Détente, SALT 1 and the Nixon-Brezhnev Era
From Confrontation to Coexistence
By the late 1960s the Cold War was changing shape. Both superpowers had reached a state of mutually assured destruction: each held enough warheads to obliterate the other many times over, regardless of who fired first. The arms race that had begun with the atom bomb in 1945 had become economically punishing. The United States was bleeding men and money in Vietnam; the Soviet Union faced rising defence costs and growing technological gaps in computing and consumer goods. Both governments came to believe that managed coexistence was preferable to permanent confrontation. The French word détente — meaning easing of tension — was already in use in French diplomacy and was now adopted to describe the new approach.
Détente means easing of tension. In May 1972 Richard Nixon visited Moscow and signed SALT 1 with Leonid Brezhnev. A return visit to Washington followed in June 1973. The diplomacy did not end the Cold War — it managed it.
Why the Two Sides Wanted It
For Brezhnev, three pressures pointed toward détente. The Soviet economy could not sustain ever-rising defence spending; the split with Communist China had opened a second strategic threat in the east; and the Brezhnev Doctrine had stabilised Eastern Europe enough to negotiate from a position of internal strength. For Nixon, taking office in January 1969, four pressures applied. Vietnam had to be ended on terms that did not look like defeat; American allies in Western Europe (West Germany above all, under Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik) were already reaching out to Moscow with or without Washington; the public mood at home was tired of confrontation; and Nixon’s own foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger believed in stabilising rivalries rather than winning them.
Nixon’s opening to China in February 1972 sharpened the logic. By visiting Beijing and meeting Mao Tse-tung, Nixon split the communist world: Moscow now had to consider that the Americans might play China against the USSR. The Moscow summit had already been agreed in October 1971, but the Beijing visit strengthened Nixon’s hand when he arrived three months later.
SALT 1, Moscow May 1972
The SALT 1 agreement was the centrepiece. Negotiated through three years of talks in Helsinki and Vienna, it was signed by Nixon and Brezhnev in Moscow on 26 May 1972. SALT 1 had two main parts. The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty limited each side to two missile-defence systems — the logic being that if neither side could shoot down an incoming attack, neither would be tempted to launch one. The Interim Agreement froze the number of land-based and submarine-launched intercontinental missiles each side could deploy at then-current levels for five years. Multiple-warhead missiles (MIRVs) were not capped, so the agreement slowed the race rather than reversing it. Both leaders also signed a Basic Principles Agreement promising to handle disputes peacefully.
The Moscow Summit was followed by a series of further agreements. These run past 1972, the end of the period you are examined on, but they show where détente led. In June 1973 Brezhnev visited Washington and signed an agreement on the prevention of nuclear war. Trade between the superpowers expanded: Soviet purchases of American grain rose sharply (the ‘Great Grain Robbery’ of 1972). Cultural and scientific exchanges expanded; in July 1975 American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts shook hands in orbit during the Apollo-Soyuz mission. The high-water mark came in August 1975 with the Helsinki Final Act, signed by 35 states including the USA, USSR and most of Europe. Helsinki recognised existing European borders — a Soviet aim — in return for Soviet acceptance of human rights and freer movement of people and information — a Western aim. The human rights clauses gave dissidents inside the bloc legal language they would use for the next fifteen years.
What Détente Did Not Solve
A common misconception is that détente meant the Cold War ended in the early 1970s. It did not. Three sources of tension continued. First, ideology: the two systems still saw each other as fundamentally hostile. Second, the Third World: Soviet support for revolutionary movements in Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua and elsewhere convinced many Americans that the USSR was using détente as cover for expansion. Third, human rights: the Soviet record on its own dissidents (Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) hardened American conservatives against further concessions. By the late 1970s détente was unravelling. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 ended it formally; Ronald Reagan, taking office in January 1981, would denounce the USSR as the ‘evil empire’.
For an exam question asking how far things had changed by 1972, three things had genuinely changed: arms control was institutionalised; both leaderships accepted the legitimacy of the other’s European sphere; and the language of bipolar confrontation had given way to the language of negotiation. Three things had not changed: nuclear arsenals continued to grow in capability; Eastern Europe remained under Soviet control; and the underlying ideological hostility was unchanged. SALT 1 mattered not because it solved the Cold War but because it proved that even hostile rivals could codify rules for managing their rivalry.
SALT 1 (May 1972) capped the number of intercontinental missiles each side could deploy and limited missile-defence systems. It did not cap warheads, so MIRVs let stockpiles keep growing. Helsinki (August 1975) traded recognition of European borders for Soviet acceptance of human rights principles.