Special Report: Who Conceded What to Whom

Last week's announcement of agreement on a SALT II treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union capped 6½ years of negotiations. Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev hope that when they sign the treaty next month, they will be keeping alive a process that began with SALT I a dozen years ago and will continue—in SALT III, IV and V—for decades to come. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks have been called the most important negotiations of the postwar era. But whether SALT II ever becomes the law of the land, indeed whether the SALT process is to continue, depends on the U.S. Senate, which must ratify the treaty by a two-thirds majority. The debate in the Senate over ratification will cover a range of questions, including one of history: Who conceded what to whom in exchange for what in the course of the negotiations? Attention has already begun to focus on the confused but climactic phase of SALT II, from the beginning of the Carter presidency until last week's announcement. Believing that one way to grasp SALT is to understand its evolution, TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott has spent much of the past year reconstructing the Administration's conduct of SALT, based on exclusive interviews with key officials. His report:

Jimmy Carter had just been elected President, and the Kremlin was nervous. After eight years of dealing productively with Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, the Soviets found themselves confronted in January 1977 with a largely unknown quantity. Would this new American Administration finish the work on a Strategic Arms Limitation treaty begun by Nixon and continued by Ford? The SALT I interim agreement limiting strategic offensive arms, signed by Nixon and Brezhnev in 1972, was due to expire in October 1977. Brezhnev and Ford had agreed at Vladivostok in 1974 on the framework of a new treaty to run until 1985: each side would be allowed 2,400 strategic, or intercontinental-range, weapons, 1,320 of which could have MIRVs. In January 1976, Brezhnev and Henry Kissinger had nearly reached an understanding on how to fit into the Vladivostok framework two new weapons, the Soviet Backfire bomber and the U.S. cruise missile, which had not been defined at Vladivostok. But by then detente, SALT and Kissinger himself had come under attack from presidential candidates in both parties, including Democratic Dark Horse Jimmy Carter.

After the Inauguration, Carter ordered the National Security Council to prepare for renewed strategic arms talks between Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. The NSC drafted Presidential Review Memorandum No. 2, an interagency study of the options available to the President. There was a loose consensus that the U.S. should seal the deal Gerald Ford had made at Vladivostok, and swiftly. Then the Administration could get on with more ambitious initiatives in the next round of talks, SALT III.

However, Defense Secretary Harold Brown, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, his deputy, David Aaron, and Carter himself were all dissatisfied with the Vladivostok accord. Its subceiling of 1,320 multiple-warhead launchers allowed the two sides "freedom to mix" land-based and submarine-launched MlRVed missiles. The Soviets could concentrate their MIRV force on land, where