President Gerald Ford and Soviet Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signed a document about SALT that helped improve U.S. and Soviet relations.
SALT stands for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. The first series of SALT, extended from November 1969 to May 1972. It was then that the United States and the Soviet Union negotiated their first agreements to put some restraints and limitations on some of their central (and most important) artillery. They froze the number of strategic ballistic missile launchers at existing levels, and provided for the addition of new submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) launchers only after the same number of older intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and SLBM launchers had been dismantled. One section of the treaty required both of the countries to limit the number of sites that were protected by an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system to two each. And later on for this system, they used conventional instead of nuclear warheads. The U.S. built only one ABM site to protect Minuteman base that was in North Dakota where the “Safeguard Program” was deployed. But, the Pentagon disbanded “Safeguard” in 1975 because of the system’s expense and limited effectiveness. Negotiations lasted from November 17, 1969 until May 1972. There were a series of meetings held in Helsinki, with the U.S. delegation, headed by Gerald C. Smith, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Following sessions alternated between Vienna and Helsinki. After a long time, the first results of SALT came in May 1971, when an agreement was reached over ABM systems. There were other discussions, which brought the negotiations to an end on May 26, 1972 in Moscow when Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. A number of agreed statements were also made along with other signed agreements between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. This helped improve relations between the USA and the Soviet Union. A later agreement was signed between President Gerald Ford and Soviet president Brezhnev in November 1974.
The Truman Doctrine is a set of principles of U.S. foreign policy created on March 12, 1947 by President Harry S Truman. Truman declared that the United States, as leader of the “free world,” must support democracy worldwide and fight against communism. The approach was conceived with the help of George Marshall and Dean Acheson, two influential associates of Truman, which generalized his hopes for Greece and Turkey into a doctrine applicable throughout the world. Soviet Union was clearly at the heart of Truman’s thoughts, but it was never directly mentioned in his speech. As Truman was attempting to solve Eastern Europe’s instability while making sure the spread of communism would not affect nations like Greece and Turkey.
NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was formed after World War II as a collective defense so that if one country was threatened or attacked, all of the others would come to their defense. It started with the US wanting a way to counter the USSR’s military power and to contain the spread of communism. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in April of 1949 by 12 countries; the US, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherland, Norway, Portugal, and the UK.
