treaties were to put limits and restraints on their nuclear weapons. They did this in order to avoid another Cuban missile crisis. The US and the USSR were now getting more and more worried about destroying the world by nuclear means. These talks also helped calm down the people that were constantly worried about this "nuclear annihilation" thing. The talks ended up making the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty and the Interim Agreement on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms.

These talks began in November of 1969 (First year of Nixon's presidency) and ended in January of 1972. The results of these talks were the signing of two treaties on May 26, 1972. Those two treaties were the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) and the Interim Agreement on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. The Interim Agreement is an agreement between the US and USSR to have a period of 5 years where it froze the number of strategic ballistic missles to how many they had in 1972. Building more land-based ICBM silos was strictly prohibited. On the other hand ICBM's could be modernized to specific dimmensions.

The irony of all of this is that the US and USSR did this in the first place to reduce the number of nuclear arms but it just launched a competition to see who had the most weapons.