page_title: Vladivostok Summit Meeting on Arms Control
section_title: Arrival in Vladivostok
hierarchical_section_title: Vladivostok Summit Meeting on Arms Control / Arrival in Vladivostok
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of President Gerald Ford, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other U.S. Representatives meeting with General Secretary Brezhnev, Foreign Secretary Gromyko, Ambassador Dobrynin, and the others aboard a Russian train headed for Vladivostok.
context_page_description: The Vladivostok Summit Meeting on Arms Control was a two-day summit held on November 23 and 24, 1974 in Vladivostok for the purpose of extending arms control provisions between the Soviet Union and the United States. After a series of talks between American President Gerald Ford and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in Washington and American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's visit to Moscow, Ford traveled to Vladivostok to meet with Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev directly. The two heads of state agreed to terms that would limit both nations an "equal aggregate number" of various weapons, including strategic nuclear delivery vehicles, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles fitted with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles.
context_section_description: Ford and the American delegation arrived at Vozdvizhenka Airbase on the morning of November 23, where they were greeted by Brezhnev and Gromyko. Although the Americans were flying in from Seoul, according to Kissinger they "had to double back to Tokyo" because the Soviet Union did not have diplomatic relations with South Korea at the time. According to Ford, the Soviets had themselves just completed a four thousand mile trip from Moscow by rail, but according to Dobrynin they too had flown: they had to land at a different airport in the region because of a snowstorm, however, and then took an electric train to complete the last stage of their journey to Vozdvizhenka.
  According to Ford, he and Brezhnev "got along well...from the moment we met". Their small talk touched on their mutual previous experiences as sportsmen, as Ford and Brezhnev had played American football and association football, respectively. The heads of state also began to discuss policy on the train and, according to Kissinger, Brezhnev was at first surprised by Ford's "straight to the point" style because it differed so much from Nixon's more familiar "elliptical approach". Brezhnev then began making points on arms control, the Middle East, and the European Security Conference before he made an emotional appeal that struck to "the heart of the Cold War dilemma": according to Kissinger, he lamented the amount of money both the Soviet Union and the United States were spending on the arms race, calling it "billions that would be much better spent for the benefit of the people". While Kissinger appreciated Brezhnev's "ruminations", he believed Ford was uninterested in "the general philosophy of arms control" and rather preferred to "discuss these issues in specific terms".
  The train trip from the airport to the Okeanskaya Sanatorium, the site of the summit, took an hour and a half. While Ford spent the time with Brezhnev, he noticed that Kissinger occupied himself with the cookies, pastries, and mints set out on a table in the dining car, much to the amusement of his Soviet hosts: in Ford's estimation, "he must have finished off three plates". During the trip, Brezhnev suffered a seizure, but he was immediately tended to by his doctor, Evgeny Chazov, and was able to participate in the negotiations as planned. After the Summit, Brezhnev suffered another more severe seizure on his return journey to Moscow, and according to Dobrynin it was at that point that "the long countdown to his fatal illness had begun". At the end of their train trip, the American and Soviet delegations arrived at Okeanskaya, a spa town frequented by vacationing Soviet military personnel and local politicians that Dobrynin described as "a rural community some twenty kilometers from Vladivostok". While Ford described the town and its Sanatorium as looking "like an abandoned YMCA camp in the Catskills", he also noted that Brezhnev did not seem concerned about its appearance. Kissinger described the Sanatorium as a "large stone building" and noted that it was surrounded by "small cottages built of wood".
caption: The American and Soviet delegations in conversation aboard a Soviet train en route to Okeanskaya
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