Office of the Historian
  1. Home
  2. Historical Documents
  3. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981–1988, Volume XI, START I
  4. Document 91

91. Personal Note Prepared by the Deputy Secretary of State (Dam)1

Washington, March 30, 1984

I attended a meeting of the Senior Arms Control Policy Group this afternoon at 4:30.2 The subject was continued work on INF and START. The way we are putting this is that we want to have our options clearly delineated so that we will be in a position to negotiate in the event that the Soviets express an interest in returning to either talks. There seems no possibility that they will be prepared to return to the INF talks as such, but it does seem that they have dug themselves something of a hole by saying they won’t return to the START talks until we withdraw the INF missiles from Europe. The President has authorized some probing of the Soviets on START, including the possibility of being able to lay out to them what we have in mind when we say we would be prepared to discuss trading off areas of advantage to us for areas of advantage to them.3 Thus we now have a green light to do additional work in both areas, but the work on START is what is particularly important. In addition, we are looking at ways in which INF might be brought into the START negotiations in some fashion, [Page 338] not necessarily by means of the so-called “merger” about which there has been so much public discussion.

I attended a meeting in the Secretary’s office at the end of the day in preparation for his meeting with Dobrynin next week. We now have had an exchange of letters between the President and Chernenko,4 and that leaves the possibility of some progress in discussions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and the purpose of the discussion with Dobrynin next week will be to explore how our talks can be moved ahead. One can say that outside of the nuclear area, there is a good deal going on, including CDE, MBFR and chemical weapons, as well as boundary talks in the Bering Sea, upgrade of the hot line, consulates, exchanges (which was previously called “cultural agreement”), and other related areas.

[Omitted here are discussions not related to START.]

  1. Source: Department of State, Executive Secretariat, S/S–I Records: Deputy Secretary Dam’s Official Files, Lot 85D308, Personal Notes of Deputy Secretary—Kenneth W. Dam—Oct. 1983–Sept. 1984. Secret. Dictated on March 30.↩
  2. No formal minutes were found.↩
  3. See Document 90.↩
  4. Scheduled for publication in Foreign Relations, 1981–1988, vol. IV, Soviet Union, January 1983–March 1985, Documents 190 and 197.↩