No Risk (Reduction), No Reward: Re-examining the 1973 US-Soviet Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War

Abstract

ABSTRACT Nearly fifty years ago on 22 June 1973, US President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the US-Soviet Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War. This bilateral instrument established concrete rules of the road for reducing the risk of nuclear use by means of mutual restraint and dialogue. However, despite being the product of more than a year of intense negotiations between the White House and the Kremlin, one of the Agreement’s primary architects, Henry Kissinger, later dismissed it as having ‘achieved little that was positive’. This article examines why Nixon and Kissinger pursued this Agreement in the first place and the extent to which they accomplished their goals.