What I was thinking was that whenever the U.S. enters into any form of weapons reduction agreement there has to be an enormous amount of internal reluctance to actually make those reductions.
Reagan's so-called "trust, but verify" policy.
I find it difficult to accept that any party to those agreements would actually reduce anything without having equivalent plans B, C, and D.
I am not a weapons expert so thank you for your insight.
All those arms-reduction treaties are accompanied by some regime of mutual inspections and checks. Each party visits the other's facilities and counts stuff, assesses production and storage capabilities, paperwork, etc. And compares those results to their otherwise-obtained (read: by spies) data about the other party's weapons counts.
Of course it isn't foolproof, and each party can and will maybe try to sneak a few more warheads somewhere. But those inspections at least provide some rough limit on the sneakiness, because if they had more than X% more, we would have noticed or so...
Reagan's so-called "trust, but verify" policy.
I find it difficult to accept that any party to those agreements would actually reduce anything without having equivalent plans B, C, and D.
I am not a weapons expert so thank you for your insight.