McGoverning
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I'd like to thank @Workable Goblin for his useful doubts here because they do two very useful things as I start to ease us gently into the arms-control weeds. First, they give me a base to work from with this Q&A/Socratic-style intro-for-the-perplexed thing I mean to do in this particular comment. Second, they help me through the editing process (*scary ethereal Village of the Damned voice* there's always more editing, always...) as I try to make sure that the points gotten across in the actual chapters, especially the policy stuff, comes through clearly.
In terms of what CART does on paper (ha see what I did there) really its structure, in the two treaty articles on nuclear weapons, is a version of this come early. To quote from the wiki:
OK smart guy, so what does that do for us in McGoverning?
Hey, everybody, it's Vaguely Creepy Contrived Internal Monologue! Long time no see! What it does is lead us in the direction that CART goes, where the essential goal is true limits/reductions regarding the signers' nuclear arsenals, which is to say limits/reductions on warhead levels - the things that actually go boom - that are entwined with specific language about delivery systems ("central systems" in the SALT-y language of the time) and about how you inspect these items.
So why is it a big deal, this switch from affecting delivery systems with SALT to talking warhead stockpiles/numbers with CART?
The 1972 SALT agreement did some very important things to throw one kind of brake on the escalating arms race between the superpowers. At the same time, that had a relatively limited effect, in that it came during what we could call (people at the time didn't but they easily could have) the MIRV Race. MIRVing your missiles (while at the same time developing the use of rotary launchers in the bomb bays of bombers that are exactly what they sound like, a kind of massive revolver chamber loaded with missiles, which is a form of MIRVing all its own) meant that you could have any number combination of missiles and what the folks in the business call "penetration aids" - decoys of several different types - aboard a missile up to the max of what it could carry. That maximum, for your given missile, was a correlation between the diameter of the main surface of its "bus," the part where you load up the warhead(s) and "penaids" (decoys/diversions), and what's known as the "throw weight" of the missile. Throw weight, taken from the aerospace terminology that missiles "threw" payloads, is the maximum weight of what you can load onto the warhead part of the missile, factoring for the delivery bus itself and the warhead "shroud" (its covering, basically, the bullet-shaped part at the top you see on an intact missile.)
So why in all of that does the number of warheads matter so very much? Three reasons. The first two are obvious when you think about them. The first, rather like the first rule of engineering, is that the more things you have that go boom, the more things you have that go boom. If you see that as a bug more than a feature, you'd like that number to drop.
Related to that is what the nuke guys call yield: the sheer destructive power of the warhead. The more accurate your weapon, the smaller the yield can be because its maximum effect is in much greater proximity to the target. But you can get missiles, as the Soviets often did (because their missiles tended to be less accurate until late in the Cold War game), with really big yields to do similar damage. Of course, like the whole "horseshoes and hand grenades thing" there are side effects, namely that the big Soviet warheads would tend to destroy a hell of a lot more than they were strictly asked to. For example, if you mounted a single warhead on the Soviet SS-9/SS-18, the maximum single warhead they built for it had a 25 Mt yield. What does that mean? The first properly-MIRVed US missiles were the Minuteman III land-based ICBM, as you'd guess the third generation in the Minuteman series that made up the vast bulk of American land-based nuclear missiles, and also the UGM-73 Poseidon sea-launched ballistic missile (SLBM). Those were already in service when George Stanley McGovern took the presidential oath of office ITTL. Before those MIRVed missiles came along, a general rule of thumb was that you could assure "sufficient" destruction (you need a nice, warm bath in a swimming pool of disinfectant after reading enough nuclear-warfighting material) of a significant urban or command-and-control target with a one-megaton (1 Mt) warhead. Now that big fucker on the SS-9s/-18s had a projected yield of twenty-five goddamn megatons. That's enough to stomp a mudhole in a major metropolis like the Fist of Actual God Herself No Fooling, and obliterate satellite burgs twenty miles down the road as though the warhead had landed directly on their heads. It's a sickening level of overkill. So there's a kind of feral commonsense that the fewer such things you have lying around the better.
But in terms of strategic calculus and the bloody arithmetic of the Cold War nuclear arms race, the reason you're concerned about warhead numbers over and above delivery systems is explicitly and specifically this big bar steward, shat directly from the Devil's Own Arsehole:
DUDE IT'S A FOOT LONG I SWEAR LEMME WHIP IT OUT AND I'LL SHOW YOU
That is the R-36M intercontinental ballistic missile, in Soviet nomenclature, known in NATO type designation as the SS-18 Satan. It is the mightiest goddamn nuclear weapon with which the cold and heartless Elder Gods have cursed the world to date. And in the early 1970s, as the HMS Dreadnought had transformed naval arms races at the start of the 20th century, this threatened to unbalance fatally the nuclear arms race between the USSR and the USA. It had the greatest throw-weight of any ballistic missile ever designed, so vast that even OTL's huge American MX missile had a throw-weight about a third as large. Based on the correlation of its vast diameter under the warhead shroud (it's even bigger than it looks in the picture #thatswhatshesaid because nukes are the most Freudian technology ever devised) and that boggling throw-weight, you could potentially put forty really quite big and powerful MIRVed warheads on board just one of these. Forty. Four-zero. An MX could carry ten, the most-MIRVed US missile of that day, the Poseidon SLBM, carried a max of 14 warheads with much smaller yield because of their high accuracy. This was one of the first, if not the first, fully MIRVed Soviet missile. Unlike some of its MIRVed contemporaries in Moscow's arsenal, it was also decently accurate. And that's where the nightmares started.
Because it was decently accurate and because it could bust through defensive measures with big warheads (the principal deployed version, properly the SS-18 Mod 3 in NATO classification, carried ten 800-kiloton warheads plus a couple dozen penaids), it appeared that SS-18s could strike and destroy American Minuteman silos. Over the course of the Seventies and into the Eighties, the US nightmare scenario where a sneak attack with SS-18s crippled the US ICBM arsenal in its silos became null for complex technical reasons to do with computerized retargeting and response time (tl;dr by the Eighties the SS-18s simply couldn't get there fast enough to stop a Minuteman launch if the US "launched on warning") but it was a profound and existential fear of US planners in the Seventies. Add to that these really are fully MIRVed, and a MIRVed missile could, at maximum spread, throw individual warheads at targets a few hundred miles from one another. That way "just" a few hundred of these SS-18 nightmare tools of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse could do major damage to US land-based nuclear weapons and destroy urban life in the continental US all by themselves, any extra Commie missiles would just make the wasteland glow.
So, the learned minds who plotted out US nuclear strategy and concerned themselves with protecting the country, and by extension the world, from the Cold War going hot, had to figure out some way to corral this particular system. In McGoverning, that's a very large part of what leads Jeremy Stone and the rest of Clark Clifford's merry band to embrace President McGovern's educated-layman concern that dickering over missile technology doesn't keep the warheads from piling up.
That's well and good, but what about Goblin's objection? Why not just go Cheater AF and hide a bunch of warheads?
Because counting warheads is not all CART does. It works by an interrelationship of components that's actually more complex than what Saint Ronnie of Pacific Pallisades offered at Eureka College and eventually turned into OTL's START agreement. It's more detailed because as they get into it the McGoverners want to strike at this schwerpunkt (point of maximum effect, if you attack it) in the world the Trinity Test made. They want to affect the arms race, the military-industrial complexes on both sides, the whole damn thing. So, how do they do it? Let's look.
First they say "here's the first component in how this treaty's going to work. We set an absolute ceiling for each 'Rambouillet side' on warhead numbers. Here's the total ceiling, can't have more than that."
So they do that. Nice. Where does that get you? Well, it's not the only ceiling. There are also what arms-control-treaty-writers call "sub-limits." Perhaps the most significant is on "modern large ballistic missiles," a term coined in the Seventies for the SS-18 and anything that came along reasonably akin to it. It says each side can only have so many of these game-changing nightmare weapons, and even within that only a sub-limit of the sub-limit can be "fully MIRVed." (There is a halfway-step approach on the way to MIRVing, developed earlier, called Multiple Re-entry Vehicles, which is simply putting multiple warheads on a bus and throwing them at the same target like pellets from a shotgun shell, to "assure destruction." Yeesh.) But more than that, and more than any treaty signed IOTL, after months of each side sorting out just what it wants in their "mix" and how much thereof, CART in final form uses language like this. (Not necessarily a direct example from the treaty, but an illustrative one)
"(iii) 1100 [INSERT TECHNOBABBLE TYPE DESIGNATION] 800kt warheads, to arm 100 SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMS), each with ten (10) MIRVed warheads each"
Rather like programming language this specifies not just warhead numbers but interrelated things. First, that you have a maximum allowed (chosen freely by your side within your "mix" of forces) warhead stockpile of this specific type, which the treaty calls "useful" warheads - ones you could actually stick on a missile and fire - and includes the number you plan to stick on missiles plus an overage for test warheads and spares. Then, in the same line in this subsection-of-a-subsection, it specifies the number of delivery systems you will deploy, and the allowable number of warheads aboard each "central system," e.g. each individual missile. In this case a thousand warheads on SS-18s, plus ten percent of that thousand on top for tests and spares, for a hundred SS-18s at ten MIRVed warheads per missile. (Knock yerself out on penaids, Ivan. Have a ball.) By specifying how many delivery systems there will be, too, and how many warheads aboard each delivery system, it also means that the signatories don't get to have, say, three hundred spare ICBMs with no warheads lying around just cuz.
CART goes down the enumerated laundry list of nuclear "central systems" that way. This then affects the inspection language as well. Want to ask a leading question about that?
Sure. What's with the inspection language?
A few things. First, it exemplifies a branch of game theory that wasn't even fully developed yet in the Seventies IOTL or ITTL, but it is very much the kind of thing a shrewd lawyer in a major civil settlement would do to reach an acceptable agreement with opposing counsel. Indeed it's what any smart parent, or oldest sibling in a large family, would do when the kids/younger siblings are kvetching about who's going to get the bigger piece of cake. You hand the cutting knife to one of them, and tell the cutter that they get the smaller piece of cake.
That's basically what Clark Clifford does with the Soviets here. He lets the Soviets draft the inspection agreement. The Soviets are, of course, as prepared to cheat around the edges as any real-world signatory to an arms control agreement usually is. But. They don't want the agreement to be a sham, a tissue of lies that will fall apart at the first push. They have some genuine political motives and political capital invested in an agreement themselves, in particular Leonid Brezhnev does who's coming into his own at this point as the boss-man of the USSR. So they need to draft inspection language that will bind the US enough that the USSR can believe the Americans are upholding the agreement. They - the Soviets - will be bound by the same language. But they're most interested in holding the Americans accountable, so they will tighten up the language as far as they themselves can reasonably stand it in order to keep a good eye on the Yanks. But it won't be too tight, and it won't contain any poison-pill provisions, because they know the Americans have to get it through a vote in the Senate (the parliamentary Brits and parliamentary-kinda-in-this-case French can mostly guarantee approval.)
But it will be relatively tight. Knock-and-announce inspections, disclosure of stockpile numbers and storage locations, public witness to dismantling and demolition of proscribed systems, etc. Plus all the SIGINT and TECHINT to keep an eye on what the other side is testing or might be up to. And you can inspect different things. The treaty's baroquely-specified warheads-and-systems language gives you multiple points of verification. You can check warhead storage magazines for spares. You can check randomized missiles in randomized missile batteries to see that they don't exceed the number on board that they're allowed. And, rather like train conductors, you don't have to punch every ticket to intimidate people into having them handy. Again, if you're really dedicated to cheating, you can. There are always ways. But there are several means to check up on what the other side has that they're not supposed to.
But what about this whole brake on the military-industrial complex? That probably won't go over well.
Our plucky band of negotiators have thought of that - this is why it's useful to have a combination of game-theory chess masters and really, really good lawyers on the case. First of all, there's the magic term "end state." CART specifies a time - January 1982 in CART's case - as the "end state" moment, if you will, for the treaty, the time at which its language about what systems you get to have and which ones you're required to scrap must be met. For people haggling this out in the mid-Seventies, that means a number of systems still in the development pipeline can be "end state" systems in the treaty, deployed in the field by the time its sunset provision kicks in. That's the "newer but fewer" bit Jeremy Stone's on about.
Also CART specifies that signatories may develop X-many new types of different weapons, and introduce them on a one-for-one replacement basis with "end state" systems. That is to say, the "one for one" is that you need to match up a warhead stockpile equal to the one you've chosen to retire/dismantle, and delivery systems in appropriate proportion. This means that there's a future for the dark satanic arms mills of both sides, indeed that tut-tutting legislators should be happy there will be more intense competition for more limited contracts which might drive down costs or at least contain them (so the legislators/commissars hope), because you're allowed fewer opportunities to, say, design a new ICBM or ballistic-missile-carrying submarine (SSBN).
That's a look at some of the logic and ingredients that go into CART. Next comment around I'll offer up a sketch of what's in the agreement itself both for sweet sweet G R A N U L A R I T Y and also for further clarification.
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McGoverning: A Cook's Tour of CART or, You Can't Tell the Codicils Without a Scorecard...
Right. As promised, a bullet-point outline of what's going on in the Comprehensive Arms Reduction Treaty (CART). It's an old school talking-points memo (no, not an Internet-based center-faintly-left investigative news magazine, "talking points memos" have been around since at least the Nixonian era in political communications, famously in Leroy Newton Gingrich's missives to his House GOP shock troops but in many other settings too for other purposes.) Feel free to read through a few times and ask questions. Yes I have got much more detailed versions in my notes files, I can stop any time, what do you mean "going to stage an intervention"...
Comprehensive Arms Reduction Treaty (1975)
Article I
Comprehensive Arms Reduction Treaty (1975)
- Negotiated over one year from April 1974 to April 1975 at the Chateau de Rambouillet in suburban Paris; for this reason the negotiation process is known as the "Rambouillet talks"
- Included all four nuclear powers directly involved in the Cold War confrontation in Europe; created what international relations experts refer to as "Rambouillet sides" in arms control, with the Soviet Union as one side unto itself, and on the other side the United States, United Kingdom, and France as an aggregate
- Negotiating teams from each nation involved in the process; on the Western side US special ambassador Clark Clifford became de facto chief of that "Rambouillet side"
- An effort to create a broad-spectrum arms control agreement that covered NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical) weapons and, if possible, also conventional arms limitations or reductions in Europe
- Sought to limit the upward surge in strategic weapons that had begun with MIRV (Multiple Independently-targeted Reentry Vehicle) technology, to make large reductions in shorter-range nuclear forces, and to cap or reduce other arms systems also
- Nuclear arms control language and strategy shifted from SALT's earlier emphasis on constraining delivery systems to a ceiling on warhead numbers instead
- Great attention given to inspection standards and inspection mechanisms for treaty enforcement
- Final draft of CART signed April 19, 1975 at the Hotel Majestic, site where Paris Accords on Southeast Asia also had been signed
Article I
- Covers strategic nuclear weapons: "strategic" weapons classed as any with a range of over 5500km, either in range of delivery system or of launch vehicle (e.g. subs, bombers) or both taken together, bombers classified as "strategic" if range of bomber and delivery system together exceeds 5500km with a single in-flight refueling of the aircraft
- Anchored by a warhead cap of 7500 on each side: classified as "useful" warheads that are operationally deployable and inclusive of a factor for spares and test warheads within the 7500 limit
- Sub-limit of 200 MLBMs (Modern Large Ballistic Missiles) per side with additional sub-limit of 100 fully MIRVed MLBMs
- US and USSR each limited to three fully MIRVed missile types apiece at end-state ("end state" defined as systems enumerated within the treaty as deployed under its terms) plus up to two types of multiple-load strategic bomber (i.e. bombers capable of carrying more than one weapon); United Kingdom and France limited to one fully MIRVed missile type apiece and one multiple-load bomber type; missiles that are not fully MIRVed and single-payload bombers' only limit is numbers of delivery systems correlated to the warhead cap (e.g. no extra "unarmed" delivery systems)
- Bombers allowed only such weapons as may be stored in, and deployed from, their bomb bays, or from existing weapons rails if no bomb bay exists in the bomber's design
- Within the limitations above, full freedom for each side to mix during treaty drafting
- US and USSR each allowed to develop one additional new ICBM, one additional new bomber type, and one additional new submarine delivery system (inclusive both submarine type and missile type) beyond end-state systems in order to replace end-state systems over the longer term; UK and France limited to one additional new bomber type and additional new one submarine delivery system in development beyond end-state
- "Vigorous and extensive" inspection regimes including observed destruction of any warheads and "central systems" (ICBMs, SLBMs, bombers and their weapons) not enumerated in final treaty, knock-and-announce inspections of deployed systems and suspected warhead stockpile locations
- Covers "theater" nuclear weapons: "theater" systems defined as those with a range from 0 km (e.g. backpack charges, land mines) to 5500 km, aircraft delivery classed as "theater" if range inclusive of a single refueling (or lack of refueling capacity) plus range of weapon combines lower than 5500km for bomber and delivery system together
- Warhead cap of 3500 "useful" warheads per side
- Theater delivery systems to be single-warhead delivery only; aircraft with bomb bays only allowed to deploy weapons stored and launched from those bays
- Within these limitations, full freedom otherwise to mix end-state systems during treaty drafting
- Inspection regimes as provided under Article I
- UK and France to dismantle and forswear chemical weapons capability; only defensive research in limited and prescribed laboratory facilities permitted
- US and USS each to cut chemical stocks by half; no development of new offensive chemical systems permitted, only research in prescribed laboratory facilities
- Inspection enforcement regimes laid out and specified, including observed destruction of covered stockpiles
- Both "Rambouillet sides" required to sign 1972 Biological Weapons Convention both jointly and severally (legal language, "jointly" = as a side, "severally" = as an individual nation)
- Creates inspection regime for defensive bioweapons research facilities as prescribed for the signatory nations with penalties assessed against each side jointly (to discourage any independent violations by individual signatories)
- Ratifies US conventional force ceilings in Europe based on the effects of the Humphrey-Cranston Amendment (e.g. reduction in US forces based in Europe from c. 300,000 personnel and related equipment down to c. 130,000 personnel and related equipment N.B. included in OTL's FY74 defense authorization bill but narrowly defeated)
- Caps United Kingdom's and France's military personnel and equipment ceilings at levels current at the time of the treaty; those may be reduced below the cap at discretion
- Specifies withdrawal of 20th Guards Army from the Group of Soviet Forces Germany back to Soviet soil, removal of one motorized rifle division from the Central Group of Forces likewise, and removal of two Soviet fighter-bomber regiments stationed in Eastern Europe back to Soviet soil as permanent reductions in forward forces
- Signatories allowed to increase size of forward forces for up to sixty days at one time as part of military exercises, etc., but required to remove them again at that time
- Withdrawal of short-term deployments to be observed under inspection regimes
- Any separate agreements on further reductions to observe inspection regime specified in Article V of CART
- Reduced nuclear stockpiles of the signatories from c. 47,500 aggregate warheads in 1975 to 22,000 at the treaty's end state
- Created inspections and regulations for biowarfare ban and significant reductions in chemical weapons
- Created limitations, and some reductions, for conventional forces deployed in Europe
- Capped growth of MIRVed strategic forces, all but eliminated many small "battlefield" nuclear systems, and vastly reduced stocks of tactical warheads
Elegant and thorough. And seemingly with the framework, much easier to reduce nukes even more over time (if the world is lucky).
Of course the next stage- what I believe they call in non-proliferation circles Hydrogen Ordinance Reduction & Systems Elimination- is tricky itself. But if you’ve put the CART first, you should be ok.
Of course the next stage- what I believe they call in non-proliferation circles Hydrogen Ordinance Reduction & Systems Elimination- is tricky itself. But if you’ve put the CART first, you should be ok.
John Farson
Banned
All this talk of nuclear weapons and arms control reminds me of the film First Strike, which deals with a Soviet sneak attack against the US that destroys over 80% of US strategic forces, forcing the US President to surrender when the Soviets threaten to destroy America's urban centers. Scenes in the film were later used in The Day After.
As the film came out in 1979, I can't help but feel that it was also an extremely veiled attack on Jimmy Carter. As the film was produced by the USAF, reputedly the most right-wing of the five military branches, this wouldn't surprise me. Actually, now that I think about it, this new treaty between four of the five declared nuclear powers is bound to have its own share of staunch opponents in the US; I wouldn't be surprised if something like First Strike were produced here, a few years early...
As the film came out in 1979, I can't help but feel that it was also an extremely veiled attack on Jimmy Carter. As the film was produced by the USAF, reputedly the most right-wing of the five military branches, this wouldn't surprise me. Actually, now that I think about it, this new treaty between four of the five declared nuclear powers is bound to have its own share of staunch opponents in the US; I wouldn't be surprised if something like First Strike were produced here, a few years early...
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Well this is again my own perspective and thoughts (which Yes could likely basically go and say I'm entirely wrong on), as a slight reminder that at this point (73/74), Conrail doesn't exist yet and it's still technically the Penn Central. You are probably close to the point of having a similar creation of the 3R Act (that created the USRA in order to basically organize and create a 'Final System Plan' for what will become Conrail with the PC threatening liqudation); the presence of W. Graham Claytor as the Secretary of Transportation will be interesting on the effects, but it's again going to come down on the question of having the unions agree or not along with what the railroads think. Because there's also the fact that the railroads absolutely did not want to cross the fire barrier that was Pittsburgh and Buffalo considering it was basically seen as "bankruptcy lies ahead" (if I'm recalling the right adage from the book "The Men Who Loved Trains" (which is a fascinating book on the downfall of Penn Central and the creation of Conrail)).
In general, there's also the big questions of whether 1) the Erie Lackawanna is going to be able to stay afloat (despite the damage that Hurricane Agnes inflicted upon it and all the other railroads in the Northeast) or wind up requesting eventual entrance into Conrail and 2) whether you would have the operating unions agree to wind up merging as part of whatever System Plans get tossed around (like the Two System Plan with the EL joining the Chessie was opposed by the EL unions for some reason of which I forget).
But as to the matter of the future Conrail being profitable... it's going to be an interesting question, since it was expected that Conrail should've been raking in the profits, but it wasn't and was constantly in the red. And so there were major reviews by the USRA over the matter, and they found that the way the ICC handled shipping rates (since they had to approve any and all rate changes) was if I recall correctly causing major financial impacts to the railroads (and not so much for the shippers, who rather enjoyed it). And in part from that led to the eventual passage of the Staggers Act, which along with the Northeast Rail Service Act of 1981 (which took the commuter operations and I believe some adjustments to labor stuff) is what helped to turned Conrail around.
(And now I'm wondering what other proposals were being tossed around at the same time as the 3R Act was being considered since I've never really looked at the legislative history of it... and this feels like the potential for something bad emerging.)
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This? This is art, folks. Watch and learn.
Indeed I may just need to make a version of those last two sentences into canon. Buried somewhere in the Foreign Relations of the United States, McGovern Series, I think. Not that I don't bring them up constantly already but among the senior-most people in the administration I see either Sarge or Phil Hart penning that one. Both men have the combination of education and infectious wit to come up with it.
NGL @Yes I am genuinely astounded how you are able to write all this with such detail in such a short amount of time! Are you by any chance a Russian bot?
"Click Here to Watch Senator Gurney TRIGGER McGoverners with LOGIC using ONE EASY TRICK!"
In this case really it was just deciding to use a mild bout of insomnia for something useful.
Oh absolutely. OTL's Seventies already has/had a huge catastrophe fetish. People were pumping out the equivalent of penny-dreadfuls on all kinds of subjects from overpopulation to the collapse of the nuclear family to toxic pollution to teenage Satanism to How The Political Side I Don't Like is Undermining Modern Society, to Biblical apocalypse, on and on. Both right and left made movies about disastrous nuclear crises (in the latter case that'd be Dawn's Early Light with Charles Durning as the president and Burt Lancaster as the rogue USAF colonel who wants to basically expose the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers, which were out already IOTL so that's a bit confusing.) Given that one side of the hardening political divide in the country (we still haven't reached Great Polarization levels but it's coming along faster ITTL) are basically living their nightmare scenario and presume the worst about what the McGovern administration has done or intends to do, there will be lots of this kind of stuff out there. From the real fever-dream conspiracy stuff about how Eleanor McGovern Serves White Christian Babies for Dinner to the Black Panther Army Hidden in the White House Bowling Alley to stuff like First Strike intended to grab the pop-culture conversation and drag it to the right. I'd imagine films like Death Wish, also, will be even bigger given the hard right's combination of panic and blind fury about the McGovern White House. A thousand reactionary pop-culture flowers will bloom, we may even see some of them in coming chapters.
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It was/is indeed
N O Q U A R T E R. Which regional? I still have a dimly-recalled knowledge of East Coast and East Coast-adjacent schools. I knew those shirts well, they even reprinted them as retro at the student store in the Nineties. Funny thing: the last visit we made to my late mother my high-schooler who is a varsity swimmer practiced with the Greenville club team in ECU's training pool, in the old yellow-brick-and-concrete parts of the Minges Sports Complex where I ran around through the halls like warrens as a faculty-brat kid when school wasn't in session. Surely the same pool they trained in (that part of the complex dates from the end of the Sixties) when the T-shirt came out and when your dad was coaching. Colonial Athletic? Should never have left that conference but that's the curse of being just big enough to have ideas above the sports program's station.Detailed route maps for metro systems, national train networks, bus rapid transit, airlines, etc., are one of my very favorite forms of Nerd Heroin. I'm sure some will emerge at some point. Especially since there are other nerds who feel the same which means engines for making them exist out on the intertubes, and not just being enterprising with Microsoft Paint. (Although our distinguished and really prodigiously skilled fellow thread-member @Wolfram has done some great ones for his native Houston over time.)
Prexactly. Indeed as you mention the Motor City, local-boy there @wolverinethad has clued me in to the specific vicious old racist who dominated the Oakland County council (NW suburban Detroit metro) and spent decades preventing mass transit from expanding in the metro area so as to keep up the white-flight divide. And I'm very familiar with the case of Baltimore, whose ambitious and clear-sighted subway plan from the turn of the Seventies was killed by neighboring counties on the same American-apartheid grounds. Some of that... may feel the wind in the Butterfly Field as we go along.
Love the Wedway People Mover. That may just need to happen. Also yes, the Jersey Shore makes a lot of sense, especially if you can link up stations at least in close proximity with the Northeast Corridor transit rail networks.
Can you do bullet points for other legislation passed under McGovern? Or a list?
I should say that technically, where we leave off here, CART has just started its full confirmation journey in the Senate, which is a post-midterms Senate too so composition is a little different. But we all have our fingers crossed and as the most substantive foreign-policy achievement of the McGoverners so far, I will definitely count it. This may not be a complete list, I could miss something here or there. And it's in no particular order, and includes at least one item that's not legislation, just an important confirmation process at work. But here's a shot:
- Food and Farm Renaissance Act: George's Big Damn Farm Legislation on protecting and enhancing the "family-sized farm," brings in education and technology research, funds for electrification and revitalization of rural communities, federal food-aid programs (esp. the Commodity Supplemental Foods Program) for the poor that will use farmers' stocks, bigger and more complex overseas food aid programs, reserve inventories held by designated bodies as commodity reserves against price fluctuations, regularized disaster payments, etc.
- Wright-Bentsen Act (Federal Omnibus Transportation Act): The big bill on funding transportation infrastructure, one-for-one general fund swaps (state/municipal entities that don't want to spend on a particular project can return the money in trade for general expenditure funds for whatever infrastructure purpose), tracks to mass transit in metro areas, farm/market road maintenance and highway access in rural ones
- Rehabilitation Act of 1973: Souped up version of OTL's with more precise language granting civil-rights action on reasonable accommodation
- Federal Maternity Leave Act: Providing ninety days of secured unpaid maternity leave (secured as in you can't lose your job), extensions available for women who qualify due to certain medically identified conditions
- Domestic Volunteer Service Act of 1973: Bigger, longer, and uncut, creates a Civilian Community Corps twenty years early, folds that and an enlarged, better funded VISTA into the Department of Peace
- Railroad Renovation and Rehabilitation Act (@Usili @Wash): Tackles rolling stock and corporate issues regarding Amtrak and creates FreightTrak, a kind of "working receivership" for freight lines - like Penn Central - in serious trouble at the time, taking them over and making necessary adjustments to return them to profitable function then selling them back to the private sector, special provisions to try and protect branch lines to farming centers
- District of Columbia Home Rule Act: Pretty much OTL's
- Endandered Species Act: Again pretty much OTL's but with a streamlined fast track for listing species under the terms of the act
- ERISA: Pretty much OTL's but with swifter passage
- Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Act (VEVRA): aka the Dole-Dellums Act (no, really) Bigger and broader than IOTL, specifies index-linked educational benefits extended to vocational rehab, provisions through through the ancestor of TriCare (and then through MECA) for treatment of physical and mental disorders, protected-class status in preferential hiring and accommodations for federal jobs with riders to control appropriations used to "encourage" states to adopt similar state-level regulations
- Privacy Act of 1973: As it says, passed a year earlier than IOTL
- Consumer Protection Commission: Tied in to the FTC, Phil Hart's pride and joy for product labeling, disclosure on behalf of consumers, power to issue instructive findings (not binding but "this is a good idea") on regulation and deregulation, enforcement of federal regs on consumer protection out of one bureaucratic shop rather than many
- Airline Deregulation Act of 1974: like it says
- Minimum Wage: Upped to $2.00/hr with much broader applicability than IOTL (e.g. those who work for tips, several classes of agricultural and forestry workers, etc.), McGoverners battling to bring it up again to $2.25 by the 94th Congress
- Federal Handicapped Child Welfare Act of 1974 (Carey-Mondale Act): Defines handicapped child in a way that includes "loss of one or more significant life function due to diagnosed medical outcomes of abuse or neglect", provides for one free school meal per qualifying child per day - kids who now can go to public school automatically, federal funds to state and local authorities for special-education tracks in schools, supportive programs through MECA (see below) for life-skills rehab together with physical and psychological treatment of childhood disabilities
- Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act (Humphrey-Hawkins Act): Still in play but moving along, with a head of steam behind crafting federally funded programs to generate the jobs prescribed in the bill
- Earned Income Credit Program: Tax credit structure, linked to employment and/or proofs of "actively seeking work" (and also language that says Social Security recipients qualify bc they had to work, or be married to a worker, to earn SS anyway), sharp lead-in and long fade-out (as above certain income levels credit amount drops on a slow glide plane until it disappears in tax adjustments) of $500 at maximum benefit to working person, same amount to their spouse, same $500 again per qualifying child (if there are any in the household, terms and provisions for "qualifying" apply but written pretty broadly including certain specified kinds of fostering particularly within birth families) up to four children (after that you don't gain more per child)
- Court appointments: Got Shirley Hufstedler on SCOTUS and Constance Baker Motley on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals (includes NY state)
- Medicare Expansion and Consolidation Act (MECA): The big kahuna, we've been over that in some detail but it provides the closest approximation of single-payer care (integrated with supplemental insurance of various kinds) that Americans are likely to get
- Comprehensive Arms Reduction Treaty (CART): The Big Damn Detenteburger, caps and contains growth of strategic nuclear weapons due to the MIRV race, makes really quite big cuts in tacnukes, provides actual enforcement language for bioweapons ban, some significant cuts in chemical weapons, some pullback in conventional forces in Europe
There's more stuff, to be sure, I think maybe in an earlier version of trying to do this a few pages back in the thread, but those are highlights. All things considered they've been busy. Now really principal things they're trying to get on with (that we now about and aren't spoilery of future chapters) concentrate on battling inflation without driving up unemployment and, indeed, trying to run an industrial policy that will keep up US productivity and employ more people, particularly in areas where poverty due to lack of work is a real issue. They'd probably like to come back around to how the EICP works, in terms of getting credits to people who through a variety of circumstances can't effectively go out and be employed outside the home, but after the Demogrant went down swinging they've decided to eat that elephant one bite at a time.
It was/is indeed
Detailed route maps for metro systems, national train networks, bus rapid transit, airlines, etc., are one of my very favorite forms of Nerd Heroin. I'm sure some will emerge at some point. Especially since there are other nerds who feel the same which means engines for making them exist out on the intertubes, and not just being enterprising with Microsoft Paint. (Although our distinguished and really prodigiously skilled fellow thread-member @Wolfram has done some great ones for his native Houston over time.)
Prexactly. Indeed as you mention the Motor City, local-boy there @wolverinethad has clued me in to the specific vicious old racist who dominated the Oakland County council (NW suburban Detroit metro) and spent decades preventing mass transit from expanding in the metro area so as to keep up the white-flight divide. And I'm very familiar with the case of Baltimore, whose ambitious and clear-sighted subway plan from the turn of the Seventies was killed by neighboring counties on the same American-apartheid grounds. Some of that... may feel the wind in the Butterfly Field as we go along.
Love the Wedway People Mover. That may just need to happen. Also yes, the Jersey Shore makes a lot of sense, especially if you can link up stations at least in close proximity with the Northeast Corridor transit rail networks.
Spoke with Pater and I was wrong, they didn't compete in the same association, which I should've realized since ECU is about five times the size of Fairmont (which was his school and who were NAIA at the time and also several rinky-dinks that came and went year by year). They did a few casuals with ECU from time to time for whatever reason, probably just personal connections. He also informs me that the head coach at ECU for about 35 years, just retired in 2017? He was one of my dad's kids at Fairmont way back in '75 or so.
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You're entirely welcome.
All both cool and interesting. At that same point in time the local college out here was NAIA (they're D3 now.) Lots of generalized sportiness but in particular they own the longest continuous winning-seasons streak in college football going back to the Eisenhower years, and in '84 I think? they won the NAIA title. Several players from that team are still teachers in the local school system (my three younger daughters' elementary school PE teacher was a starting defensive end, one of their middle-school social studies teachers was an outside linebacker) and indeed they've won again at least once since then back in the Aughts and played in the title game though lost a couple years ago. That's very interesting about the head coach, he might've been roaming the building when my high-schooler swam practices with the club squad.
And, because you've been supremely patient, have a map of Baltimore's abortive 1969-71 subway plan!
Yes "Friendship International" is BWI/Thurgood Marshall. Of course all the fainting couches in Anne Arundel County were full over the thought that the Dangerous Blackness of Bulmer might buy day-trippers out to the 'burbs, and so it was not to be. I wonder if any do-gooding left-liberals might want to find a hammer to pound that square peg into the round hole because, after all, busing has gone so smoothly can mass transit be far behind? ...
Given the relative lack of mention given to domestic pressures during the piece about CART, I'd imagine that things haven't changed that much. Obviously, OTL's '74 versus TTL's would be like night and day regardless, but that Unassailable New Deal Coalition Majority would probably hold just fine. The Senate would be up in the air, especially with those elections in Kentucky and Florida, but I'd imagine that Mansfield would still squeak in. Just a prediction, of course, but I'd imagine it'd be the usual midterm haircut that presidents come to expect, with added media hand-wringing.
Mashallah, indeed...
Just give me a Georgetown Metro station. It's all that I ask.
I have some transit ideas related to this TL as well.
Boston:
Red Line Extension to Route 128 in Lexington that was cancelled IOTL
Existing Orange Line Relocation and Haymarket North Extension coupled with extension to Reading and Dedham
Blue Line Extenstion to Lynn, Salem, or Peabody
New York City:
Program for Action: https://archive.org/stream/metropolitantran00newy/metropolitantran00newy_djvu.txt
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@wolverinethad,
Thanks kindly! I'll follow in the same vein with green (the ink color favored, purportedly, by British sovereigns since Victoria when they "do their boxes" of state papers brought weekly.)
Provisions of CART
Article I
Thanks kindly! I'll follow in the same vein with green (the ink color favored, purportedly, by British sovereigns since Victoria when they "do their boxes" of state papers brought weekly.)
Provisions of CART
Article I
- Covers strategic nuclear weapons: "strategic" weapons classed as any with a range of over 5500km, either in range of delivery system or of launch vehicle (e.g. subs, bombers) or both taken together, bombers classified as "strategic" if range of bomber and delivery system together exceeds 5500km with a single in-flight refueling of the aircraft
- Anchored by a warhead cap of 7500 on each side: classified as "useful" warheads that are operationally deployable and inclusive of a factor for spares and test warheads within the 7500 limit--7500 is a good point to reach for 1974, but with everything we've learned about overkill, it's still a whole damn lot of warheads. It is, this is very true, and indeed it's a little higher than the extant number at that point (the point of signing off on CART) ITTL, and indeed even a very little bit higher compared to OTL at that time. But what they are especially trying to do is arrest the upward trend on strategic weapons. IOTL by the early Eighties (the official end-state sunset point on CART's requirements) the US had in the neighborhood of 11,000 deployed strategic warheads and the Soviet number was even higher, despite both sides ostensibly abiding by SALT II limits on delivery systems just so the other side couldn't claim that they weren't. Also in this case the number of warheads actually deployed with delivery systems is a bit lower than 7500, that includes the factor for test warheads and spares so really it's more like 6700-6800 actually deployed. But the goal here is very much in line with Paul Warnke's famous metaphor about climbing down the tree a branch at a time rather than trying to reach for the bottom from the top of the tree and falling off. They want to truncate and arrest the climb on strategic systems. None of the folks involved in the CART process with the McGovern administration, and indeed the British negotiators also - the French are relatively satisfied for the moment - don't want this to be the last word in the process. They'd very much like to sit down within a year or two of getting this treaty approved and start work towards a CART II that would begin a process of reductions below this figure to kick in once the terminal point of CART requirements (the date by which the treaty's provisions must be met) hits. Then they can make some real reductions.
- Sub-limit of 200 MLBMs (Modern Large Ballistic Missiles) per side with additional sub-limit of 100 fully MIRVed MLBMs--this right here means there's gonna be 100 SS-18s with 25MT warheads aimed directly at the major cities, Cheyenne Mountain, and probably Mount Weather (Raven Rock and the Greenbrier were still, at this time, unknowns). There may well be a few of those (particularly aimed at Cheyenne Mountain and Mount Weather) but in general bureaucratic and organizational inertia plays a role. By this time the Soviets already have about 2-300 MRVed SS-9s deployed, and will (1) lose some of that number to the MLBM sub-limit and (2) want to balance what remains between plenty of fully-MIRVed SS-18s and the number of MRVed SS-9s (SS-9 Mod 4 in NATO nomenclature) that have three 3.5 Mt warheads apiece, enough to do quite a lot of damage without having to have budget battles about replacing them. I think you're entirely right that they will field some "penetrators" among the SS-18 count with the big warheads, but for targets that actually need a weapon that will blast through mountainsides. For "soft" targets they can save time and money hitting them with an SS-9 MRV package.
- US and USSR each limited to three fully MIRVed missile types apiece at end-state ("end state" defined as systems enumerated within the treaty as deployed under its terms) plus up to two types of multiple-load strategic bomber (i.e. bombers capable of carrying more than one weapon); United Kingdom and France limited to one fully MIRVed missile type apiece and one multiple-load bomber type; missiles that are not fully MIRVed and single-payload bombers' only limit is numbers of delivery systems correlated to the warhead cap (e.g. no extra "unarmed" delivery systems)--big win for the West here, since the Soviets don't share nuclear technology with their allies. This gives the Western nations an advantage in that they can have a more diverse array of delivery systems for their 7500 count. The Brits only have subs for MIRVs, and will either move hard to get a new bomber worked out (Tony Crosland, BAC on line 2, Hawker Siddeley on line 3) or have to choose upgrading between the Vulcan or Victor (The Vulcan could carry two nukes at greater range as opposed to Victor's one, so it probably wins the pony if an upgrade happens) Indeed. And at that time the British didn't have fully MIRVed SLBMs (sea-launched ballistic missiles, for our other readers), that was one of the essential questions in the Chevaline project. As you say it's entirely possible that the relatively-newly-minted Secretary of State for Defence in the UK may also be interested in what ALCMs can do on the relative cheap to diversify the arsenal. Tbf to the Handley-Page Victor, a frankly magnificent aircraft (in a very different way from the Vulcan but they were both fantastic jets) it had a bomb bay big enough to mount the rotary launcher used on the B-52s so they could've held up to 8 SRAMs/ALCMs (probably the latter since the Victor functioned best at higher altitudes and could still be useful in a standoff role) but the RAF was already converting them for photoreconnaissance and as tankers by around our POD for McGoverning so Vulcans would be likelier anyway, and could mount two to three ALCMs or about 4-6 SRAMs in their bomb bays if you got creative and designed racks for the purpose.
- Bombers allowed only such weapons as may be stored in, and deployed from, their bomb bays, or from existing weapons rails if no bomb bay exists in the bomber's design--could complicate a bomber upgrade, but this seems like some fungibility might be worked in. Generally it works to the West's advantage. The really big missiles that made the Backfire interesting as a fleet/carrier killer don't fit in its bay, and the ALCMs that did were pretty short in their range, while the earlier-model Tu-95s could mount big missiles on rails but only a handful, it took until the Bear-Gs in the Eighties, basically, for them to evolve a bomb-bay rotary approach. The B-52s of course can carry eight on a rotary launcher in the bay and there are other possible aircraft that could carry even more.
- Within the limitations above, full freedom for each side to mix during treaty drafting
- US and USSR each allowed to develop one additional new ICBM, one additional new bomber type, and one additional new submarine delivery system (inclusive both submarine type and missile type) beyond end-state systems in order to replace end-state systems over the longer term; UK and France limited to one additional new bomber type and additional new one submarine delivery system in development beyond end-state
- "Vigorous and extensive" inspection regimes including observed destruction of any warheads and "central systems" (ICBMs, SLBMs, bombers and their weapons) not enumerated in final treaty, knock-and-announce inspections of deployed systems and suspected warhead stockpile locations--At time of this treaty, U.S. was incredibly ahead in its surveillance capabilities. One year after the signing of Rambouillet, the KH-11 satellite would go into space, giving the U.S. its first real-time imagery platform. The Soviets did not mirror this achievement ever. Russia only reached real-time capability in the mid-1990s, still dependent on film canisters dropped by the satellites until that point. It makes for a real difference in mapping "suspected" warhead sites. The West do have some key advantages here, part of the reason why knock-and-announce figures in; by simply showing up the Soviets can redress some of their technical backwardness in divining where they should look. But at the same time, in order to have that privilege they have to give it to the Westerners too.
- Covers "theater" nuclear weapons: "theater" systems defined as those with a range from 0 km (e.g. backpack charges, land mines) to 5500 km, aircraft delivery classed as "theater" if range inclusive of a single refueling (or lack of refueling capacity) plus range of weapon combines lower than 5500km for bomber and delivery system together--that is a very large theater. Using the inner-German border as a reference point, this covers all of Europe, most of Turkey, a substantial chunk of the USSR, and North Africa's coastline.It is indeed a big theater: it's measured out to OTL's max classifiable range on intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) which is probably that high-water mark for the same reason the CARTographers (ha) use it, that it's the max effective range of the Soviet SS-20 missile. They want to corral the SS-20 also, it's a lower priority than the SS-18 but still very much a priority. So (1) grouping it in with the category that has a lower overall warheads limit and (2) also in the category where the Soviets want to preserve maximal numbers of shorter-range ballistic missiles for battlefield use (the Red Army and its artillery, it's A Thing), carrier-killer missiles on bombers, briefcase bombs, nuclear-tipped torpedos, etc., which means within the "theatre" warhead count that further reduces the scope for SS-20 numbers to expand.
- Warhead cap of 3500 "useful" warheads per side--so, now we're back over 10,000 warheads for each side. It's progress, but still ridiculously unnecessary. Well, yes. But let's remember how profoundly baked-in tacnukes were on both the big Cold War sides for warfighting purposes. The F-106's primary anti-air missile for killing Soviet bombers was nuclear tipped. There were nuclear land mines, nuclear depth charges, the so-horrendous-it'd-be-funny-if-it-wasn't-nukes Davy Crockett system was basically a nuclear-armed grenade launcher ferchrissakes. And all this was an absolute shibboleth for The Chiefs in particular, they assumed that getting below a certain minimum threshold of defensive tacnukes meant they were automatically condemned to lose against the Vast and Capable Red Hordes (back when we presumed for Cold War purposes that "capable" actually applied beyond a few of their Category A front-line units.) So in order to avoid an actual mutiny they need to start the descent from outright madness with a number The Chiefs can live with. Considering that in OTL's 1975 the US possessed about twenty-one thousand operational tacnukes and this figure is about a sixth of that, even lower really when you count British and French tacnukes plus the spares factor, it's a decent start. Likewise in preventing the Soviets from spiraling up to the "we don't even have enough targets to use them on anywhere" arsenal of over forty thousand total operational warheads in OTL's Eighties. Again for the general readership, it may or may not work this way but the McGoverners are thinking very much in terms of setting up their next billiards shot with a CART II round of talks, where they would hope to make some additional headway. By itself CART seeks to constrain existing numbers, cut wherever possible (especially tacnukes), and prevent an arms-race death spiral.
- Theater delivery systems to be single-warhead delivery only; aircraft with bomb bays only allowed to deploy weapons stored and launched from those bays--MIRV's are pretty useless for most tactical weapons, so this is pretty obvious. True - also it's the punchline on constraining the SS-20, perhaps the only intermediate-or-lower ranged ballistic missive that ever was effectively MIRVed. This way it's one warhead a pop on the Pioner which the Soviets actually can probably live with in terms of the "theatre" constraints, if they MIRVed it they could afford even fewer of them which, since quite a few are pointed at China and the McGovern administration is just fine making sure Moscow and Beijing spend time and money deterring each other, is something they're quite willing to give away to Moscow on this.
- Within these limitations, full freedom otherwise to mix end-state systems during treaty drafting
- Inspection regimes as provided under Article I--this will be where things get fun. Inspections for tactical nukes will mean getting extra looks at vehicle and troop arrangements (hey, is there going to be a Helsinki summit for CSCE or is that butterflied away by CART?), which has its own uses. Good question re: CSCE, Helsinki is indeed going on ITTL, and there may be overlap there as much or more than with MBFR. Again handing the inspection drafts to the Soviets is intended to get them to strike the balance between genteel spying-as-inspection and what the sides can or can't tolerate in a pinch. What the West in particular really would like is reliable inventory numbers on the systems the Soviets intend to eliminate and at least some room to police what they have, to keep them from building up similar numbers in secret.
- UK and France to dismantle and forswear chemical weapons capability; only defensive research in limited and prescribed laboratory facilities permitted--the first area where the other Western nations get cut out of the loop. Interesting. Where the Brits are concerned, for Labour in particular it's an opportunity to tell the party's unilateralists that at least one major weapon of mass destruction has been eliminated from British stocks; for the French it is their principal concession to get in good graces with both the superpowers. And it's a place where in a nuclear-and-bioweapons age the parties can make cuts that look great in newsprint without feeling that they've compromised either their military capabilities or their future bargaining positions too badly.
- US and USSR each to cut chemical stocks by half; no development of new offensive chemical systems permitted, only research in prescribed laboratory facilities--already enough nastiness out there, R&D in this area is pretty limited by 1975 anyway. Very true.
- Inspection enforcement regimes laid out and specified, including observed destruction of covered stockpiles
- Both "Rambouillet sides" required to sign 1972 Biological Weapons Convention both jointly and severally (legal language, "jointly" = as a side, "severally" = as an individual nation)
- Creates inspection regime for defensive bioweapons research facilities as prescribed for the signatory nations with penalties assessed against each side jointly (to discourage any independent violations by individual signatories)--Strongly recommend people read David E. Hoffman's The Dead Hand, which shows how well the Soviets hid their biological weapons labs. Even with inspections, it'll be damnably hard to find hidden labs, and so I suspect the Soviets will cheat here too, and will go uncaught without a defector or spy to feed information about them. A great book - thanks for that! Careful readers take note. Yes, really all the parties are likely to try and find some ways to fudge, and cheat outright. We'll see how the decision to clamp down on secrecy does or doesn't work out, or possibly both...
- Ratifies US conventional force ceilings in Europe based on the effects of the Humphrey-Cranston Amendment (e.g. reduction in US forces based in Europe from c. 300,000 personnel and related equipment down to c. 130,000 personnel and related equipment N.B. included in OTL's FY74 defense authorization bill but narrowly defeated)
- Caps United Kingdom's and France's military personnel and equipment ceilings at levels current at the time of the treaty; those may be reduced below the cap at discretion
- Specifies withdrawal of 20th Guards Army from the Group of Soviet Forces Germany back to Soviet soil, removal of one motorized rifle division from the Central Group of Forces likewise, and removal of two Soviet fighter-bomber regiments stationed in Eastern Europe back to Soviet soil as permanent reductions in forward forces--so, a nice precursor to the CFE treaty of 1990, except that the difference here means that the Soviets could mobilize a lot faster if they chose to attack. I know we discussed this in PM, but do the POMCUS sites remain for U.S. forces? It does mean there are more Cat A units they can bring forward in good order in a crisis, that's very true. But the McGovernite Pentagon has taken that into their calculations. As we'll get into at least briefly in the next chapter (and certainly in the warp and weft of the TL-verse) and it doesn't seem particularly spoilery for this readership to say that the "show me the efficiency" McGoverners are actually madly in love with prepo and are building POMCUS sets like they're going out of style, especially as Humphrey-Cranston kicks in. They intend to rely on evidence that it will take at least a little time for Warsaw Pact forces to build up a head of positional, offensive, and logistical steam during which they will pour in prepo reinforcements with the CRAF and more dedicated aircraft in the Air Force Reserve (hi, Lockheed!) for hauling GIs in seats to build up in turn. In a case where the Soviets went to war with the forces they had, they would still push for reinforcement via POMCUS and if that did not prevail, would with that partly-fatalistic High Plains pragmatism figure that very quickly they'd be in talks with Moscow to prevent a general nuclear apocalypse, or end up in the middle of one anyway.
- Signatories allowed to increase size of forward forces for up to sixty days at one time as part of military exercises, etc., but required to remove them again at that time--good old REFORGER and Progress blowing up dirt and tearing up roads. Indeed
- Withdrawal of short-term deployments to be observed under inspection regimes
- Any separate agreements on further reductions to observe inspection regime specified in Article V of CART
- Reduced nuclear stockpiles of the signatories from c. 47,500 aggregate warheads in 1975 to 22,000 at the treaty's end state
- Created inspections and regulations for biowarfare ban and significant reductions in chemical weapons
- Created limitations, and some reductions, for conventional forces deployed in Europe
- Capped growth of MIRVed strategic forces, all but eliminated many small "battlefield" nuclear systems, and vastly reduced stocks of tactical warheads
That's a thing of beauty. And hey, UMBC (my undergrad alma mater) isn't a blank spot on the map anymore! You can get there from here!
Just noticing that like 2/3rds of my previous post is gone, not sure what I did there. Had more ramblings on light rail and perhaps the gods are telling me to just chillax for a second.
But I did want to share this, first time I'm seeing it. Maybe you're already familiar. Smithsonian political ads collection. Only one from McGovern, and unfortunately it's maybe the most annoying example of the genre I've ever seen.
Edit: also just started reading through this paper, which has some things to say about the positive effects of high-skill migration on countries of origin. So that's nice!
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