Bush and Gorbachev sign a treaty to cut the world's largest nuclear arsenals
By 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union together held roughly 20,000 strategic nuclear warheads, built up through four decades of arms racing. In Moscow on July 31, 1991, President George H. W. Bush and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, capping each side at 6,000 warheads and 1,600 missiles and bombers, with on-site inspections to verify compliance. Earlier treaties like SALT had only capped growth; START I was the first to force actual cuts. Full implementation a decade later eliminated about 80 percent of the era's strategic nuclear weapons.
START I let Washington cut costly forces without ceding advantage, saving an estimated 46 billion dollars in its first five years alone. It also set the verification model, on-site inspectors and satellite confirmation of destroyed bombers, that shaped every U.S. arms-control treaty afterward, including New START in 2010.
QWho actually sat across the table doing the day-to-day START negotiating for the US?
Edward L. Rowny held the title of US ambassador for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that evolved into START, serving as the chief American negotiator through years of stalled sessions with Moscow. On the Soviet side he dealt for years with foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, who had held that post since 1957 and represented the old Kremlin guard skeptical of concessions. Secretary of State George Shultz, in office from 1982 to 1989, worked the political layer above the negotiating table, coordinating with Reagan on how far to push Moscow on the Strategic Defense Initiative dispute that kept freezing progress. The pairing of a career arms negotiator like Rowny with a long-tenured Cold War fixture like Gromyko meant early rounds were shaped by institutional habits as much as by the numbers themselves.
QWhat kept a Soviet officer physically posted at an American missile site around the clock?
The treaty's verification regime included something called Perimeter and Portal Continuous Monitoring, a system that placed a representative from the verifying side on location at all times rather than relying on periodic visits. This meant Soviet, and later Russian, monitors could be stationed continuously at designated US facilities, watching activity in real time instead of scheduling inspections around it. Paired with national technical means, the satellites and other information-gathering systems each side controlled independently, the arrangement gave both militaries a standing set of eyes inside the other's territory. Earlier Cold War arms agreements had relied on distant surveillance and self-reporting; PPCM put a live human observer on the ground instead.
QWhy were Soviet bombers built to fly toward the Atlantic rather than the United States?
Most of the Soviet bomber fleet was configured almost entirely for a different mission than striking American cities: attacking US convoys crossing the Atlantic and hitting land targets across the Eurasian continent. Of that force, only about 150 aircraft actually had the range and equipment to reach North America directly. That changed in 1984 when the newer Tu-95MS and Tu-160 entered service, carrying AS-15 cruise missiles that extended their effective reach. That's why raw bomber counts could mislead: most of the fleet wasn't built to hit North America at all, which negotiators had to account for when weighing bomber limits against missile limits.
