page_title: Vladivostok Summit Meeting on Arms Control
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Vladivostok Summit Meeting on Arms Control / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: President Richard Nixon (seated at left) and Premier Alexei Kosygin sign the Agreement between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Cooperation in the Fields of Science and Technology; which included the agreement governing the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project. The agreement was signed during the bilateral summit in Moscow, May 24, 1972.
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: The Soviet Union and the United States had first reached an agreement on a strategic arms limitation in May 1972 (SALT I) which limited the number of ballistic missiles that each nation could deploy to 2,360 for the Soviets and 1,710 for the Americans. The agreement was not comprehensive, however, as it did not restrict the number of heavy bombers or missiles equipped with multiple warheads (MIRVs) for either country, which by 1974 worked to the advantage of the United States. Because SALT I was due to expire in October 1977, both the Soviet Union and the United States were interested in reaching a more permanent and comprehensive agreement, but initial efforts made by President Richard Nixon and Gromyko were not successful.
  Eventually, a visit to Moscow by Kissinger in October 1974 made significant headway and allowed for the creation of a general framework for a SALT II pact before Ford even arrived in Vladivostok. Before the Vladivostok Summit began, Ford noted that they only "had to button down two things": the number of launchers and MIRVs to be permitted for each country, and whether each nation would be given an equal quota for both or if a differential would be used that would allow the Soviets more launchers and the Americans more MIRVs. According to Dobrynin, this potential discrepancy was due the fact that the American and Soviet arsenals were "from the beginning completely different in both structure and deployment". The United States had a "strategic triad" of nuclear weapons that could be delivered from land, sea, or air (largely due to the blue-water United States Navy and strategic American airbases located around the world), while the Soviet Union had relied on large, long-ranged missiles because its weapons were mostly restricted to its own continental territory.
  Going into the Summit, Dobrynin alluded to the Soviet desire to find "a tricky balance between the larger number of Soviet land-based missiles...and the greater quantity of superior American MIRVed missiles". The Americans desired to instead have equal numbers of weapons allowed for both countries, a policy known as "numerical equivalency", although Kissinger was more optimistic than Ford about the prospects of achieving this. According to Kissinger, the Vladivostok Summit marked "the only time in Ford's presidency that he would be representing a united position of his government on SALT". Even if an agreement could be reached, he warned the President, "the domestic attack on SALT would continue".
  According to Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, it was Ford who proposed the Summit take place in Vladivostok, in part because of a documentary he had watched at the Soviet embassy in Washington about tigers living in the Ussuri taiga in Siberia. After Ford inquired about how far Vladivostok was from Moscow, Dobrynin answered that "New York was closer to Moscow than Moscow was to Vladivostok". According to Dobrynin, Ford "was amazed by the size of my country and said few Americans could comprehend this". Kissinger was also excited by the prospects of the Summit taking place in Vladivostok, according to Dobrynin, both because it could be tied in with Ford's trip to Japan and thus "appear less deliberately staged" and also because of the city's close proximity to the People's Republic of China, which was the other major concern of Kissinger's "triangular diplomacy".
caption: American President Richard Nixon during the bilateral summit in Moscow on May 24, 1972
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