SALT I — the 1972 Interim Agreement on strategic offensive arms

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The offensive half of what was signed in Moscow on 26 May 1972 at the end of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. Formally an executive agreement rather than a treaty, and formally interim — five years — it did not reduce anything. It froze the number of intercontinental ballistic missile launchers and submarine-launched ballistic missile launchers at roughly the numbers each side had built or had under construction, and it allowed increases in submarine launchers only in exchange for retiring older land-based ones. Two features make it more interesting than the numbers. First, it counted launchers, not warheads, which meant it did nothing about the technology already arriving — multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles, which put several warheads on one missile and drove the totals up sharply through the decade that followed. Second, verification was by "national technical means", meaning reconnaissance satellites, and each side undertook not to interfere with the other's: the agreement legalised mutual surveillance as the price of mutual limitation.

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